On a blogging kick here for a while ... and it will get back to this way more and more as I transition back full time to Nashville out of Beaufort ...

GameSpot featured this piece asking the editors of the site if there were only 5 games they could take with them to a deserted island, what would they be?

They give some pretty interesting answers, so you ought to check that out. Mine are:

1. Halo 2. This is a pretty simple choice. The number of hours I've spent playing Halo 2 with friends online, if I actually had access to that number, has got to be really scary. Like Michael Jackson scary. The game just doesn't get old. Easily the best first person shooter of all time, and a contender for best multiplayer game ever in any genre.

2. Baseball Mogul. The Baseball Mogul series (particularly the 2007 version) is incredibly addictive for anyone who's ever wanted to be a general manager of a baseball team. Another game that simply does not ever get old. From grabbing a critical piece of a playoff run at the trade deadline, to adding a team option or a player option for a 5th year to a big contract to a marquee player in order to get the contract negotiated, to finding out that when you signed Randy Johnson, he went and taught a couple of your double-A players his slider and made them better ... the game is really easy to grasp and hard to turn off.

3. Civilization 4. Again, a game that doesn't get old (which is a theme, cause I'm on a desert island for forever!) and is a total masterpiece. The strategy behind whether you try to win through sheer might, or try to take over the world through economic strategy or diplomatic tactics, along with the completely customizable set of game conditions, provides for infinitely many ways to play the game. The whole franchise is awesome, but Civ 4 really moves this series closer than ever to perfection.

4. The Final Fantasy series. I'm cheating here by taking an entire series instead of one game, but what a series of games we're talking about. The epic, timeless stories that these games weave have always been what has made me such a fan of them, but the gameplay on top of the story is what makes them accessible to such a large number of people across the world. Anyone who has ever completed a Final Fantasy game understands what I'm talking about here. They are definitely coming with me to this island!

5. SimCity / Metal Marines / ActRaiser / Super Mario World. Again, I'm cheating (sue me), but I've got to take all of them. These were my four favorite games (by far) on the SNES, and while most people are familiar with the first one and last one, Metal Marines and ActRaiser were two lesser-known games that I played the hell out of when I was younger. Forget that the graphics are dated with all the PS11's and XBox 36,000,000's coming out ... back in the day of Nintendo and Super Nintendo, the graphics weren't what sold games. These games were genuinely unforgettable to play and were extremely creative in how they approached storytelling and often fused different genres together in ways that hadn't been done before.

An honorable mention goes to Brain Age for Nintendo DS. There have been no shortage of people giving me weird looks as I do Sudoku puzzles and the speed-based "100 Simple Math Calculations" mini games on there while I sit on a plane waiting to leave or head back to Nashville. Incredibly fun game with a number of actually useful, intelligent mini-games to play.

Everywhere you turn right now, whether its the business press, popular press, mainstream TV, whatever, they're talking about environmental issues and the importance of taking action in the face of an incredibly hot summer and other visible evidence of global warming. Its been interesting to see an issue that has been muted and ignored for so long finally become credible in what feels like overnight.

Random thought: US education will be that next "overnight" issue of importance sometime over the next 5 years.

Candidate wants to be 'None of the Above'

Interesting idea. And the guy's from Tennessee. Major points for actually taking initiative to do something and try to effect change instead of sitting on the sidelines and just complaining...even despite the futility of it...

iTest registration postcards head out in about 30 days to hit schools right at that critical beginning of school year time. And I'm cutting back on physical mailout material (from those nice, big folders from last year) in order to invest in some online advertising that will go out at about the same time and leading into September.

Seattle managed to pull out a win against the Yankees yesterday. Gil Meche has really turned a corner in his development and might be a legitimate #2 starter behind Felix Hernandez. Assuming Felix keeps progressing back to that dominant starter he was a year ago....he's nearly there.

Bush used his first veto of his entire presidency to overrule the stem cell bill?? I would think he'd have something better to use that on than this. I don't particularly want to die to a disease that could've been cured through stem-cell research while these embryos we put up on a pedestal stay intact sitting in some refrigerator somewhere. Thanks, but no thanks. Can we get back to discussing tax reform please, Mr. President?

And in a final note in this blog of random musings, MSNBC reports that more than half of bloggers are under 30 years old. The interconnectivity of our generation is really pretty incredible. For people my age not to be taking advantage of the time we live in, to use any of the various social networking tools at our disposal to express yourself and to stay in communication with friends across the world, is an incredible loss.

And don't give me the complete BS of "I don't want to be out on the internet lest I lose my job." Like I've blogged before, as our technological generation continues to exit school and invades the workforce, that misperception that "social internet presence" = irresponsibility will change completely. On the other hand, I have seen two separate instances of drunk/drug pictures out on the internet costing two different people jobs this week though...putting pictures like that of yourself out on the 'net will probably remain a really stupid thing to do!

Back in Beaufort...here until August 1, at which point I'll be spending a week every month here, but will no longer have an apartment or anything like that. It'll be back to normal in Nashville. Lori has been great about dealing with a potentially difficult situation and I am looking forward to being back for her. I will miss Tri-Command's staff a lot but I will look forward to my trips back down there to visit. Its one of the best groups of people, in terms of both talent and personality, that I've probably ever seen anywhere.

On a lighter note, Xbox Live Arcade has finally announced a release schedule for the rest of the summer, so I can have some additional gameage to play while I'm down here. Frogger was just released today to download for $5 so I've been playing that for a while. Its the way I unwind...now I think I'm going to get back to it.

I am up way later than I should be for a 6:22 AM flight out of Nashville...

I paid a Vandy student to do some computer work for me while I was out of town, the major part of which was to rescue the data from two old computers and combine it on a new 250 GB drive he was to install.

I got the computer back from him today and am completely intrigued by the contents of the old drives, which are probably in the neighborhood of 5-7 years old. I've got plenty of old music, which I have spent serious time importing much of it into my current iTunes setup to get on my iPod. But I also have plenty of MY old music, from dual or 3-track keyboard instrumental pieces to piano+vox 1-minute song ideas to full demos of songs like "Black and White" that are pretty crazy to hear after all these years. It really tells a story, but interestingly, some of it is actually good and might be usable someday in the next album I'll record.

Plenty of old assignments from college were saved, including an interesting WWII report that was the only document I bothered to open while sorting through some of the stuff earlier tonight. An old journal of mine, running through the first years of college, is on there...now THAT was interesting. All my NES and SNES emulated games are there, as well as a full version of the one and only Duke Nukem 3D too. All sorts of Vanderbilt Music Society material is there, as well as mp3s from a Pub "Battle of the Bands" event. VMS not making a compilation CD of that stuff and selling it on the Card is still a huge mistake.

It is pretty insane to look back at that stuff, have it come back so clearly to me where I was then, and then see what's happening now and what God had in store for me. I am MARRIED to my beautiful wife. I have a nice little business with the iTest, as well as a great full-time job. I actually draw a revenue stream (modest as it may be!) from JBF500 royalty payments (as well as my instrumental disc obviously). And I've got my sights set on another album sometime in the next 5 years which might actually display some talent!

Looking back then, it was such a time of uncertainty for me for so many reasons. Family reasons, personal reasons, non-existent only-in-my-head reasons ... all sorts of reasons.

Which of course lead to plenty of excuses. Yeah, lots of excuses for why some things happened and others didn't.

So where I might have had a night of horror by going back and subjecting myself to some of those memories, much like it might be for someone to look back in a high school yearbook decades later...its not really like that at all. Its a feeling of understanding how blessed I am to be here and able to do precisely what it is I want to be doing...understanding how great it is to not take life as it is now for granted, and really seeking to help other people get over the stuff I went through.

Anything I can do to instill that invincible feeling of confidence in other people, I do it. Mainly, convincing people that hey, we live in a world with 6 billion people in it ... someone will ALWAYS have something negative and nasty to say about what you're doing. Someone will always take offense when others figure out how to express themselves and gain that personal identity everyone looks for. If someone's going to disapprove of your actions NO MATTER WHAT, then why not do what you want to do in the brief life you've got?

OK, enough of this late-night rambling! Off to Beaufort tomorrow morning (actually, THIS MORNING!) to begin about a week-and-a-half of work down there, including the TCMH project review. I'll see you later...

Teacherspayteachers.com is a website where teachers post lesson plans, homework assignments, and any other proprietary material they have spent time creating for their classes and can earn money by selling it on the open market. The prices are very reasonable (a WWII history document detailing the entire war was available for $2.00) and it seems to be sprouting up a little community around the economy they've built there.

I have been looking for a platform to use to sell old iTests without incurring physical reproduction costs and this might be it. But I posted about the website here simply because I am fascinated by the determined route the internet is taking toward micropayment items that will payback over a large volume of consumers. One knock on the internet is that while you've got all this free information at your fingertips, the quality sometimes isn't there ... but when you introduce capitalism to the mix, the quality gets restored. So resources like this teacher website above are effectively bridging the gap between readily-available information and accuracy in reporting, moving the internet to a better place than it was 5 years ago.

Separately, you need to hear "Balancing The World," the new major-label debut single by Birmingham native Eliot Morris. John told me about this guy a while back and just today in Beaufort I hear the DJ on the radio talking up this guy in introducing his single. His MySpace page is here and his single is available for purchase on iTunes.