kitty

Kitty sleeping

Garden Entry #2

Here are some up to date photos on my tomato and pepper seedlings I took today:

Here is a photo I found of my garden last summer:

Battlefield 2 AIX mod

For the last 5 or 6 years I have been playing a lot of the Battlefield games starting with Battlefield 1942, then Battlefield Vietnam, and of course, Battlefield 2. I never bothered with 2142 because I am not into the whole future thing, if I want future, I'll play Unreal Tournament 2004 (which I still do). I know a lot of console kids play Call of Duty or whatever but in my opinion Battlefield 2 is way better.

A couple of years ago I started checking out mods for Battlefield 2 and came across Allied Intent Xtended (AIX). This mod turns Battlefield 2 into the best multiplayer first person shooter ever. I am skeptical to see how Battlefield 1943 is in comparison, but as of right now Battlefield 2 with AIX 2.0 is awesome. The cool thing about PC games like Battlefield 2 is when you get a new video card its like you get new games. For some reason I thought you should match the resolution of your monitor so I always ran BF2/AIX at 1152 x 864, just recently I tried jacking it up to 1680 x 1050 and wow! It's like an entire new game, it looks so crisp, and I even felt guilty because it felt like I had an unfair advantage because I could spot bad guys so easily.

Here is a list of a few of the things that make AIX such a good mod:

• Longer run time (all-time run on some servers like DOD)
• Better weapons
• More helicopters and jets that are equipped with more weapons
• A ton of new maps
• Pickup weapons
• Health and Ammo
• A portable Stinger (a bazooka that locks onto choppers and jets(pickup only))
• C4 20 second timebomb
• Grappling hook and zipline
• Lazer mines that sound a siren, shoot a flare, and jets can lock onto

If your PC can hang with the big boys you'll be able to run Battlefield 2 decently otherwise stick to the kiddy consoles. You can buy Battlefield 2 for $10 at the EA store here,

AIX 2.0 mod is free and you can find that at www.aixtended.com

If you make it that far you should also aquire the TNG2 mappack which a lot of AIX servers require. I know you can get it from the ISA clan's site but you have to sign up to access the files.

Garden Entry #1

I started my garden the other day and this is probably my sixth year growing a garden. My parents have always had a garden for as long as I can remember except for maybe the summer we moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota. This is the first year I am doing all USDA certified organic vegetables. This year is will also be the first that I try my hand at saving seeds.

How to Fix a Propane Grill

I have a propane grill that has seen better days, I let it sit out in the weather uncovered for many years until the burner itself was rusted to the point where it didn't function properly anymore. With about $35 and a half hour of my time I was able to have the grill back in working order.

Before and After

To start out I put on some gloves that I planned on throwing out and cleaned the thing out. As you might be able to imagine, it was nasty. I ripped out the old rusty burner and all the old grease and cheese covered lava rocks and threw it all away.

Products obtained at Walmart

Then I assembled the universal bar burner, installed it, installed the drip vaporizer, and that was it. A working grill

Google Chrome Blogger Extension

Right now I am testing out a Blogger extension for Chrome.

Mobile Blog

this is a test, i am posting this from my phone. I wish I had a phone with a qwerty keyboard on it

Rocky busted

We have two dogs, and sometimes when we leave they or one of them makes a mess. Usually knocking the trash over or dragging some food item around. We have always suspected it was Rocky the pitbull, and not Frank the border collie, that was the trouble maker. We had entertained the hilarious idea that it was Frank the whole time and Rocky keeps getting in trouble for Frank's actions. So I decided to make sure it was Rocky.
The other day I downloaded a sweet little program called YawCam. It is a free program that lets you basically turn a normal webcam into a surveillance camera, or at least that is what I used its for. I set up the motion detection part and had it save a jpeg to the hard disk and email a copy to me so I would recieve it on my phone. Then I set the garbage can in front of the camera and here are the results:

About 2 minutes before

The crime

After the crime

As you can see it was Rocky all along. All in all I would say YawCam is a great program and if you are interested you can download YawCam here:

yawcam.com

Geocaching like mad

My good friend Phil and I spent the last week geocaching all over the the twin cities area. The first day we hit up 5 in north Saint Paul and then another 3 in Forest Lake. Phil found most of them while I played with the gps, I found one on a playground hidden in one of those "animals on a spring" type deals.

The next day we started in Forest Lake with a long trek to one at Lamprey's Pass and then ended up in Lino Lakes in a Kohl's parking lot and couldn't find the cache for the life of us. We moved on to the Walmart area on Lexington and 35W, we easily found one there, but there was one by Walgreens we couldn't get to because there were too many people sitting around eating toxic fast food. I guess in the world of geocaching those folks are called "muggles" which I guess is from harry potter. We found a cache right down the street from there by the Minnesota school of business shortly after. We found one more in a park off of Radisson and couldn't find one near a school off of county road I. So we moved on to county road H where we parked at a park and ride. It seemed like the cache was nearby a drainage ditch we were parked by and since it is February we figured it would be safe to walk on. Well it was for the most part, but when we got near a bridge we noticed the water was open under the bridge and flowing, and that the cache we were hunting was on the other side of the bridge full of stopped traffic. Right when I realized this I heard Phil scream and I turned to see his left leg submerged through the ice, and not even a second later did I notice the sweet smell of sewage.

Needless to say that was the end of our caching for the day, but after I was home and settled I recieved a call from Phil and he was looking for a knife he had with him earlier. This was a very big and very cool knife and Phil was very attached to this knife, so we ended up driving back to county road H to look for the knife. We ended up finding it on the ice right next to the spot where Phil fell in the sewage, using a stick we retrieved it. After that we figured we would try to get the cache we were looking for when he fell, so we crossed the street and searched and searched. Couldn't find it, but when we were walking back to the vehicle the police found us, harrassed us for IDs and left us alone once we told them that we were geocaching. They had obviously heard of the "sport" before because they didn't give us much crap after that.

The next couple of days we went to Minneapolis and snagged a few more to finish the week out. For more info on geocaching go to geocaching.com