Yesterday the snow began to fall and as of today, there will be upwards of 16″ of snow on the ground. This has caused a lot of problems on the roads and a lot of delays around the area. Today is definitely a “sit-at-home-and-relax” day.

Besides the snow, a lot else has happened in the last few months. I finished my co-oping period with ABB in December. It was an enjoyable and valuable experience. It does feel good to be back in school though, I was really starting to miss the academic environment that has become so familiar to me over the last few years. Christmas break was pleasant, we spent some time with family, saw some friends, and burned up a lot of time playing Rock Band and other video games.

Now I’m back in school, and back to the grind. This semester I only have four classes, but they’re all engineering courses, so it’s a very difficult semester. I am taking VLSI, Operating System Concepts, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Communications & Signal Processing. Over the summer I’ll have to take a few more courses to make sure I can graduate next spring.

Other than that, the last few months have kind of buzzed by. Tim is looking at colleges to attend in the fall and head to France after he graduates in June. Mike is not currently attending school, and is trying to find a job (which he is finding out is very difficult in today’s job market) . I spent some time with Nick Koehler over his winter quarter break a couple of weeks ago. Nick will graduate this spring and start working at AEP in Gahanna, OH this summer. Also, Tom Downerd will get married to Ashli Litten this April. Exciting times for all, that’s for sure!

Anyways, that’s pretty much all for right now. Hopefully I will be able find some time to blog a little bit more often than once every 3 months!

I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.

Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.

Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.

I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.

I thought it might be nice to put up a quick update of what’s been going on lately. I have tons of stuff to talk about, so I’ll have to post some more later. And no, I don’t especially love Vanessa Carlton, I just liked the sound of the words.

Anyways, for starters, I am currently employed at ABB part-time over the summer. This is pretty cool because in order for me to make the same amount of money every pay, I would probably have to work about 2.5 times more hours than I work here (Here being where I am right now). Not to mention the work isn’t too difficult (Note the last parenthetical statement). Also, this summer, I finally embarked on the Great Journey (read Circuits II), hopefully it will turn out like I expect it to. Speaking of the Great Journey, I bought a Xbox 360 back in May, and it is leet. I tried to buy used, to save some bucks, but that was a bad idea. Out of the two used ones I had, neither worked… Regardless, I now have a pretty all white Core system, and the Halo 3 beta kicked serious butt!

The new Transformers movie comes out today! It should be cool, I’m going to go see it at 10:20 PM tonight. I’ll have to put up a post of what I thought of it. Today I had this for an away message… “Transfloormerz! Robuts in Da’ Guys!” And Ben Radey messaged me with “transgenders! more than meets the eyes!”. That was good for a laugh!

I’ve done a couple things to the site lately. First of all, I made a new header. I used the base Flash file that the snow header was created from, rewrote the action script, found a cloud image and did a little PSing, and it looks pretty good to me. I also dropped a Twitter javascript into my sidebar. So that’s been a summary of the last couple months. I’ll update again with more soon.