Check them out here. The detail improvement in the full-size comparisons (click on the images, rather than just mouse over) is great. Now where's my blu-ray player?? (oh yeah, it's here)
Friday night, my bike was mostly fine. I was trying to adjust something, so I was just riding it around the parking lot a bit, that was it. Sunday afternoon I go to put my bike in the car, flat tire! Leaking fast, right where the valve attaches. Now both of the original tubes are out, maybe they were just junk. :-P I had just purchased a backup tube, but still, come on now. Bring on the solid rubber tires already. ;-)
So I went biking with Evan at South Mountain, on the noob-friendly Desert Classic trail. Without much of a warmup, we both felt dead about a mile in. I started to do better after that, Evan kept getting more physically drained, and may in fact pack an oxygen tank next time. Round trip was about 7.5 miles, and I felt like I burned about a billion calories. I had a good time though, confidence is increasing, and I look forward to getting back out there again.
Unrelated matter, I finished my Battlestar Galactica season 1 dvds, and season 2 is on its way from amazon.com. Great show. :-D
I ended up at DSW last night, as it was next to the Chandler Costco, and Evan needed to buy some shoes. I needed nothing, but in my wandering, I noticed a lone pair of brown Ecco golf shoes with a sale price of $140 and a 70% off sticker on top of that, in my size no less. So for about $45 out the door, I ended up with an amazing pair of golf shoes. Nice.
Seeing this article on Engadget makes me wish I had a reasonably quiet extra computer around. The only extra stuff I have is now considered "fairly old" (900-1000 MHz), and runs hot enough that all the fans would make it too loud for living room use. The prebuilt hardware solutions at the end of the article are fairly expensive, I think the cheapest was $700 or so.
Bah, I was hoping for some cheap improvements in Tivo video quality. :-\
Last night was achievement-city, I racked up a bunch of them. I finished all of the solo career races at the silver level, so there were the steel/bronze/silver achievements, plus I got to level 5 along the way for another one. I finished won a race at the platinum level with a manual transmission, that was another. I completed one lap at every track configuration in time trial mode (don't recall the actual name), and along the way I took a photo in each city, so there were two more. Then I used my winnings to buy every Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Exotic, so there were three more achievements. Then I think I got the Arcade Racer achievement, and I don't even remember what you have to do for that. :-P So I think that's 11 achievements in one night, not too bad.
Next I'm going to be working on upgrading those silvers to golds or better, and racing in more ranked online races.
I played video games for about 6.5 hours last night. More importantly though, it was on my new 360. :-D Brian heard about a local Costco having a large quantity of them, and he picked one up for me the other day. I picked it up from him, set it up, and now I'm basking in the glow of HD gaming. I also can't imagine MS could have found a louder fan to put in that thing, it's amazingly loud during real games. :-P
Most of yesterday afternoon/evening was spent on PGR3. I played through the first 13 or 14 championships in the solo career, I believe (the last one I finished was the series of Eliminator races). For now I'm playing through on Silver for some easy money, and I'll probably try to go back for Golds if I find that I need more money in the future. Right now I have about 4.5M cr, but I've only purchased two cars, the Atom to start, then a Ruf Turbo I've been using since then. It's a kudo machine. So there's one thing I don't like about the game, there's no real reason to buy more than one car. As far as I can tell, you could play through the entire solo career in one car, with no reason to buy anything else.
Playing on Live didn't go as well last night. For the first few races the in-car view was forced, and I hadn't used that before. I was hitting walls all over the place, it was horrible. Once that was turned off I did a little better. Another problem I had is that I had just spent the last few hours racing for kudos, only needing to go fast enough to beat the car behind me for the most part. Basically, I wasn't driving the cars in a manner that produced fast lap times. Took a couple races to adjust to that as well. Then the people I played with quit. :-P
I wish there was something to play for on multiplayer though, besides the individual races (or even a series of races). I like the fact that you can accumulate points within the group you're running with to see how everyone is doing for the entire session, but there doesn't seem to be a long-term multiplayer ranking of any sort (that I could see, at least).
After finishing my PGR3 time, I finished up with some Hexic HD. I played a couple timed games, but didn't make much progress. I somehow managed to beat Survival mode though, so hooray for another achievement.
But specifically, into a little container and sent off to Blackstone Labs a few weeks ago for an oil analysis. Results came back pretty good...I don't know if I should be surprised or not. ;-)