Happy New Year!
I'm shocked to see over a month has gone by since my last entry. I've been dealing with some tech issues that I love to populate this blog with, but (correctly) the holidays took precedence and I've had a wonderful few weeks with my family. Hope each of you has enjoyed time with your loved ones as well.
Now then, where did I leave off? I have to admit I went on a real tech-related bender the last quarter of last year. I got some really cool stuff.
Last October I went to MLG Orlando with my oldest gaming buddy - I'll just use his handle: 'Essobee.' Essobee and I 'met' virtually when the Xbox live service first launched. I can't even remember how I came across him, but he and a group were playing Ghost Recon regularly and I joined in. I was never very good at FPS games (or any other game, for that matter) but always enjoyed them. We ended up going through just about every shooter made for the Xbox over the next couple of years. I have to admit my favorite times were still when some guys would come over to my apartment with a couple xbox's and we'd hook up 3 tvs and play Halo late into the night. But I digress...
Essobee eventually talked me into the City of Heroes MMORPG and I built my first gaming pc for $500. I played Warcraft 3, City of Heroes, Command and Conquer Generals, Starcraft (the original) and eventually Battlefield 1942. Wow - that was a great game. When Battlefield 2 came out Essobee and I joined a website that organized teams with a military hierarchy and had battles which lasted all day two days a week. They tracked victories and armies would gain or lose territories based on the results. Pretty cool stuff. Somehow Essobee and I lost touch for a few years, probably me getting married, buying a house and having a son had something to do with it.
Then in summer of 2010 Essobee sent me a note and said 'hey, did you know that Starcraft 2 came out?' As it turned out, my laptop can play the game and we were right back at it having a blast. I set up a forum (Essobee jokes that I just can't help but organize the hell out of things) and dragged my brother and some friends into the world of Starcraft and we've been having a lot of fun with it for well over a year now. Even after the cost of a gaming pc, gaming remains a relatively inexpensive hobby when you consider it to other activities. A movie costs at least $10 a person for 2 hours of entertainment (if you are lucky and the movie is actually entertaining). A video game costs $60 and you might play it four to ten hours a week for a year or longer.
Essobee has always been the king of cool stuff, and I've always been responsible with money to the point of being cheap. He'd build and awesome gaming pc, I'd build the cheapest one I could that would still play the games I wanted to play. I was jealous, but my wife and I didn't have two dimes to rub together and I could never justify getting something better than good enough. I was always jealous of the high end stuff Essobee would buy - not in a bad way - I was happy for him but certainly hoped for a day when I could afford the same.
Well over the past few years a combination of opportunity, hard work and good decisions has gotten my wife and I to the point where we do a little better than just getting by. We're very grateful for this, and while we are not materialistic, we enjoy the opportunity to splurge on something special we'll enjoy once in awhile. It's off-topic but I'll share my opinion on spending money: there is nothing at all wrong with buying nice stuff you'll enjoy, as long as you don't expect it to make you happy and you can pay cash for it. This is the rule we live by, and it serves us very well. That's it for the public service announcement.
As I said, Essobee has always been the king of cool stuff, and last summer he told me he was building a new pc. Let me just say that if NASA needs a little extra computing power, they call Essobee now. When he turns his machine on, 17% of the apartments in his complex lose power. It's a beast. I don't remember if I asked what he was doing with his 'old' pc or if he offered first, but I ended up buying it from him. To call it his old pc is kind of a joke - it's still better than 90% of the gaming pc's on the market. He built it himself, it's done really, really well and he gave me a fantastic deal on it - I'll always appreciate that. I think he even said at one point it was worth it to him to know it was going to a good home. Befriend a nerd, folks - we're pretty cool people.
For once in my life, instead of having a machine just barely good enough to play the game I was enjoying so much, I now had an awesome rig that could not only play the game, but allow me to stream on twitch.tv which is something I love to do. In fact I loved this pc so much that the floodgates started to open a bit here. I'm not going to lie - with each new cool thing I got, I would think of just one more cool thing that would make everything perfect - until I thought of the next thing... I didn't put our family in the poor-house or anything, but when Christmas rolled around I told my wife I was pretty well set.
To begin at the beginning we have the gaming pc: Intel Core I7 920, 6 GB ram and a Nvidia GTX 285. Soon I realized that it was no good to have a fancy gaming pc but use my old wireless logitech mouse, so I got a Razer DeathAdder - this is a great mouse by the way. Having a great pc and mouse was terrific, but looking at the game on my old 19" monitor just didn't seem right, so I found a deal on a Viewsonic 24" monitor. Of course I didn't want my old monitor to go to waste, so I set that up as a second monitor for chat windows and such while I'm in game on the main screen. As I said, a lot of the reason I wanted a big rig was to stream, so I got a great HD webcam from logitech - I highly recommend this one. This webcam captures crystal clear video in almost any lighting condition - I can't say enough about it.
Now things get really good. The office I was using for my gaming shares a wall with our bedroom. If you're married and you play video games, you already know where this one's going. As a married man, your prime gaming time is after your spouse goes to sleep - unless your gaming is waking your spouse up. Then you are what we call 'royally screwed.' Somehow we managed to argue about things for a few months before realizing the solution was in our bonus room - a finished attic above the living room on the other side of the house. Can I get an AMEN? This room has been used as our storage and it took me the better part of two days to carve out a niche for myself and still I couldn't be any happier.
I call it, of course, the Man Cave.
I went to Staples and got a simple and solid glass top desk which was extra-wide so it has plenty of room for the keyboard and the mouse and the dual monitor setup. It was on sale for $100, from $200 I think. I ordered a Tempur-pedic office chair, and let me just say it's the most comfortable thing I've ever sat on. Then the sales guy, who was refreshingly helpful, tells me they have a close-out on a dorm-room size refrigerator. How could I say no to the kid? It's very large and cost only $70. That fridge is stocked full of lime flavored sparkling water, organic cola, and Celcius energy drinks. The only thing I'm missing up there is a toilet. Oh - I also got a great deal on an air-conditioner for the window - because the room is a finished attic it gets hot as Hades up there in the summer, but this unit keeps it very comfortable. It even has a supplemental heater built in, though I haven't needed that yet. I'm surprised to find that the computer pretty well heats up the area around the desk enough.
Throw in a set of Michigan State Spartan coasters, and by October last year I had a fully-functioning Man Cave and was happy as can be. Which brings me back to where I started - my trip to MLG Orlando with Essobee. To do this trip justice I'll have to take the time to write another entry dedicated to it, it was a great experience. For now the only reason I bring it up is that while we were there Essobee discovered - and purchased - one more thing that I learned I just couldn't live without.
Just about everyone of the 'FPS-kids' walking around MLG had on a particular headset around their neck that I've never seen before. We stopped and asked one group about them and the kids told us they were made by Astro, sold online and at a booth at MLG events, and that the quality was outstanding. We went and took a look at the booth and the headsets, while they were very high-end, were priced at $250 which I never dreamed of spending on a headset.
The event started on Friday, and by Saturday afternoon Essobee had purchased a pair. Nevermind he already had an outstanding headset at home - these were better. As for me, I had a plantronics headset I had purchased maybe 7 years ago, and suddenly I'm thinking that for all the stuff I upgraded, I still had the same old headset... Lucky for me my wife doesn't mind me spending money on stupid guy stuff and we had just purchased her a set of furniture for the family room so the headset for me seemed like a fair trade. I got the green light and Sunday purchased my MLG Edition Astro A40 Audio System.
I'm not going to pretend that $220 for a headset isn't stupid - but this thing sounds absolutely amazing. It has Dolby Digital 7.1 Surround Sound and I hear things in Starcraft that I had no idea were there. The Siege Tank sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. Astro wisely packages this product very well so help justify the price - it came with every kind of cord you need to hook it up a variety of different ways, including a fibre optic cable which is quite expensive. It also came with a rugged travel case and they threw in a set of vanity tags (switchable ear plates for looks only). The mixamp has a great feature which allows you to independently control game volume and team chat volume. Furthermore, the mixamp works with the Xbox as well so now I can watch movies late at night without disturbing the house. In fact, I later ordered a second mixamp to leave connected to the Xbox downstairs just for this reason. This stuff is expensive, but it's well worth it in my opinion.
For those of you concerned about the economy, you can see I've certainly done my fair share to get us back on track. I probably should feel guilty about my spending spree but I love my equipment and enjoy it almost every day which makes it seem pretty worth it. Sadly, I'm not done yet - I have a few more fun tech purchases I've made recently but this has run on long enough so those will be a story for another day.
