Once I got fed up with that I decided to pick Pokemon FireRed back up and continue on with it from where I stopped last year after investing 25+ hours. While history would dictate that I restart after taking this long of a break, the sheer amount of time and also not really needing the background of a story helped with my decision to just continue on. I’m currently either as far as I’ve ever gotten or extremely close to it, and maybe I’ll be able to take the opportunity of my flights next weekend to finally beat a Pokemon game. That sounds like it would be an accomplishment, but then you realize that there are actually four more generations of games afterwards with yet another round coming out this fall.

Now that I’ve been exposed to the development process of Windows though, I feel like it would be extremely odd to have to be like the rest of the world and wait until batch of information is released to know what is coming in the next version. I can guarantee that I wouldn’t be running Windows 8 as my main OS right now, not with some of the bugs I’ve had to deal with at home. I wonder if I’d even like the direction that it’s going in without the internal knowledge of the design decisions?

Should I wish to start playing Diablo 3 while in Dallas I’ve gone ahead and added the key to my Battle.net account, but the server track record hasn’t exactly been stellar since launch. I don’t see a holiday weekend happening within two weeks really making things all that much better. Once my June YotGotYGP game has wrapped, I’ll probably either start playing it instead of my second monthly game or at least do it in parallel with one. Hey, after 12 years, is another month really going to matter all that much?

I realized recently that once again I’m back to a string of not having a completely free/open weekend for a while. Alternating between parties and traveling between now and my return from LA, it looks like most of my free time is going to come on weeknights. Mondays or Tuesdays will be taken up by Ultimate games, and while I don’t have anything else standing on my calendar, there’s usually something that pops up at least on one other night any given week. My social life in high school and college may have been drastically skewed because of sports, but I think I’m doing a fine job of catching up with the rest of the world.

• Tying my record for most posts in a year, 366 of them: “Everybody Loves the Stats” to “Super Impressive All Things Considered”. Say it with me, 2259 total posts life to date (and 2260 if you count today’s). If you’re looking for a quarter of 10K, you’ll be anticipating January 10th coming around.
• Posting streak wise, let’s up it to 1851, shall we? That’s one every day since 4/22/07, and #2000 for it is coming up on October 10th.
• My longest title this year was only 11 words long, but I still had two titles as short as 2 words. For the third straight year my most common count was 5, and this time by a longshot (129, 35.2%). Runners up were 4 (89, 24.3%) and 6 (77, 21.0%).
• Who remembers my blog year resolution from last year? It’s fine if you don’t; it was to make fewer last five minute posts, and guess what? I actually succeeded! This time around only 24% of them (88) fell in that five minute window, my fewest ever of tracking this stat. To get this year started off right, I hope you notice what time this one is being posted at.
• Another new category got added, but it wasn’t anything nearly as interesting as Videos (although there were 16 posts in that category, so it clearly wasn’t a one year wonder). This year my Trips category expanded with Boston due to the real time posting from PAX East, and that combined with my other trips added up to 58 posts away from Seattle (Dallas: 49, Boston: 5, Los Angeles: 4). That’s an extra two weeks in Dallas over last year (and a month and a half total, so I guess I can’t complain about how little I get to travel). My comic count took a beating at the expense of the increased Videos posting though with only 7.

Since my resolution last year was so successful, I feel like I need to make another. Hmmm…I think the blog is due for a visual refresh, but is that really what I want to commit to? WordPress has been amazing for me, so I don’t really want to move away from it. Let’s just say that I’ll do something impressive with the site beyond a visual refresh. Don’t worry, I won’t try to get back into vlogging, but something needs a shakeup.

The insanely awesome Seattle weather will continue for the rest of this week, so while I definitely want to take advantage of that as much as possible, I’m going to have video games fighting me every step of the way. Bioshock 2 (yeah, that game), Paper Mario which can be played now courtesy of my Wii being returned from Nintendo, and Diablo 3 arriving tomorrow all are going to form a perfect storm designed to keep me inside as much as possible. The latter of those three I actually have no issue delaying for a little while, and I still have half a month (minus a trip to Dallas in there) to take care of the first two.

For the next week and a half I actually get to do the job of two PMs, but if you go back a month then someone else on my team did the same thing while I was out, so it’s really just all averaging out. What that does mean though is my calendar should stay full enough to make me need to be in the office every day. Hey, it’s just going to make my Memorial Day vacation that much more appreciated, even if I’m not missing any work because of it.

Two weeks from now I’ll be in Dallas, and then two weeks later I’ll be in LA. Clearly I enjoy traveling, so maybe in my next Microsoft role I need to focus on a position that will let me do that. Well, do it within reason; Sinan gets to travel, but two week trips to China isn’t exactly what I have in mind when I want to go somewhere.

Aside from the plans for this weekend that I’ve already outlined, I think resting and being lazy are the other things at the top of my list. There aren’t any movies I’m aware of that I haven’t seen (and despite how much I love The Avengers, I can hold off on seeing it a third time), and I don’t see any big plans getting made. Now that I’ve formally said that though, who knows what will happen. Well, I guess I can always choose to rest over anything else if I want to, but other things just tend to be so much more fun.

I’m really, really looking forward to the Windows 8 Release Preview to come out since that means it will be a nice supported build for me to upgrade my home desktop to and finally get rid of some of the bugs that have been annoying me since the end of February. We’re encouraged to take home builds throughout our milestones as well to selfhost, and I almost did that with one earlier this week. As it turns out I made the right choice not to though since I would have needed to do a clean install (which would have been expected), but then I’d unexpectedly have needed to do a second clean install between then and the official Release Preview build. Oh well, first week of June, I can wait that long. After all, I’ve figured out how to survive so far.