BenHollis.net

I just finished Fallout 3 last night. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I haven't released anything new in a while. One of my favorite parts of the game was the old music they used. I loved the BioShock soundtrack too. Now that I'm done with the game and won't be listening to Galaxy News Radio anymore, I figured I'd hunt down the individual songs on Amazon MP3 so I can listen to them while I'm playing other games (my favorite is when Halo or Chrono Trigger music plays over another game). As long as I'm doing that, I thought I'd post the links for everyone else, since I didn't find a list with links to download the songs anywhere online. I got the list itself from Wikipedia's Fallout 3 page. Unfortunately not all of the songs are available - hopefully they'll show up in time.

I haven't really played PC games for years. Sometime in college I bought my first console, an Xbox, and ever since, I've preferred the gamepad to the mouse. However, there are just some games that you can't get on a console - strategy games. I loved StarCraft, Homeworld, Command & Conquer, and Myth. But as my poor old machine became more and more obsolete, I stopped being able to play even budget titles. Beyond that, the quality and selection of PC games was dropping fast - I think I finally swore off PC games when I bought Unreal Tournament 2003, new, and it came as 4 CD-ROMs in paper sleeves in an otherwise empty cardboard box, required 3 patches and 2 driver updates to work, and wasn't even a very good game!

A few weeks ago I watched the Al Gore slideshow-in-a-theater “An Inconvenient Truth”. Al Gore parts aside, I thought it was very good, and while it didn't tell me much I didn't already know, it did make me think about my power usage. In general, I hate waste - wasted money, wasted time, wasted material, wasted code. Wasting energy is just as bad. This is sort of at odds with my tech-heavy lifestyle, though. I realized that my entertainment center probably wastes a lot of energy while I'm sleeping, what with the TV, the stereo, the powered subwoofer, the Xbox 360, the PS2, the Xbox, and who knows what else casually sipping electricity just to stay in “standby” mode. I don't know what standby mode does, but I don't think it's worth having power flowing into those devices for the 18-odd hours I'm not using them each day. So I went to Target and bought a remote switch - the one I got cost less than $25 and included two remote switches that are controllable by one remote. All I needed to do was put this between the wall outlet and my power strip, and now I can just push a button on a remote when I go to bed to save energy. The other switch now controls the lamp over in the corner. It's perfect. And I bet within a year I'll have saved enough on my electricity bill to pay off the switch. In that time I'll be using just that much less electricity, saving that much carbon dioxide, and sparing my equipment that much wear and tear. Seems like a win overall.

It should be no surprise to people who have looked over BRH.numbera.com, or who know me even in passing, that I love Halo 2. The game is a lot of fun, and was obviously built with a lot of care. However, I'm always on the lookout for a good online game, especially one for the Xbox 360, since I really like what Microsoft has done with Live on their next-gen platform. However, no matter what game I've played, I've been disappointed. Halo 2's approach to multiplayer has essentially spoiled me to all lesser implementations. From here on out, I expect three things from Live-enabled games. These three things have so far been present only in Halo 2: