My friend and neighbor John threw a going away LAN party for me. Despite the extremely low turnout (only four people showed), we still enjoyed ourselves. The evening was dominated by Halo 3, but I didn’t take any video of that part since I played in every one of those games. When we switched to Call of Duty 4, I had the chance to shoot the video above.

I’m learning that I really enjoy taking home movies and editing them, but Windows Movie Maker is a very limited application and my Powershot isn’t a very good video camera (it’s excellent for still shots though). I may need to invest in better equipment, both hardware and software.

A friend of a friend invited me to a LAN party; I accepted his invitation. A few days before the party, I learned that our mutual friend had bailed. However, I still went.

Nad can attest to the fact that I avoid meeting new people. It took a lot for me to make the thirty minute drive out to the house to spend several hours with a bunch of people I didn’t know (I knew the names of two guys, and that was about it). Aside from wanting to be in a LAN party after not attending one in many years, the thing that drove me to go out there was the promise of playing Rock Band.

We played maybe two games of Unreal Tournament and one game of Serious Sam. The trouble I had installing UT, an eight-year-old game, solidified my stance against PC gaming. It shouldn’t take 44 minutes to apply a mod and a couple of patches to an ancient game.

The rest of the time was dominated by Rock Band. I put together the below video of them playing two songs. I should note that the first half of the video has some flickering due to a bad SD card. I switched out for the second segment.

Hello from Texas! It’s been difficult adjusting to life without Will, the furbabies and my home, but I look forward to the day that we will all be together again in May.

So how have I been spending my time here? Lots of death by powerpoint lessons, classroom instruction, formations and Army-chow *yummy*. I have my 360 and my PC to keep me occupied, so I don’t do too much outside of my room. I did, however, venture outside on Friday to see the World Combat League competition. I was less than 1000 feet away from CHUCK NORRIS!!! This league is his baby, and he made a special guest appearance to meet with the local Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines.

There were 4 teams - NY Clash vs. Miami Force and NJ Tigers vs. St. Louis Enforcers. You can find out details about scoring and the team members from the site. It was 3 minutes of beat downs and let’s just say that the Northeast did not represent the way I hoped they would. It was very entertaining and I hope to see this take off like UFC. Check out their schedule and see if they will be in your area. My photos didn’t come out as great as I had hoped, but I assure you that the action was real.

UPDATE: Here is a video of the last fight between NJ (orange) and St. Louis (grey).