Holiday Plans??

Well, its that time of year again. Actually, its my favorite time of year. The Holiday season is upon us in full bloom. We have snow and cold, bell ringers at all the stores, and of course, soon we will be stuffing our faces with turkey, taters and gravy.

I like Thanksgiving for many reasons. First of all, my family generally all comes home for one of the few times of togetherness each year. For that I am truly thankful. Second, my brother and I take all the boys to a Sabres game. Probably the only game I will go to this year. And finally, its the end of the election season.

This year was particularly hairy for me. It being a Presidential election year meant work. Lots and lots of it. I lost track of how many hours I put in, but it was a lot. I worked 30 out of the 31 days in October. I managed to work 41 consecutive days from September to that one day off in October and overall worked 70 out of 75 days. Like I said, it was a very busy year at the office. But now its over. No more early days. No more late days. No more weekends. I think I am most thankful for that.

Holiday season also means the arrival of new games for the XBox 360. Gears of War II immediately jumps to mind. Devil talked me in to getting Gears of War and we started co-op playing through the levels. It was damn entertaining and the most fun I have had playing video games in a long time. One Friday we finished the game. So the next morning I went out and purchased Gears of War II. Devil and I started playing that and then started exploring the online (XBox Live) content of the game. WOW!! Just go out and get the game and start playing. You too will discover just how cool it is to perform a custom execution move on a Locust scum. And then you will stumble upon Horde mode (for which you can get an achievement). There are still a lot of the multi-player game types I haven't even tried yet. There are just endless hours and hours of entertainment to be had from this game.

So what are my plans for the holidays?? Sleeping in, watching football, eating lots of food and playing Gears of War II. Who wants to join me??

Things to love

This is a very short and sweet list of things that are good to have and good to do.

• FRIENDS
• GOLF
• GEORGE DICKEL
• GARBAGE PLATES

Why in that order?? Well let me explain. Every October my friends and I participate in the annual September party in October. This is for several reasons. First off, there are several birthdays (see previous post) in a short period of time. So those are all kind of celebrated at once. Next is the annual George Dickel Golf Open held at Durand Eastman Golf Course. Its kind of our own little thing - no major sponsors, no tv coverage, just us. The winner gets to hold the fabulous jug of genuine No. 12 George Dickel. The champion and past champion must also partake in a victory shot at the conclusion of golf. And finally, everyone heads on over to Irondequoit Hots for a tasty garbage plate.

And there you have, short, sweet and delicious. Unfortunately, I will not be able to participate in the golfing action this year - but you can bet your sweet ass that I will make it for a plate!!

And now for the visual portrayal of the above list:

One More Day!

So it's Wednesday. Hump day and all that. Well not really for me. Right now I am in the midst of working 40 straight days. Call me Noah or whatever, but Wednesdays no longer mean mid-week to me. So why am I excited about this particular Wednesday??

Simple - tomorrow is the start of the full NHL season!! Yes, hockey is back from its 4 game European opening tour. Now all of the teams will be back on the ice in the coming days. Its a chance for a fresh start for those teams that sucked (ie Buffalo) last year. And it gives me something to look forward to when I go home from work, other than going to bed.

So say it with me real loud:

HOCKEY!! HOCKEY!!!! HOCKEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How to REALLY Resolve the Financial Crisis

OK - I did not write this - but when I saw it, I thought it was shear GENIUS! And best of all, even after paying off all of your personal debt, there is still plenty of $$ to upgrade your X-Box!!

S-I-X

Hi Pals,
I'm against the $85,000,000, 000.00 bailout of AIG.
Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000, 000 to America in
a We Deserve It Dividend.
To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000
bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.
Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman
and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..
So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00.
My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a
We Deserve It Dividend.
Of course, it would NOT be tax free.
So let's assume a tax rate of 30%.
Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes.
That sends $25,500,000, 000 right back to Uncle Sam.
But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.
A husband and wife has $595,000 ..00.
What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage -housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college - it'll be there
Save in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car - create jobs
Invest in the market - capital drives growth
Pay for your parent's medical insurance - health care improves
Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean - or else
Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks
who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company
that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.
If we're going to re-distribute wealth let's really do it...instead of trickling out
a puny $1000.00 ( 'vote buy' ) economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.
If we're going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult U S Citizen 18+!
As for AIG - liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.
Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn't.
Sure it's a crazy idea that can 'never work.'
But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party!
How do you spell Economic Boom?
I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion
We Deserve It Dividend more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC .
And remember, The Family plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.
Ahhh...I feel so much better getting that off my chest.
Kindest personal regards,
A Creative Guy & Citizen of the Republic.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS BLOG DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF HALO FRIDAY OR ITS SUBSIDIARIES.

Birthday SHOUT Outs

Well its that time of year. Lots of birthdays in a relatively short period of time.

It may seem a little impersonal to just blog out a Happy Birthday, but if you think about it, I'm actually putting their names and birthdays out there for all eternity!! So lets get right to it

Happy Birthday to all my friends!!

Chanh Q - September 9th
Boily-man - September 12th
Devil - September 15th
Merlin - September 30th
my sister Mary - October 1st
Tracy T - October 5th
my b-day brother; John Cook - October 6th
Deputy Noah - October 7th
Laura B - October 10th

Hope you all have/had a great day! And if I ever get a day off again, I will definitely be up for some celebrating.

S-i-X

PREPARE TO DROP - An in-depth look at the new Bungie Teaser Trailer

OBEY POSTED LIMITS!

Bungie has finally revealed (a little) what their next Halo themed project will be. The teaser trailer appeared on Bungie.net yesterday, the One Year Anniversary of Halo 3. And boy howdy, it did not fail to impress me. It was short and at first glance not too much to see, but there actually were a lot of goodies in there to look at, if you knew what you were looking for, and this fanboy would like to think that he does.

I'm going to give you my interpretation of what things in the trailer mean using what I know of the story, the timeline and what has already been disambiguated on the intertubes. If you haven't already, go get the video and watch it. It's on Bungie, but I think the best place to watch it is from Xbox Live Marketplace. It's in HD and you can pause and rewind at your leisure.

Let's start at the basic premise and background. Required reading includes the first two posts from the mysterious Superintendent which were laced with clues. Read them HERE and HERE. Who is the Superintendent? Well he appears to be a City-wide AI. It does not appear that he is a "Smart AI" like Cortana, but an AI that is in control of a city's infrastructure. Not at all sentient, but knows how to keep the lights on and the services active like communications, water, the garbage trucks, etc. And speaking of communications, this is where the Super gives the first clues, in his monitoring of various transmissions.

The first communication is a transcript of a classified Office of Naval Intelligence transmission possibly between someone on a UNSC Prowler (Prowlers, electronic intelligence gathering ships, are run by ONI) and the "URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE A.I. [SUPERINTENDENT]". It doesn't go well for the human trying to communicate with the Super. The Super is not making any sense. There appears to be a problem of some kind, an apparent malfunction and the communication doesn't go well. We can tell that there is some kind of metropolitan emergency, possibly a Covenant attack, and that according to the Comm Officer on the prowler, help is on the way.

But what kind of help? Help for what?

It looks like the second intercepted transmission sheds more light on those questions. Again, a classified ONI conversation, this one seems to be between the commander of the Heavy Cruiser Say My Name and an unknown Captain, possibly on the ground requesting more troops. The crux of the conversation is that the Captain is trying to get the ship commander, an Admiral, to release or approve the release of more ground support. The problem is that the Heavy Cruiser is clearly in the middle of an intense space battle. The Admiral is trying to fight this battle and command, at the very least, his ship, not to mention that an Admiral is probably responsible for dozens more, possibly an entire fleet. Understandably the Admiral is essentially telling the Captain to go away, that he has bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

However, in the middle of this, the seemingly nonplussed Captain on the ground merely states that he doesn't report to Fleet and that neither do his men for that point. That can only mean that they are ONI or that the Captain has the authority to take troops for ONI missions that supersede FLEETCOM orders. The other clue to this is that the Admiral refers to them as "you S1 Types", presumably - ONI Section One

from Halopedia:

"ONI Section One -
The main intelligence-gathering section, and the foremost provider of electronic intelligence for the UNSC. Covenant ship movements and force deployment, evacuation notices for colonies, deletion of data for secrecy purposes, and much more are all done by Section 1. "

Reluctantly it seems, but with approval once it's revealed that the Captain is from S1, the Admiral agrees to the request.

Guess who's coming to dinner...

Now we look at the Trailer itself. Up to this point all we had to go on were all the disjointed messages from the Superintendent on B-net before E3 and then these last two, much more substantive communications.

The trailer opens with a shot of a cityscape and then jump cuts to a fiery falling object in the upper atmosphere. You get to see this for a second or two then it jumps back to the city and seems to cycle through a few stationary security cameras. The city is New Mombasa. We know this because of two clues. One - in the wide shots you can still see the space elevator stretching up into the sky. New Mombasa was one of two confirmed locations on Earth for Orbital Space Elevators. The other being Havana Cuba. The second clue is more obvious and more of a 'duh' moment if you pause the video. In the 2nd security cam shot, at street level, there is a sign that says City of New Mombasa. But you can only see it paused and in Hi Def.

For those who have paid even a little attention to the Halo 3 story, you'll know New Mombasa is just about the most significant location on Earth during the Human-Covenant war and was a prominent setting in both Halo 2 and 3. In Halo 2, Regret knew that there was something special about that area, but before the Master Chief and Earth forces could get to him, he initiated a slipspace jump in the atmosphere to escape, but the rift caused by jumping in the earth's atmosphere, destroyed Most of New Mombasa. In Halo 3, we now know that what Regret uncovered with the Slipspace jump and what drew him there was the portal to the Ark. Truth came to finish the work Regret had started, but thought that the portal was the Ark. We all know how that ended...

The trailer continues with the Superintendent (presumably) zooming in on many objects falling from the sky at great speed. Probably many of the fiery objects we saw up close at the beginning. As they reach the city level there is also a huge shockwave of some kind that is sweeping through the city. When this reaches the camera, it all goes black. after a few seconds we see the Super coming back online and he cycles through all of his now familiar responses:

Please Remain Calm (in English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese)
Expect Delays
Road Closed
Yellow Means Yield
Obey Posted Limits
Pardon Our Dust
Maddie, Where Are You?
Proceed With Caution
Danger: Flood Zone
Final Notice: Bill Past Due
Keep It Clean

The one of these that took me by surprise and was hard to find was: "Maddie, Where Are You?". I have never seen this one before. I can only assume that the Superintendent is trying to communicate with another AI. Possibly the AI that controls the Orbital Elevator. We know from Contact Harvest that it's possible that there could be separate AI's to control city-wide duties and elevator control.

Once the Super gets the cameras back online, we can now see that the city has been razed. The street scene is now one of total destruction and the cityscape is now smoke filled and the buildings are clearly severely damaged. What caused this? Based on the fact that the Orbital Elevator is still intact, this may be the Slipspace event that first destroyed the city in Halo 2, which gives us pretty concrete evidence what the timeline is for this game.

And finally, the video concludes with one last drop pod falling into the city and seemingly landing on the camera lens sending the video to black. That's right I said DROP POD. It looks like the cavalry coming to the rescue are those crazy Feet First Into Hell, Helljumpers - the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers.

I'm pretty sure at this point that the mysterious ONI S1 Captain, convinced the Admiral on the Heavy Cruiser Say My Name to release his squad of ODST's, to take care of whatever Covenant ground threat is left over after Regret turned tail and ran.

The ODST's are bad-ass. There are no two ways about it. They are the toughest, craziest, meanest sons-of-bitches in the entire UNSC and the only thing tougher, is a Spartan. Unfortunately there's not too many of those to go around, so the real work in this war will be done by you presumably taking command of a freshly dropped squad of ODST's and taking it to the Covies on the ground. I'm guessing yet again that it could be like a Ghost Recon, or Republic Commando experience, which would be totally cool. Needless to say I am looking forward to that!

The Elevator is still intact so I am expecting that to be a big set-piece of the game, as at some point we know that it has to come down. Pieces of it can be seen from the first time you set foot outside of Crow's Nest in Halo 3 all the way to Voi and the Portal to the Ark. Watching that fall to Earth should be pretty breathtaking. Finally one of the last things you see as the video ends are the words: PREPARE TO DROP. Not sure if that hint can be any more blatant, but it works just fine for me!

Want to learn more about the ODST's and you haven't read any of the books? Check out this handy reference from Halopedia:

Halopedia: ODST

I hope you are as jazzed about this addition to the Halo universe as I am. I can't wait for more to be revealed so I can stop guessing and get to the real content!

Thanks for reading and please leave some comments or thoughts!

|)3V!|_

In Memory Of

Richard Wright

LONDON — A Pink Floyd spokesman says founding member Richard Wright has died. He was 65.

Richard Wright, a founder member of Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 65 after battling cancer, his spokesman said.

Wright played the keyboard with the legendary band and wrote music in classic albums such as Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here.

His spokesman said: "The family of Richard Wright, founder member of Pink Floyd, announce with great sadness, that Richard died ... after a short struggle with cancer. The family have asked that their privacy is respected at this difficult time."

Wright's spokesman did not say from what form of cancer the star had been suffering.

The self-taught keyboardist and pianist met fellow band members Roger Waters and Nick Mason while at architecture school. He was a founder member of The Pink Floyd Sound in 1965, and the group's previous incarnations, such as Sigma 6.

In the early days of Pink Floyd, Wright, along with Syd Barrett, was seen as the group's dominant musical force. The London-born musician and son of a biochemist wrote and sang several songs of his own.

The Great Gig In The Sky, and Us And Them, both from 1973's seminal Dark Side Of The Moon album, were his most well-known compositions. He also made essential contributions to Atom Heart Mother, Echoes and Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the tribute to former band member Barrett.

After his relationship with Waters became increasingly difficult, he left Floyd following sessions for the album The Wall. Wright was retained as a salaried session musician during live concerts in 1980 and 1981. In 1983, Pink Floyd released the only album in which Wright does not appear - The Final Cut.

Wright played with the surviving members of Pink Floyd in 2005 at Live 8. He also performed at a tribute concert to Barrett last year, but Waters and Gilmour, who famously fell out more than 25 years ago, appeared separately. Wright had performed on every Pink Floyd tour.

He officially rejoined Pink Floyd following the departure of Waters and contributed vocals and keyboards to the 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason. In 1994, he co-wrote five songs on The Division Bell album, singing lead vocals on the track Wearing The Inside Out.

(article copied from http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hWIGm5l-yoyRo6pTklrXqJB3BnmA)

Milestones and Memories

Some time ago, Merlin, Devil, Domino and myself used to get together every so often on Fridays to play Halo. We coined the name "Halo Friday" and an idea was born. If you are at all familiar with www.halofriday.com, you are well familiar with the story. I will not retell it here.

This weekend I was playing Halo III and nearing several in game milestones for myself. As I came closer to some of the marks, I sat and remembered the good old days of gathering at someone's home and playing Halo, eating pizza/wings, drinking beer and doing shots of George Dickel. I really miss those days. They were some fantastic moments.

The whole idea of Halo Friday was for good friends to get together and have a good time for a few hours. When we all got X-box 360s the hope was that it would be even easier to get together because we could do it from the comfort of our own homes and not have to drive anywhere to get together. Early on it was great. Every Friday we would join around 8:00 and play for several hours and have a good time. Lately, its been hit or miss and we have been lucky to get two or three guys together for more than one or two matches.

But enough about memories. On to my milestones. I know some readers will look at these and say - "That's all you got? You SUCK!" Well - these are my milestones. I'm a casual gamer playing to have fun more than anything. So here goes (note these are only for RANKED matches):

Milestones
TOTAL KILLS - 4000
DOUBLE KILLS - 200
KILLING FRENZY - 1

Almost Milestones
KILLING SPREES - 48 (50)
BEAT-DOWNS - 970 (1000)
ASSASSINATIONS - 186 (200)
SNIPES - 48 (50)
GRENADE STICKS - 286 (300)

I was very happy to get my first killing frenzy. It took me a very long time to get it. The very next match I had a spree of 9 - so I almost had TWO in one day. But oh well.

Now, I am laying out a personal challenge to MERLIN, DOMINO and DEVIL to match my milestones!! OR even surpass my milestones!! Can you do it??

When A Good Day Turns Bad

Just a short little bitch about how my good day yesterday turned into a bad day last night. I won't go over how work went - its a job and had no bearing on the rest of my day.

I stopped at the store on the way home from work and bought some groceries and some fresh steaks. It was a nice evening and I figured a grilled steak would be quite tasty. Then I stopped at my parents to take care of their mail and cat, while they are out of town. I also stole a couple of potatoes so I could make some fresh real mashed potots to go with the steak.

So I got home and relaxed for a little while, then started dinner. I got the potatoes going and then fired up the grill. I seasoned the steak and threw it on the grill and left it to do its magic. I went back inside and did a little quick cleaning up (basically to just kill some time while the steak was cooking). Checked the steak and it was ready for a flip. I love the sizzle that makes when you flip that succulent beef over to a fresh side!! Then I went back in to check the potatoes. Almost finished. My timing was working out to near perfection. By the time i mashed the potatoes and got a drink out of the fridge, the steak would be done to perfection.

I went back out and took the steak of the grill. It looked fantastic and smelled even better. Put the whole meal together, along with a small bowl of applesauce and a beer. The steak was tremendous! Perfectly pink in the middle and done on the outside. Mmmmmmmm not much better end to a day then a grilled steak and a beer!! Oh wait - there is always the television. Surely there is some good movie on or a football game or something . . . . . flip, flip, flip . . . . hmmm, nothing!

No matter, I have several excellent movies up on my computer, I will just go fire that up and enjoy a movie that way. So I went upstairs to fire up the computer. I turned on the DSL modem and router and then hit the button to turn the computer on. Nothing. At first I thought maybe I didn't hit the button all the way. So I hit it again, making sure I actually hit it. Again, nothing. Uh oh - this don't look good. So I began trouble shooting. I basically unplugged everything and tried a different outlet, a different plug in the power strip, disconnecting and reconnecting the power chord - still nothing. CRAPPERS!!!! So then I opened up the case to see if I could see anything glaringly wrong inside. It all looked normal to me.

So I called Devil and asked his help on diagnosing my computer problem. We tried a few things with no success and he diagnosed a dead power supply. Thankfully he has a few spares at his house and said to bring it over this weekend to see if we can bring it back to life. Devil is good like that, fixing broked pcs or just building them from parts.

In the meantime, my good night turned into frustration and anger by not being able to do what I wanted with my computer. Because just what do you do when there is nothing good on TV and your computer is dead?? Thankfully the answer was sitting right on my bedside table.

Merlin and Devil turned me on to a series of books written by George R. R. Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire. All I will tell you here is that they are amazing novels. I am presently in the middle of Book IV and waiting for Book V to be released. So I layed down on my bed and continued reading til it was time to turn the lights out and call it a day.

I guess in the end, it wasn't such a bad day after all.

My Current Halo Songlist

(I'm still working on it - this is just the beginning. Check back every once and a while for updated listing.)

List is arranged by artist, but all songs are randomized
**All songs are from my extensive live library**

U2

• Vertigo
• Walk On
• Bad
• Love Rescue Me (featuring BB King)

METALLICA

• Ecstasy of Gold/Breadfan
• Master of Puppets
• So What

LED ZEPPELIN

• No Quarter
• The Rain Song
• Dazed and Confused
• Whole Lotta Love (medley)
• Ten Years Gone

IRON MAIDEN

• Brave New World
• Dream of Mirrors
• Hallowed Be Thy Name
• Children of the Damned
• Sanctuary
• Drifter

MUSE

• Space Dementia
• New Born

GENESIS

• Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
• Mamma

COLDPLAY

• Poor Me
• Ladder to the Sun
• Fix You

TOOL

• Stinkfist
• 46&2
• Schism
• Disposition
• Pushit
• Vicarious
• Aenima
• The Patient
• Maynard's Dick

JUDAS PRIEST

• Solar Angels
• Riding on the Wind
• The Bloodstone
• The Sentinel
• Freewheel Burning
• A Touch of Evil

My 360 Does Tricks Too!

I'm sure that the capability has been there for a long time, but I am not as technologically savvy as Merlin and DJ Devil - so I didn't know about it. One day I am sitting at home bored. So I fire up the 360 and go to the Dashboard. I have never really explored the Dashboard, so I took a few moments to see what kind of stuff is in there. There are all kinds of neat little features in the DB. One of them caught my eye - I think it had something to do with shared media (ie pics, music and video).

I tried to connect to it and it gave me an error, but also gave a very nice explanation for what I had to do to connect. I ran upstairs and fired up Windows Media Player and added a few folders to the share section. Then I ran back downstairs and tried to connect again. All of a sudden there was my PC to go look at pictures from. I thought this is the coolest thing since sliced bread! Then I had one of those wondering moments. You know, the ones that are few and far between, but end up being a really good idea?? Yea, I had one of those!

I ran back upstairs and added my movies folder to the share directory of Media Player. Ran back downstairs and was suddenly tired. After a quick breather, I went back into the DB and went to the video section. There was my folder on my portable hard drive! So I browsed through and within minutes, I was watching the Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer through my 360, off my PC, on my big screen TV. It was truly a wonderful moment.

So now I can watch movies, view photographs and listen to music off my computer, all from the comfort of my sofa, all thanks to my little friend - XBOX 360.

S-I-X

Speaking of Music...

Since I've talked about the whole Halo Friday Playlist thing, here's what's actually on the playlist in its current form. It's still taking shape as I add stuff to it all the time but this is it as of right now (bands only as there are multiple tracks from each artist. I might list those out later).


40 Below Summer
808 state
Ac Dc
Breaking Benjamin
Caviar
Chevelle
Coheed and Cambria
Death Cab For Cutie
Deftones
Everlast
Expansion Union
Fall Out Boy
Fishbone
Fluke
Front 242
(Hed) p.e.
Helmet
Hybrid
Jimmy's Chicken Shack
Josh Wink
Justice
Korn
Mindless Self Indulgence
Mudvayne
Muse
NIN
A Perfect Circle
Poe
Prodigy
Queens Of The Stone Age
Senser
Silversun Pickups
Snapcase
Staind
System Of A Down
Taproot
My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult
Tool


So if you catch me singing into my headset during the next Halo Friday, I apologize in advance. This is a great bunch of artists to jam to and kick some Spartan ass!

|)3V!|_

I taught my 360 a new trick

Well not really, I just finally tried something that it already knew how to do.

First a few words about my setup...

My Xbox is in my office, not connected to a TV but hooked up via the VGA cable accessory to my 19" LCD monitor. I then have a KVM that lets me switch from my PC to my Xbox with a double-tap of the Scroll Lock key. Very convenient. Since my office is upstairs two walls from our bedroom, I never game with external speakers on. Instead I use a set of Turtle Beach Ear Force X1 headphones.

These things are amazing. The quality of the sound is excellent. All of the game sound plus any voice chat is pumped in to the headphones with separate volume controls for each so that you can fine tune just how much of your friends or the game you want to hear. This allows me to game whenever I want to no matter what the time is, without bothering anyone. I think that you also get to hear more of the nuances of the game sound by having it driven directly into your ears without losing it in the rest of the room. It's awesome for Halo, but has recently become more evident when I recently put in The Orange Box and Gears of War and was blown away by the sound.

Now back to the trick -

I am also Zune owner. When the new generation of Zune's came out, I did my research and took the plunge, opting against the against the Ipod classic. I have to say that overall I am a total Zune convert. I have an older Ipod and have no problems with it or the Apple software. The Zune just did so much more than what the ipod offered. Admittedly the software isn't as smooth as Apple's, but as you work with it you get to know its quirks and it's actually quite capable.

So this past Halo Friday, I connected my Zune to the 360 with the USB sync cable, and on the 360 dashboard flipped over to the media blade. I selected music, and there was Devil's Zune, listed and ready to go with no tweaking or installing needed. There in the interface were all of my playlists and music arranged by artist. I decided to create a playlist on the fly and within a few minutes I had about 70 songs ready to accompany a night of Halo 3 multiplayer mayhem! Some good songs for shooting your friends too - a good mixture of Rock, Techno, Metal, Industrial, all different kinds of blood pumping sounds. Then just hit shuffle, play, and start the game. As soon as the game boots up, there is your music playing in your ears.

Now this brings me back to the main point of my post. I NOW LOVE THIS WAY OF PLAYING MULTIPLAYER. The whole night, while engaged in pitched battles, I was jamming to some of my favorite tunes. I have to say that it really kept me in the game! And, I could still adjust the volume so that I could hear the game sound as well as the chat of my teammates. Finding that balance was really easy with the X1 headphones. And to bring this around full circle and why I explained my setup in the beginning, I think that using the headphones really made the experience what it was. The audio quality of the music right in my ears along with the game's sound effects and the voice chat, was not too much to handle and gave an overall entertainment experience that I wasn't prepared for. In a good way! I loved it! I can't wait 'till the next session so I can fire up the new multiplayer specific playlists that I've created. Mind you, I'm pretty sure this would totally ruin any single player game that you would play, as those are so scripted with content driven music and cutscenes, but in multiplayer where there is no soundtrack or in-game NPC exposition, it is a perfect fit!

I do suggest that you try it sometime, and if you don't have a Zune, I believe it also works with flash drives and can also pull media from other pc's on the network. If you don't play with headphones, but pipe the sound through your TV, I'm not sure that you would benefit from this neat trick, but if you use the hi-def sound from the Xbox or some good 5.1's, I'm willing to bet that it will sound pretty freaking cool.

Let me know if you try this. leave a comment and tell me what you think of the feature. I know that from now on, I'm only playing multiplayer to my own personal soundtrack!

Devil

ZOMG First Post LOLZ KEWL, Halo RulZ!

Welcome guests, to the new Halo Friday Blog - Shout Halo Friday. We have added this new element to HaloFriday.com and you are reading the very first post! We want to make it less of the normal news items you see on the site, and more thoughts about what's going on in our little gaming world.

Anything is on-topic here. While the overall theme is all things Halo, any games are open for discussion as well as what the heck I did today or happened to me while trying to live my life, that I really need to shout about.

I also won't be the only one to contribute. We will have guest posters from the Halo Friday community to entertain and open your minds. Some you will probably find amusing, some may make your eyes bleed with their prose. The point is, you will see our gaming community from a few different angles. If you like what you see, are a gamer, specifically play a lot of Halo 3 - come join us at www.HaloFriday.com for more Halo news and universe updates. Want to just listen to us rant? This is the place! Welcome. Pull up a chair, the drinks are on me, there's a cigar in the humidor, a lovely young lady will be by shortly to take your order...

Enjoy,
Devil