Every year starting around late September to early October I begin to crave certain flavors that are entrenched in the feelings of the fall season.  Pumpkin, gingerbread, molasses, hearth breads, fresh pies, and butternut squash are just a sampling of the delicious flavors I make a part of my regular menu.

I am an avid Espresso drinker.  Some might say that I have a problem with it while others may cheer me on in my endavours to find excellent espresso drinks made by excellent baristas in the Puget Sound area.  You might as well call me a snob, akin to some of the ‘wine’ snobs out there– except there are some distinct differences in the quality of espresso that even the ‘average’ or ‘unseasoned’ espresso/coffee drinker can taste.  I don’t know the ‘official’ way to rate espresso other than the words I use to describe flavors and how yummy a drink is.

This morning’s arrival of the red holiday cups from Starbucks marks the kick off of the retail madness, the bone chilling weather, the craving to head to the mountains, a lust for tryptophan laden turkey; Here is a review of some of the seasonal drinks made available by coffee houses and cafes in the Seattle area (in no particular order).

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Criterion, now eternally famous for their work with the Burnout series, recently released their prized FPS dubbed by many in the industry as “gun porn”.

Black offers up a healthy dosage of action that, in my best attempts at finding an appropriate simile, is like being in the Diehard movies..

My first impressions of Black were that of “oooh” and “aaaah!”. The graphics are tight, weapon models are gorgeous, levels are decently designed, and the level of action is pretty damn solid.. but every game is bound to have it’s problems.. so let’s get the nasties out of the way first, shall we?

Nasties

Too short!! I won’t give you any indication of how many levels there are (you can find that spoiler info elsewhere), but let’s just say the game is short enough to beat, on normal mode, in a solid day’s worth of playing.. maybe less (so a weekend for the casual gamer).

No Multiplayer!! With such a beautiful game, crisp visuals, and great action.. I’m extremely disappointed that there isn’t even split-screen action let alone internet play.

Okay.. now that that’s out of the way.. the counter point to Black being a short game is that the replay-value is somewhat decent. Beating the game on each difficulty setting requires meeting a set number of ‘objectives’, which are mostly just destroy or collect certain generic items in the game. Completing each mode also unlocks classes of weapon modifiers to make replay very action run-and-gun oriented.

Speaking of run-and-gun, one of Black’s high points is the sheer fun of balls-deep action with tons of enemies around you. It keeps you on your toes and forces you to find appropriate cover, keep moving, use grenades appropriately, and..

There are plenty of items that explode when you shoot at ‘em.. so looking at your surroundings and seeing when to blow something up is a key point to shrink the enemy pool and help stay alive.

Visual effects are top-notch, with particle effects, breakable objects, and explodable objects all looking drippingly sweet. Pair that with the incredible sounds and Black satisfies a media overload.

I must say that while the Normal mode is quite easy for a sesoned gamer.. the Hard mode will most certainly keep you on edge.. There’s also a “Black Ops” mode, which I’m sure is the equivalent to Halo’s Legendary mode in some respects (I have yet to invest the time).

So even though Black is short, it’s worth a play, and a replay.. and maybe a replay after that.

Overall.. I give black a 7.5 out of 10.

The open source development community for Xbox has generated some awesome software. XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) is a perfect solution for home Mp3 and video streaming in the living room.

Over the course of last summer I began to research and harvest all of the information I could about Xbox Modding. Why, you ask, would I want to take the risk of destroying a 300$ piece of hardware? (I bought my Xbox at launch, and it has been worth every penny) Well, the warranty had expired, and I was sick of paying 50$ a pop for games that I wanted to play. Yes, I admit, that I do my fair share of “try before you buy” (I do still buy games I enjoy), but after tinkering around with the different software available in the Xbox mod community, I realize now the modding will come in handy for uses OTHER than pirating software.

I’m planning on moving in with my girlfriend at the beginning of the summer. She already has my HDTV at her place, and the stereo she uses is a boombox unit with a 3-Disc changer. The system puts out enough sound that I don’t feel the need to drop money into a better system for the living room, though I was concerned that we needed a better way of playing music. Since I’m a Mp3 aficionado, my first idea was to build a “TV” computer with the sole purpose of streaming music from my server to play on the stereo.

Thanks to a friend’s tip, I no longer have to dump the money into a new computer to stream music. “XboxMediaCenter” (XBMC) is an open source project in the mod community that allows an Xbox to stream music and movies over networked computers. In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves, “Whoa.”

I found the compiled files, did some research regarding the custom protocols for file-sharing to the Xbox, and downloaded a handy file server application called “ccXgui“. After a little manual tweaking of the settings files on my PC, I uploaded XBMC to my Xbox. I was amazed at the solid feel of the program. I swear I could’ve just installed a real third party licensed application to my Xbox!

Streaming music was ridiculously easy. XBMC reads Winamp playlists, though I’m not sure of other playlist formats. There was a definite time delay as the Xbox processed the large amount of text involved with a huge directory listing, but it didn’t choke and worked flawlessly after it loaded.

I then became curious and busted out a few DivX films. I used several different films that were encoded with different codecs. Using a Divx 3.11 alpha, a Divx 4, and a XviD encoded movie I tested the video streaming. Amazing! I was pleased to see the developers took the time to integrate DVD remote functionality as well as in-movie DVD menus for fast forwarding, rewinding, key-frame skipping, progress, time, etc. Each movie played perfectly. Even the XviD movie that ran “so-so” on my main desktop PC ran smooth ‘like buttah’ via the Xbox.

There are some other features for XBMC that are handy too, such as the ability to view pictures. This will be handy for when ‘rents or people come over whom want to see pictures; we don’t have to cram around a PC monitor ;D There is also a “weather” option, which is *very* cool. Granted there is a Weather Channel on TV, but this option in XBMC is really useful since you can tell it where you live and it physically grabs the data from Weather.com for your city and displays today’s weather, as well as a 4-day forecast! Instant weather report =D

I’m very pleased with what I’m able to do with my Xbox now. I highly recommend anyone looking for home entertainment Mp3 and video solutions to consider buying an Xbox and investing the time to research and mod it. There are also rumors floating about the next major development: Xbox as a “TiVo” type DVR device (don’t ask me how that will work). If you already have an Xbox, hell, what are you waiting for?? Just be sure to read, read, read about what you’re doing and what options you have. The more you know, the easier it is.