So, what could cause me to willfully neglect food, water, work, chores, sleep and my cats? Nothing other than Phantasy Star Universe!!!

Since its inception on the Dreamcast as Phantasy Star Online, this series has cost us more money than any game we own! We have 2 of every system just for this game…and it has been on 4 systems. Add on various broadband adapters, alternate versions of the game, music soundtracks and a low, low fee of 9.99/month (up $1.04 from the previous version) and you got a winner on your hands!

Will and I recreated our beloved CASTs 8-Man and Vyper. We will post pics of the new bots in a future update.

This is how crazy it can get - I didn’t even realize that it was Daylight Savings Time today. The first thing that came to mind - “I have another hour to play PSU today!!!!!”

For at least the next 2 weeks, I will only be playing this game (add willfully neglect other games to list above!). If you have this game, look me up (gamertag Vyxen ) so we can explore the universe together.

Edit: Found pictures of the Dreamcast 8-Man and Vyper:

I know many people who wake up in the morning, then go straight to their computer and jump onto IM and check their e-mail. They also watch TV to catch the news, eat breakfast, and can spend up to an hour doing this before taking a shower and getting dressed.

I don’t understand that at all. When I get up in the morning, my list of tasks are:

1. Pick out today’s clothes
2. Use the bathroom (#1)
3. Brush my teeth
4. Shower
5. Get dressed
6. Pack my lunch (usually made the night before)
7. Leave

Nadia’s schedule is very much the same, but in a different order. She might have an extra step or two. We almost never eat breakfast; when we do, that’s when the TV comes on to watch the news for ten minutes or less. I’m not even thinking of turning on the PC. When we get up, our goal is to get out of the house in fourty minutes or less.

This isn’t directly related to the length of our commute. When we lived seven miles from Nad’s job, she generally had the same routine and timeframe (correct me if I’m wrong Nad). When we lived fifteen minutes from my job, I follwed the same routine and timeframe.

If you are one of these people that basically hangs around the house before leaving for work, how do you do it?

Tabi’s siblings, Todd and Leila, have come to stay with us for a couple of months. Here is Leila with Nadia, shortly after she came out from hiding behind the couch:

[soapbox]f9c3bc8a-515f-4c56-8191-bea51350f889[/soapbox]

She’s been a mix of happy and pissed. The video shows her happily eating food and being affectionate, but at the same time hissing and growling, even biting me at one point. Her brother is still under the bed, and has been there for the past 24 hours.

On a not-so-related topic, I was invited to the MSN Soapbox beta, Microsoft’s answer to YouTube. I find the interface of the service to be superior to Youtube and Google Video, but not by a lot. Since everyone and their mother uses Youtube, I figured that I’d be different and go with the new service.

Over the past few months at work I’ve been focused on Wordpress, particularly in the area of plugins. As much as I like this CMS, I find it to be terribly limited. Every problem I run across needs a user-contributed plugin to solve it; one of those issues is the inclusion of videos that use Flash-based players like YouTube. I came across an excellent plugin named Viper’s Video Quicktags. This plugin allows for easy insertion of all sorts of video formats, including YouTube and Google Video.

This is the part where I bring these seemingly random topics together: I uploaded Leila’s video to Soapbox, and then realized that the video plugin didn’t support it. I made some minor edits to the plugin to support it, and the above is the result of my work. Now I have to send the source code over to the author. Maybe it could be included in the next version of the plugin.