In other news, the PATV episode today was about the Child’s Play golf tournament and dinner last year, both events that I worked. You’ve seen the videos of PAX, you’ve seen the video of what Enforcers are like, so it seems only fair that I let you round out the video experience by seeing what the third component of my Penny Arcade volunteer life is like. Go watch, my readers.

The presentation went well today; as always there were more people than what Microsoft was anticipating it seemed like. You’d think that by now they should just plan on 300 people at presentations and reuse whatever is left over at the end. Oh well, I’m not the one who gets to make those decisions. In fact, my only real decision to make for the rest of the trip is the one in the first paragraph as aside from work, it’s the primary candidate for consuming the most of my next 40 or so hours.

As I’d think would be obvious, this trip is for recruiting, but it isn’t nearly to the scale of the fall one. Literally the only thing I have going on is a presentation at 5:30 tomorrow, and that’s it. I fly back on Saturday because while my normal plan would be Sunday (and was in fact that for 16 hours or so), there’s this little thing called the Super Bowl happening that I sort of want to watch. So yeah, heading back on a day that I’d otherwise just hanging around here rather than being on a plane getting updates from the pilot.

This trip is also the reason why I had to adjust my February YotGotYGP game; I decided that since a 360 is down here and hooked up, it might be worth my while for it to be a game that I could actually start. In fact, this is a game that I was planning on starting down here last Christmas, but Fable didn’t get played quite effectively enough for that to happen, and it’s been languishing on my shelves ever since. Never fear though, for now is the time to play it…

YotGotYGP Game for February 2012: Mass Effect 2

I’ve successfully set up and trained my parents on how to use Kinect (perhaps “trained” is too strong of a word…had them demonstrate they’re not completely incompetent with it?), so that should take care of the last thing that was on my checklist to do down here. We’ll see if Kinect Sports: Season Two gets any more use than Tiger Woods did as far as games being played go. Eventually I’m going to find a game they like, even if it does take numerous attempts.

Let’s see, my upcoming post schedule: tomorrow will be an early post since I don’t have faith that I’ll get to Seattle at 9:00 like I’m currently supposed to, New Year’s Eve will be scheduled since no one really needs an 8:00 AM post from me talking about how comfortable my bed was, New Year’s Day will be another scheduled post in which I reveal my grand plan, and then finally on the 2nd you’ll get another normal, evening post to read. How does that sound, hmmm? I think I should have an interesting enough collection of media to provide that the lack of any timely news shouldn’t cause anyone to get bored reading my posts. Right, like that’s why anyone reads these to begin with…

Trying to use up all my free Amazon Video money is much more difficult than it would seem because I’ve already rented pretty much all the movies I care about seeing (or, you know, I own them). In fact one of the first movies I rented expires tomorrow, so I’ll be watching Rio before I go to bed. Maybe at this point I should just rent the movies I don’t really even care about seeing, but if I get super bored in the next month, at least they’ll be there as an option.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as a movie actually stuck very close to the plot of the book. So close, in fact, that the one thing they ended up changing (for reasons unknown to me) caused me a great deal of confusion until I later figured out exactly what the deal was. Why they changed that one aspect of the story is beyond me; if you’re going to keep everything else so similar, why throw off the part of the audience who has read the book with a change like that? My score: 8/10.

My dad and I went out and bought a TV to mount in the wall on his study today as a way to retire the streaming TV setup I’ve had rigged up for years. The fact that the chipset fan on that computer died and wasn’t booting up properly was definitely a factor in going that route, so I now just am left with dealing how to replace that machine. I’ve contemplated doing a WHS upgrade in Seattle for a long time, and it seems to make sense to go ahead and do that in the near future so that my existing WHS machine can come be the replacement for down here. I know, it’s so horrible that I have to buy new computer parts. Let the research begin?

My game choice of the day was actually Orcs Must Die!, a game that I first learned about back at PAX East that I hadn’t ever gotten around to playing yet. Fine, I was also motivated to play it because of one of the achievements for the Steam sale/contest, but I would have gotten around to it eventually! The same may not be able to be said for the plethora of other games I’ve picked up through Steam while on sales, but all it takes is the promise of free stuff to get my attention.

I do have my priority of family over games straight and as such did not play Old Republic any today. With much less family stuff on the docket for tomorrow, even though it’s Christmas, the probability is higher but not a given. I’d still really like to beat Assassin’s Creed 2 this trip, but that’s just going to require tearing me away from my computer and Kindle for a much larger time period than has been possible so far.