Top 5 Things About XMas

XMas, Christmas, Holidays, what have you. Here are the five things
that make my Christmas:
5. Chocolate and Candy
Holidays is the one time of the year, when it's OK to give that
sweettooth a treat
4. Snowman
Snowman and it's theme song "Walking in the Air" ends the Christmas
morning, followed by the best rice porridge there is (made by my
mother, of course). It's about tradition and this has been on for two
decades now.
3. It's a Wonderful Life
The Christmas Movie, re-run every year and every time it brings a tear
in my eye.
2. Giving and Sharing
True Holiday Spirit comes from the joy of giving, sharing and
forgetting all the selfishness one might have.
1. Family and Friends
That's what it is all about, right?

Lifehacking Your 43 Folders

There are times when one needs to start over, clean the table and turn things around. This is it for me. I haven't been very active blogger (and I'm not turning into one), but I still decided to (b)log some of the things I'm Looking Into right now.

Lifehacker.com. I stumbled upon the site by accident couple of days ago and boy, am I happy about that stumbling - I really should browse the web more often. Anyway, lifehacker is very active bringing out smaller and bigger hacks into your home or work life. Especially the "Geek to Live" features are driving me on right now. If it says anything, I even bought the book that's coming out in couple of weeks.

43 Folders: More on the lifehacking subject, and also more on the Gettings Things Done (or GTD) . Something I'm bringing into my life right now after getting tired of ineffectiveness of myself and my working environment. Naturally this will and has effect on my non-working life as well (I am writing this on my "free" time anyway).

I even cleaned up piles of old and unneeded articles, bills and other paper from my desk and drawes at home. YAYME!

Something Blue and the New Year

It's the new year and quite a bit has been going on in my life. Since my last post, I got married and spent a week honeymooning in Tenerife. After that X-Mas went by nicely, and yes, I did get quite a bunch of presents :)

I started the new year by playing one of the best adventure/interactive stories I've seen for a while: Fahrenheit (also known as Indigo Prophecy in US). I got bored to shooting and driving on 360, so I wanted to try adventure game for change, and never looked back - Fahrenheit is very close to game of the year 2005 for me (very high on my top games of the year at least).. I recommend you to check that out on PC or XBOX if you haven't already (especially if you liked Grim Fandango, Monkey Islands and such back in the days).

XBOX 360 Time!

I got my Origen price of Xbox 360 premium package, the Origen experience has officially been closed now (Although the Live experience with the new Origen friends lives on). The 360 has been up and running in my living room from last friday (2nd of December) and it has been good. I've played a bit of PGR3 and Geometry Wars, but most of my time has gone to Kameo.

Kameo is one excellent game, the main game is excellent with superb graphics and nice features (although some puzzles in the game have been a bit vague). The scoring system of collecting multipliers (brutal, carnage and frenzy), and online ranking list of the individual missions made me go nuts with the game. I tried and tried to hit the 'A' rank in Forgotten Forest mission, and it took about 5 hours (prolly even more) to get it right.

I finally passed 15 million in Forgotten Forest (required for rank 'A'), but as I played that particular game offline (not connected to Live), it seems that my hiscore wasn't submitted (it should do so when there is a connection, but for what I see the game only sends the scores when the hiscoring game is finished and if the connection is not there, it doesn't - ever :( Oh well, at least I got the 'A' rank achievement for it (and propably will go for even higher scores just for the fun of it)

as a side note concerning the HDTV speculation on the earlier post.. it turned out that getting HDTV and any other goodies with the 360 for the Origen win, was more and less exaggerated. The Xbox.com article announcing that Origen winners got the 360 with all the accessories including HDTV was published by mistake, and it has now been removed. Not that big a deal, but it wasn't cool at all to publish article like that and then take it all away.. But as said, I'm happy with my free 360 and I'll be busy with it for a while :)