Happy 4th Birthday, Megan

Where does the time go? I was awoken this morning to a smiling little face standing next to my side of the bed informing me that, "It's my birthday, daddy!" It's so hard to believe it's already been four years since I first held her, watching her turn her head to the sound of my voice, a sound she already knew from the months of hearing my voice while inside her mother. I remember holding her one morning a few months later as I was getting ready for work and realizing she was smiling for the first time as I looked down, a moment that will remain one of my favorite memories in this life. It's strange watching myself type this, the guy who never wanted children, who never thought he'd be a father, who thought it best to avoid that responsibility lest I fail as abjectly as my own father. But, now, I couldn't imagine life without my children. There's an Old Testament piece of scripture that reads something along the lines of, "Happy is the man whose quiver is full," and I believe there's a lot of truth within those words. Unfortunately for Megan, her birthday party (complete with Mickey Mouse cake and Dora the Explorer-based gifts) had to be postponed until next Saturday because my cousin, Josh, is getting married today. We've got a babysitter lined up for Ian so that Melissa and I can spend time together with Megan today; we both feel a little guilty that we're not celebrating her birthday on the day of, but Megan hasn't appeared to mind very much at her age. And I'm sure she'll have a great time at her party next weekend.

Frank and I saw The Transformers its opening night. He was surprised when I called from work asking if he wanted to see it because he didn't think I would be interested. How do you go wrong with a Michael Bay film based on a cartoon of transforming giant robots created to sell a line of children's toys? Especially if you cast Megan Fox as the generic yet slightly bad girl from the other side of the tracks lust interest? Perhaps by interspersing too-abrupt action sequences with very long, slow sections peppered with John Torturro's wretched acting and held together by a plot that's as thin as week-old soap film on a moldy shower curtain. And despite these complaints, the movie could've still been salvaged had it contain solid action sequences, but unfortunately it didn't. The combat scenes were sparse, disjointed, and poorly choreographed.

I changed guilds in LOTRO since the Qt3 kinship was of little use for groups or high-end content such as raiding. My little hobbit hunter is now 48th level and well on his way for completing the final class quests and legendary skills. I ordered a copy of DiRT, a new racing game with terrific graphics, from Amazon and plan to include it in my benchmarks suite at SimHQ for graphics board testing since I'm hurting for applications that aren't CPU-limited or -bound in their performance characteristics. I've also recently added Silent Hunter 4 (Wolves of the Pacific) and plan on replacing GRAW 1 with its sequel once the latter is released in a few weeks. And speaking of which, I saw a video of GRAW 2 showing off its PhysX support that really made me want to to buy one of AGEIA's add-in physics boards. But I held off in case I end up having to buy a new PSU for the multi-GPU series; my aging 550W Enermax unit just isn't going to cut it with dual, high-end DX10 boards coming out these days. And I'd like more than one game I'm interested in playing to support the PhysX board before paying $135 or so for it. Plus, with the introduction of mainstream-priced quad-core CPUs later this year, I think it fairly safe to write that developers interested in advanced physics are going to target the larger market rather than the assumedly small number of users out there with PhysX boards. Multi-core processors are, without doubt, the future of CPU designs, so it's likely that AGEIA missed its window of opportunity by a year or so. And while GlQuake made the Voodoo 1 a must-have buy back in early 1997, I just don't see any game today, even a AAA title such as Unreal 3, having the influence and saturation of id Software's seminal 3D shooter.