Friends, if you live in Illinois, get out and vote this Tuesday, February 2nd. These are my candidate picks. Why not print this post and take it with you?

Senator
Don Lowery

Governor
Adam Andrzejewski

Lt Governor
Jason Plummer

Comptroller
William Kelly

photo credit: gregarch2

Fanboys have been wringing their hands over the recent trend of video games to evolve away from dedicated servers. With the high profile release of Modern Warfare 2 there have been calls for boycott. Then id software announced that its next game probably won’t have them either. Just today I picked up a copy of PC Gamer in which a writer whines that dedicated servers are, well, warm and friendly and multiplayer gaming without them thrusts the poor fella on the mercy of us lowly unwashed. Cry more, snob.

I kid. But it gets to the crux of why I won’t miss dedicated servers. I stopped playing Quake Zero after an incident I experienced when I joined a public server (owned by id software). A clan of players, I remember they all had a Texas handle, warned me to leave. Of course, that’s ridiculous. It was a public server that the game told me was the best match for my skills. I was clearly in the minority, so they ganged up and voted me off the server. With that they effectively turned a public beach in their private little sandbox.

Because somebody usually pays for them, server owners feel they have privileges not granted to the general public. Battlefield 2 demonstrated this well. Even though DICE took steps to make sure everyone had the same experience, it is not unusual to find server admins who modify server settings to aid stat padding or even enforcing non-sense rules like “don’t capture a flag, we need EU army hours” with kickbans.

No dedicated servers means nobody owns the server. There is no server admin who feels entitled to tweak and cheat the scoring system. There are no teenage control freaks getting jollies from kicking players. There is no elitist attitude about being deemed worthy of playing with the good ol’ boys. Good riddance dedicated servers! Without them multiplayer gaming is fairer and less frustrating.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32530713@N08/3558573825/

And now some stuff that has been on my mind.

• What the Netflix Prize 2 gonna be like?
• Why can’t I get motivated to participate in this year’s NaNoWriMo?
• Can I do anything cool with Raphaël?
• When is my copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with the night vision goggles going to arrive?
• Why are the retailers already selling Christmas junk?
• Why does the Lord of the Rings Trilogy make walking seem interesting?
• When am I ever going to catch up on my book list?
• Should I put up Christmas decorations outside before the weather gets colder?
• Could burritos be more awesome?
• Should I go see the Stevie Ray Vaughn tribute show? By myself?
• Why don’t I play guitar more?
• Why is it I forget what I needed when I get to the store?

Hello, blog. Miss me?

It’s late at night and I feel like writing. Not posting a link on Facebook. Not tweeting the twit-erers. Something that takes more than 140 characters to type and a sip of coffee to read.

I feel like waxing nostalgic. I remember visiting the campus of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville as a high school student. Two classmates and I rented a billiards table. As I chalked my cue, the soothing strains of music from the band Chicago blared from a jukebox. Why did this moment mean so much to me? Because I was excited.

Thoughts of the future were racing through my brain. What would college be like? What would I learn? What kind of opportunities would that open up? What would I create? How would I make my mark on a world seems to consciously avoid changes? There was no fear in those thoughts, only awe and wonder.

So I had my college experience. I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science. Now it’s been a decade since my shadow has darkened the hallways of a college campus as a student. Where is the awe and wonder? I can’t help but think if my present self traveled back in time to meet myself at that billiards table if he, er I, would be impressed. Have I lived my life with drive and purpose? Or, have I been too cautious and lacked ambition? Could I have taken more risks? Could I have made few mistakes?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suffering from regret. Well, America, it’s like this. The only thing that strikes me with awe as of late is the stupidity of our elected politicians. There have been changes in the system. Our country is in the process of getting turned upside down and inside out by nimwits. But I have faith that America can’t be held back for long. I wonder that if my future self came back today would he tell me how I helped elect some folks who made things right again. I wonder.

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The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds—and that would include me.

18 out of 100 – most of which I read as a teenager. The size of the Dune book intimidated me.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible – X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy -
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – X
41 Animal Farm – George OrwellN- X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Instructions: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I’m interested in seeing your fifteen too.

01. You’ve Gotta Have the Want To by Rev Alan Oggs
02. Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury
03. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
04. The Holy Bible, King James version
05. On Writing by Stephen King
06. Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
07. On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony
08. Think Better by Tim Hurson
09. A Practical Guide to the Unix System by Mark Sobell
10. The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks
11. Getting Things Done by David Allen
12. Starship Troopers by David A. Heinlein
13. Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum
14. Design Patterns by Erich Gamma et al
15. The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll