Many, many months overdue, I finally beat Super Mario Galaxy! Because I am not a completionist gamer, I only got the required 60 stars, but given my poor, poor record of finishing (or not finishing, as the case may be) video games, I’m pretty proud of myself!
Now what are George, Dan, and Addison gonna tease me about??
Posted in Entertainment | San Francisco, CA | 
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At long last, The Sims 3 has shipped! Go out buy 10,000 copies, pls. For those of you wondering, some of the major features I worked on are opportunities, cooking, moving, lifetime rewards, carpools, the burglar and policeman, and several others. So if any of those suck, you can blame me. 
Posted in Entertainment | Redwood City, CA |
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Thanks to Buddy for passing this along.
Also, yes I’m still alive. Just working. A lot.
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Sha Sha, when left to her own devices and with easy access to a PC with a fun game installed, will not move from in front of the PC for up to 6 hours, only turning off the computer when reminded that 10pm is probably a good time to eat dinner.
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How was your long weekend? I spent July 4th at Skywalker Ranch this year courtesy of Erik. Like I’ve been telling other people, it was the July 4th-iest July 4th I’ve ever had, complete with egg toss (I got egg on Erik’s pants ), tug of war, and horse carriage rides. Unfortunately, no free lightsabers and stormtroopers, but I had fun.
Saturday morning we went to the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market for the first time, and it was cool, but ungodly expensive. I’m not sure I’ve ever spent so much and walked out with so little. Afterwards it was lunch at Taylor’s Refresher, then back home to meet up with a friend from high school and his fiance. I’ll be heading down to L.A. in a couple weeks for their wedding, which I’m super excited about.
Sunday morning Buddy came up to the city to do an 8-mile run in Golden Gate Park. It went pretty well, and it certainly reminded me how nice it is to be able to run through the park. I think we kept just over a 10 minute/mile pace, which I was pretty proud of, especially considering most of the latter half of the run I mapped out was uphill. Afterwards, we headed to a friend’s barbecue, where we participated in the only appropriate activity after a long run: gorging ourselves on various meats. Yum.
I also beat Professor Layton last week. I ended up finding 109/120 puzzles, which I thought was pretty good. I may go back sometime and try to find the remaining 11, just to see what happens, but more likely I’ll just look them up on the intertubes. I highly recommend the game to anyone who’s a puzzle fan; besides being a nice collection of puzzles, it has a cute story and art style.
Finally, crazy robot dancing:
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Had a nice relaxing weekend. Friday night we finally watched The Simpson’s Movie, which was good, but not best evar, which is about what I expected. Saturday we were thinking of going to the Japanese Tea Gardens in the park, but given the crappy weather, we decided to check out the de Young museum instead. For dinner we had Little Star, which was delicious as always, and watched Knocked Up, which I enjoyed quite a bit. It was especially novel because I got it on pay-per-view, which, at $4.99 was a bit more expensive than a normal DVD rental, but definitely beat going to the video store in the pouring rain.
On Sunday I played a lot of Hotel Dusk, which is pretty fun, but I think relies a little too much on the crappy adventure game mechanic of being able to pick up/do/see/talk to certain things only after hitting some arbitrary trigger. I also watched some of the Super Bowl, but equal amounts of the Puppy Bowl. I’ll let you decide which I liked more.
For dinner Sunday night, we made corn and squash soup (much better than it sounds) and awesome biscuits. Mmmm…so buttery…
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I’m getting tired of having the doom-and-gloom last post at the top of this page, so here’s an update on the happy things happening in Sha’s life. Last Saturday, Amanda, Erik, Buddy and I went to the annual Ozomatli concert at The Fillmore. It was awesome, as usual, and I had a lot of fun.
In other happy haps, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360. Overstock.com and PayPal were having a special deal where, if you paid for your purchase with PayPal, you would get 20% back, up to $50. So the premium console ended up being just about $300, which is a pretty good deal. Astute readers who pay attention to the bar over to the left will notice that I’ve been playing Dead Rising and Stuntman: Ignition. I’ve really only been playing Stuntman recently because Dead Rising is really, really hard and frustrating. But I’ve been having a lot of fun with Stuntman.
Finally, Happy Birthday, Peter! I’m a jerk and spaced out and forgot to wish him a Happy Birthday on his real birthday, which was on the 5th. We took him to dinner yesterday at Darda in Milpitas which was yummy. Mmm…sesame bread…. Afterwards, we headed over to his place for some awesome Rock Band action, which is always a good time.
Today we’re going to get a lil’ Christmas tree from the lot on 7th ave, which is super exciting. I just hope Enzo doesn’t decide it makes a convenient indoor potty.
Speaking of Enzo, thank you to everyone for your well-wishes. Despite all his health problems, he’s actually doing really well, and doesn’t yet seem to have realized that he’s sick. So he’s still truckin’ along, sleeping, eating, and peeing as normal. All the things he does best. 
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Amanda was out of town this weekend for a conference, so I had the house to myself. And what did I do all weekend long? Why, the same thing every other self-respecting game programmer does: I played video games and ate Cheetos. A lot of Cheetos. I finally decided to give Grim Fandango another try, as last time it crashed so often that I got frustrated and gave up. This time, it still crashed a lot, but I stuck with it. I think I’m pretty near the end now, and I’ve really been enjoying it. I’ve also been cheating the hell out of it, which makes me feel a little bad, but honestly, I don’t have as much gaming time as I used to, so I just want to get through the game, and spend less time figuring out obtuse puzzles.
However, playing Grim Fandango has rekindled my excitement for adventure games (they are pretty much the reason I’m in the games industry), and while going through my games, I realized that I have several adventure games that I never played, such as Quest For Glory 3 and 5, and Escape from Monkey Island. So maybe once I finish Grim Fandango and clean the Cheeto dust from the couch, I’ll give those a go.
Besides Fandango-ing, we took Walter out Friday for his early birthday to Jump Sky High in Santa Clara, which was quite fun. I only played one game of trampoline dodge ball, but I spent the rest of the time bouncing around the big arena. Saturday night I peeled myself off the couch and made it over to Jan and Yar’s to play some Zack and Wiki, which is being billed as an adventure game, but I would call more of a puzzle game. It was fun, nonetheless, but has the most half-assed multiplayer mode ever made: basically the other players can point to the screen with their Wii-motes and click to make a noise and an effect, but can’t actually do anything. It probably took them about 10 minutes to implement.
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If you’re not watching the Discovery Channel/BBC series Planet Earth, do it. Run, don’t walk.
I’ve recently started to plan out a budget for myself. Don’t worry Mom and Dad, this isn’t because I’m poor and starving, but rather because I have too much disposable income. I know, wah wah. My problem is that I’ve never had to worry about money, but this doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t worry about money. So I downloaded the free trial of Microsoft Money (and Peter eventually got me a copy), and started making up my budget. I’m still tweaking numbers and trying to figure out what works best for me, but hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
A big chunk of my income goes into what Money likes to call “Committed Expenses”: rent, groceries, utilities, cell phone bills, etc., so that’s not really something I can change. But one big money-saving area for me is to not eat out as much as I have been over the past year, so I’ve been trying to be good about bringing my lunch and cooking dinner at home. We’ll see how it goes, but so far (i.e. for about a week) it’s been going well.
Finally, a couple more MySims writeups:
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