In honor of today being my son Johnathan's 3rd birthday, I have rounded up 60 odd photos of him to share. Beware of his extreme cuteness and the 1.21 MB worth of photos.

The New York Times is offering video of the Presidential Debates on-line for all to watch. No registration required. This is great because I actually missed them when they aired. It's great to hear both sides. When election day (Nov. 2nd) comes I will be out of town at the Macromedia MAX conference, so I have already placed my vote via absentee ballot. Kottke.org has an excellent Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election for anyone seeking information about how to vote.

So last week I picked up Tony Hawk Underground 2 (THUG2) for my Gamecube, and while exploring the Boston level I happened to bust through a window and find a nice little surprise. The developers put a character resembling the internet pop-icon Ghyslain a.k.a. the Star Wars Kid (SWK). The character in the game says multiple lines including "I'm watching a movie here!", "I'm trying to watch my movie!", "Don't make me get medieval on your ass!", "Wanna see my moves?", and various light sabar sound effects. When pressing a button (X on the Gamecube, O on the PS2) the character dances around with a staff.

On Monday while making my rounds I saw a call on Waxy.org (the site that originally launched the SWK video into popularity) looking for a quality video of the game footage with sound, etc. So I answered the call and captured a video showing both how to find SWK from the level starting point and him busting his sweet dance moves. Go to Waxy.org to see the video.

Then two days later while watching The Screen Savers on TechTV the hosts Kevin and Alex played my video from the game. This was especially cool since the video featured my custom character, and I was just like "Hey I did that!". Since Joel was kind enough to give me his unused WinTV card, I record The Screen Savers everyday incase I want to check something out. So low and behold I have the clip of them playing my clip (trying not to get sucked into some space/time continuum vortex alternate reality bizaro world...).

Videos:
My original video of SWK in THUG2 (on Waxy.org)
The Screen Savers playing my THUG2 SWK video (34.9 MB MPEG)
Alt. version of SWK dancing (not available on Waxy.org) (7.3 MB WMV)

As you can see from watching the TSS clip the hosts gave no love to Waxy.org for the video (Waxy.org credits me), instead they repeat "I dunno who did this..." several times. It turns out in their show notes for the episode they did give Waxy.org credit for the THUG2 video. Unfortunately they didn't give credit, or realize that Waxy.org was the site that made the SWK famous in the first place (and bought the kid an iPod for his troubles of being globally humiliated).

Supposedly the character in THUG2 is playable and officially titled "Geeky Kid", I plan to capture video of him when I complete the requirements.

Life happens and all of a sudden you realize that you went silent for a month on your blog; a sure catastrophic blunder in the blogshere. Well it has been a busy month or two for me, and I have several pieces that I have pre-written in Word when I didn't has access to the internet but wanted to say stuff on my blog, I will be ditching some of those but other stuff I plan to finish in post later on.

So I went unemployed for 2 weeks. During that time I built a new desk from scratch, moved my web server from So Cal to Boise, went to Boston where Mike gave an excellent presentation on running a ColdFusion MX development server on Mac OSX, bought an Apple iPod (with a must have iCarPay from Monster - if you go on road trips/drive a lot), and I have gained the opinion that "American Idiot" is one of Green Day's best songs to date (BitTorrent Links: Music Video (DVD VOB) and Top of the Pops Live Performance (MPG)).

As for my employment I am very pleased to announce that I have returned to Price.com after leaving the company over 4 years ago. Returning to Price.com means progress for the site, and again working along side my good friend Mike (he rejoined Price.com this past June). I'm not going to pull a "Ben Goodger" and talk trash but it suffices me to say "we have some *tricks up our sleeves". *New Features. Good day.