Matthew Supert

Time for another video game update. First up is my thoughts on the Ouya. So far, I have to say that it is a Beta of a 1.0 product. I see the potential, but there isn't much there yet. I have to say that the SNES emulators on it are pretty good and you know what is a good game? The Secret of Mana. I wanted to play that game so bad when I was probably 10 years old and I unfortunately never got it back in the. I must have spent a good four or five hours last week playing through that. I am not sort of stuck at what is known as one of the harder boss fights with some sort of fire breathing tiger. Man that guy is hard. 

The other game I am working on right now is Dragon's Dogma, which ironically enough is another Japanese RPG. I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised by this one, even though it got high praise from the Giantbomb crew on their podcast. It has a little bit of a Monster Hunter vibe going to it. It is difficult, but not brutally punishing. Stick to the story elements early on and it is very satisfying. My only major complaint however is that the Japanese tropes and mannerisms come out too much in the characters. You of course are playing the silent protagonist and the facial expressions they use to try and convey emotion for the character just seem silly. 

The pawn system is really cool though when it is shared online with the world. I love looking at how other people designed their pawns.

Alright, so those who know me know that I am a gamer. Last year I was a backer of the kickstarter for the Ouya project. The Ouya is a small, very cheap open source gaming platform built on Android. The whole concept is actually pretty cool. This week I received my kickstarter Ouya and decided to take some photos. 

From a hardware perspective it is actually a pretty nice looking little box. The build quality seems pretty good and it is really easy to get access to the components. The control is nicely ergonomic and the face plates for the batters are held in place by magnets that attach to the screws on the chassis of the controller internals. A really interesting design choice which I think is brilliant. 

Overall the software at this point is still pretty rough. This is a beta of a v1.0 production. The Ouya interface is pretty bare bones and a bit laggy at times. You can see a lot of elements of the underlying android mobile interface if you delve too deep and there really aren't too many games for it at this point. I really hope it succeeds in the long run though. The idea of having the open platform that is cheap to develop on for students and whatever is really promising. It really connects with some of the DIY nature you see coming out of the Make people with the 3D printers and Arduino, etc. 

Last weekend my Dad, brother and I went up to to Wisconsin near the Middleton area to do some fly fishing near Black Earth Creek. We are terrible at fly fishing, but doing these little adventures is always a lot of fun. Black Earth Creek is a lot closer than the streams we tried to hit up last year and it was only about a 2-3 hour drive since it is just west of Wisconsin. Overall our experience was a lot better. The creek area is much more accessible than the creeks up near Viroqua and despite having more people overall on the water, it was wooded enough where you didn't really see that many people. 

We (my brother) caught one fish this year, which is fine, but I would definitely hit this place up again. There is also an excellent fly shop in the adjacent town of Cross Plans called "On the Creek". They sort of open up whenever they feel like it, but the guy working the shop was super helpful for giving us some tips on places to start. They also have an excellent map on their wall of the entire creek area with information on parking locations and access points. Highly recommended. 

It has taken me forever to get this stuff uploaded. This week has been a nightmare, but last weekend I had a wonderful time doing my first Slimy Crud in Wisconsin. It was a blast......Well it was once we got past our first hiccup. The day started out with us all meeting at the Belvidere Oasis off of I-90. Not more than five minutes into our ride one of our riders crashed on an off ramp. What turned out to be an annoying inconvenience turned into something much worse when a state trooper showed up and immediately was a jack-ass right out the gate. 

The crash also unfortunately resulted in our group getting split up at first, since about half of us didn't see the crash and kept on riding. This led to one of our other riders (Hans) and I getting split up from the group and partially getting lost. We saw some people double back to try and meet up, but it was a divided highway. Hans and I ended up continuing to ride for a while, but we were not sure what the turn off was. This ended up in a rather funny incident with us trying to find out where people were and us following a random guy who was headed towards Galena. 

In the end though we found our group, literally as we were about to turn around and the ride ended up being one of the better ones I have been on for a while. Great roads up in Wisconsin, some good people and a fun bite to eat at the end. 

Went for a nice ride today and decided to just sort of head south on 55 and then turn off to head west somewhere. I sort of randomly found myself ambling just south of the Des Plaines river. There is a nice bit of scenic riding through here and i was pleasantly surprised.

After a few hours of riding i came upon route 23 and thought to myself that looked awfully familiar. After taking a pit stop and then checking my phone, I found that I was right near Starved Rock. Who would have thought.

Apparently there are two nuclear power stations in this area and i even happened upon a wind farm on my way back that I had to check out. Riding through the wind farm was actually really cool, despite the roads just being straight. You can see in my map that I zigzagged through that for about 20 minutes.

The Dresden Cooling Lake also had a really interesting covered bridge going over it that at first had me thinking that I stumbled onto some sort of private access road or something.

One of the tedious chores that every guy has to go through during is life is shaving. This task is usually tedious at best and down right painful at its worst. For most of my life I experienced the later with my face basically being torn up every time I shaved. A couple of years ago I discovered "traditional" wet shaving using a double edge (DE) safety razor with a brush and soap/cream. From that point forward shaving for me improved drastically. 

I think one of the biggest problems that most men have with shaving comes right down to the tools. Everyone's face and hair is different and unfortunately we live in a "one size fits all" world. The sheer beauty of DE wet shaving is that the combination of tools is nearly endless to find the fit that is right for you. You can mix and match razors with blades with brushes with soaps and then creams and all find the right thing that fits the sensitivity of your face. 

For the past four years or so I have been utilizing a Parker butterfly razor and while it has severed me well it still occasionally gave me irritation. A couple of weeks ago I decided to upgrade, and upgrade big time. I purchased an iKon stainless steel DE razor with both a bar and an open comb end. The razor was expensive at $150, but it was machined stainless steel. Was it extravagant? Yes, in the end I think it was worth the purchase. I find the open comb side of the razor really works well for my face, since I tend to have thicker hair. The bar side on the other hand works well for fine points during the shave. For the amount of shaving that a man does during his life I suppose it isn't unreasonable to spend some quality money on a product you use 3-4 times a week. 

So I sold my Kawasaki ZR-7 this evening to an eastern european fellow who looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. I have a little bit of sadness at the sale, but to be honest I am not nearly as torn about it as I thought I was going to be. For months now, over the winter I had been debating whether to keep my first motorcycle; the motorcycle that sort of saved my sanity during one of the toughest emotional periods of my entire life. 

My wife in her infinite wisdom sort of convinced me that it probably made sense to sell it. I was always choosing to ride my new BMW over the Kawi whenever I went out and really the girl deserves better justice than to sit in my garage. The first ten years of her life were spent mostly in some guy's garage. She needed better.

So I threw the bike up on Craigslist and had a few takers. All said and done I think the bike probably made its way to a good home. The guy who bought it seemed extremely excited about the bike. I could just hear the excitement in his voice and while his friends who came along didn't seem quite so excited I could sort of tell that this guy found the type of bike that fit his personality. I did also get a vibe however that he may not have actually had a motorcycle license since we ended up chatting about the MSF courses. 

Regardless though I think the bike has found a good home. Someone who will put some miles on her. I have an empty spot in my garage now that is is very much motorcycle sized.........

So I picked up Bioshock Infinite this weekend and sort of ravenously devoured it in the course of a couple of days. Columbia is a really cool world and I remembered why I loved the original Bioshock as much as I did. I don't know how to actually write this without giving away any spoilers to the game. Bioshock is one of those amazing stories where you finish it and your mind is racing, trying to process everything that just happened. I need to talk to someone about it, to digest it and chew on all that has happened. 

Columbia is also a really cool world that Irrational created. It was nice to see an active, lived in world this time around as opposed to the already destroyed one of the original Bioshock. 

It has been a while since a video game excited and I think I will need to go back and play this again. 

So unfortunate news to an extent. Posterous.com is going offline as of April 30th. It is really too bad because after years of trying to find the perfect blogging software/site for me I finally found it in Posterous last year. I went through everything from Blogger, to Wordpress to Tumblr and beyond. For whatever reason none of them really gelled with me. Blogger and Wordpress are great, but they are just a bit too "much" for what I am trying to do. I am not trying to run a fully featured blog here. I am instead just trying to jot my own little ideas down here and there on the web. 

Tumblr I found to be "ok", but I wasn't really into the reblogging thing and they were constantly going down when I was using them. I also found their custom domain setup very poor a couple of years ago. So along came Posterous which fit the bill perfectly for me. A simply feature blogging site to get my info online. Commenting was easy and it has some good integration. Thankfully Posthaven has been setup in its place and to be honest I am at this point more than willing to pay $5 a month for the service and the convenience. At this point I am much more wanting to pay a little bit for the services I use to the get the stability and reliability I want out of them. 

Here's to hoping it works out for the best.