The latest two were Uncharted: Drakes Fortune (yes, the first one, I know I am way behind) and Brütal Legend. Brutal Legend has to have been one of my favorite games of the past few years. It was everything you would expect from heavy metal: gory, loud, self deprecatingly hilarious and politically incorrect, and I loved it. The final boss fights had one of my favorite songs (Metal Meltdown, which interestingly you can’t actually unlock for your car). The thing that totally surprised me though was that it actually had a plot. The plot was so engaging in fact that my wife ended up watching a me play through a good chunk of the game as well! But even with all that, probably my favorite part of the game was going through all the songs you can add to your car stereo. You can sort them by Genre which is just awesome. Of course now all I can do is try to figure out the current genre on my iPod (NWOBHM FWIW).

For Uncharted I only have two things to say (SPOILER WARNING). First, wow does that game show off the graphics processing power on the PS3. Can’t wait to get to a more recent title. And second, you got your zombie game in my puzzle game!! I was all good on suspension of disbelief when it was a modern day conquistador wading through the local hordes with a machine gun (did anyone else get a TOTALLY CREEPY feeling being someone named DRAKE mowing down all the native peoples?) But for some reason I totally lost it when the zombies started coming. The more I thought about it though, the more sense it made. I mean Drake is really Indiana Jones, and at the end of the first movie people’s faces melt off. But really, I like to know when I am getting zombies in my game.

Way to go Cook County Board. And to think we are going to get Berrios as assessor. Ugh. I’d love to have Claypool instead, but that is a pipe dream.

(IIRC, My wife showed me a site that shows different amounts of water going into different foods a while back. Clearly the higher up the food chain you eat the more water you are going to need, but there were some outliers as well. I’ll post a link to that chart too if I can find it again.)

On the actual results, the first two, sidewalks and bike network show good stewardship in my opinion. I was also really glad to see that the priority one street resurfacing and the CSMA signal both made it in. I was really sad to see that the priority one lighting didn’t make it in. That would have gotten us a huge bang for our buck, but we did vote in a different lighting project. So all in all, I think I am really happy about this. We got a number of critical infrastructure projects in there, but also some fun touchy feely ones, like the dog park at pottowatomi.

Dear Congresswoman Schakowsky,

I am a constituent of yours who is very concerned about health care reform in this country. I work for myself and as such need to buy my own health insurance. As you are well aware, the options in Illinois are not particularly diverse. I am in my mid 30s and active and healthy, and yet am still unable to obtain health care. I can go with Blue Cross and pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for insurance that will not cover me should I ever need it. However I opted for Unicare for $100 a month and prayer.

This is not the way insurance is supposed to work. I feel guilty that I am not contributing to the general insurance pool while I am young and healthy, but there is only one financially responsible choice, and now they have left the state.

There are many problems with the bill as it currently stands. There is not enough in the way of cost control. There are too many special interest items included. The healthcare bill being promoted by the president also does not go far enough in terms of providing universal health care. However, it is the only chance I have of being able to continue to run my own business. Please vote yes for this step in the right direction, as I fear if it fails I will have to wait another decade before we get another chance at reform.

Sincerely,

Moonglum

Best quote from the NYT: ‘“We have experienced three wars before,” Ahmed Ali, a supporter of Mr. Maliki, said in Ur, “so it was just the play of children that we heard.”’

Well I’m glad the bad children didn’t stop them from voting.

The fact of the matter is, most people have very obvious usage patterns that can be tracked across login sessions. In order to get useful information out of a transaction, the vendor doesn’t need to actually know your private details. If they know that “computer A” bought x, y, and z products, then they have a pretty good model of who the user of “computer A” is, even without having a name and address. Then the next time “computer A” logs in to do some shopping at their web site, the vendor can splash the appropriate ads across the screen. I think the real trick here is the ability to fund transactions without giving actual funding source information to the vendor. They will still know who you have as your credit card vendor of course, but at least they won’t be storing your card number on their server to have it stolen. And this is what the Microsoft technical information mostly talks about, but everything I have read on the web is talking about “privacy”, which seems like it will kill it for all the wrong reasons.