Earlier this week the first full expansion for Oblivion was released.  To say that Oblivion was one of my favorite games last year would be an understatement.  I've spent over 170 hours playing the game - it's one of my favorite games of all time.  I had trouble actually finding a copy of the expansion.  I went to a few stores, and checked availability online but still the game eluded me.  Yesterday I was finally able to find a copy. 

The game is amazing.  I was impressed with Oblivion when I first played it, but Shivering Isles just blows me away.  The world is so weird and fantastic looking.  The first area you enter reminded me a lot of Morrowind with giant mushroom trees and huge roots and stretch out from the ground.  

The isles are the personal realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric prince of madness.  The first quest you embark on to actually get into the isles was more interesting than most of the quests I found in Oblivion.  And all of the NPCs have their own personal madness about them which makes conversations much more interesting and varied. 

After a lackluster third season Battlestar Galactica pulled off a fantastic season finale and has pulled me right back in again.

I, along with Erin, Fraser and Justin, felt that the third season was losing it's thunder.  The occupation on New Caprica ended, a lot of people escaped and then nothing really happened.  Sure, Gaius Baltar was on a Cylon ship for a while, and he eventually returned to Galactica but for the duration of the season there wasn't a whole lot going on.  They found another marker on the way to Earth and still it felt like the plot wasn't moving forward very much.  All season the writers built up the question of who the final five Cylons were.  

During season 2 I never put much stock in it.  I just assumed they were holding off on revealing more and as they needed more Cylons they'd introduce them.  But with the revelation that the existing 7 models didn't themselves know who the final five were the mystery became all the more enticing.   And yet, much like Lost, nothing was revealed.

But the season finale changed all that.  Gaius Baltar was put on trial, and a verdict was reached.  As if that weren't enough, there was a giant revelation regarding the final five Cylons.  It was a fantastic episode and now it's got me impatiently waiting for the start of 2008 when the fourth (and possibly last) season of BSG starts.

Historically I've always changed the banner image and the site colours whenever a new season started.  I like to keep the site looking fresh.

This spring I decided to make a different change.  Rather than follow my old theme of having a banner with my face on the left, Erin's on the right and the words, "Marc & Erin" in the center with a background representing whatever season it was, I've decided to implement random header images.

What you'll see now is a randomly chosen image as the top banner.  It's from a selection of images I've created specifically for it, but the advantage for me is that I can add and remove from that selection very easily, and it won't require me to change anything else on the site.  

I think the banners I'm using now work a lot better.  They're not as "fabricated", they're more candid and they just show images of Erin and I together.  Most of them are from the wedding, but as we get more pictures of the two of us, the number of images will grow. 

If you're curious to see what the past banners looked like then read on.  I've included them in the rest of this post. 

Back in December I wrote a few thoughts about a game demo I'd played of Runaway.  At the time the only demo available was in French.  It was good practice for me and after about 5 minutes of playing the French side of my brain woke up and my comprehension improved enough that I could understand what was going on.  What struck me however was how beautiful the game looked and how great the sound and voice acting was.

Runaway has finally been released in Canada, in an English iteration (the French version was released sometime in December).  It's an adventure game in every traditional sense.  You click on locations to walk your character around, pick up and interact with objects to solve puzzles and you go through dialog trees with other characters to learn clues to move forward.  

The story is interesting, and although the characters hail from a previous game (Runaway: A Road Adventure), playing the first game is not necessary for Dream of the Turtle and if you are curious about what happened there is a short cinematic you can watch where Brian (the protagonist) explains the events of the first game.

You begin this game by tossing your girlfriend Gina out a crashing plane (talk about your relationship problems).  When you pick yourself up from the wreckage you must find you way across the island and try to get Gina who has been kidnapped by the US military who have overrun the island looking for an alien artifact.  

It took me a while to put together, and I had to film walking through our condo about six times before I could get the shakes under control but the video is finally online.  I've also included some videos of our old apartment and what our place looked like when we first took possession.  The video is 3:00 in length and I've sped up the parts where I walk up the stairs.  

I did this so that I could share with my family and friends who are out of town what our new place looks like.  You get a pretty good idea from the video.  If you're curious head on over to the Movies section of our page and look under  Home Videos -> New Home to see it.  A word of caution to those without high-speed internet.  I used a higher bit rate to encode the video so that the picture quality would be good.  As a result the file is around 40MB and could take a little bit to start streaming or stream properly. 

Alternatively you can read on to see an embedded version (at a lower resolution but the same file size) and other pictures of what the main floor looks like. 

I've been pretty slow and lazy about doing this, but on Sunday after cleaning up I finally did a walk through of our house with my dad's video camera.  I've taken it off the camera and onto my PC so all that's left is for me to edit it an encode it.  

What do I have to edit?  Well the video is over eight minutes long.  I wanted to be thorough and film everything I could, but I think I may be pushing people's patience.  So I'll have to speed up parts of the film to make it shorter.  I don't think anyone is really all the interested in seeing me walk slowly up the stairs.  Everyone just wants to see the rooms and get a general idea of the layout.  So I'll try and cut it to be shorter.  

I also made a little film of Chloe dancing to the Enterprise theme.  Poor thing puts up with so much from me.   

In the meantime there are existing videos of our house in our Movies section, under Home Videos -> Marc & Erin.  These are quicker walk throughs of the house in various stages of unpacking.  I need to re-encode these as well since the quality isn't as good as I'd like it.  Also, the music I chose for them is cheesy as hell.  If you want to torture your eyes and ears though feel free.  I won't stop you.

Click the image for a full sized version. 

I'd never really tested out the syndication that came packaged along with Joomla (the software the powers my site).  It wasn't until I started pulling feeds of MarcandErin.com into Facebook that I saw just how poor those feeds were handled.  None of the html which is built into each of these articles was being maintained.  Although that isn't so much of a problem on it's own, it does lead to some confusion when I use paragraphs, or reference a picture that is in the article, but wouldn't display in the feed.

So I've upgraded the program that handles my syndication.  Now it feeds the HTML into my RSS .   I can now have links in my articles, as well as proper formatting including paragraphs, bold and italics etc.  

And best of all, I can now treat everyone to pictures without having to upload them to Facebook.  So enjoy the first thing I see when I get out of the bathroom every morning.  Our dogs asleep in their crate.

Well it's been a few weeks since Erin last saw the eye doctor.  If you recall I had said that her first surgery had gone very well and she could see fine.  Unfortunately, although her surgery had gone well, her eyes were so bad to begin with that they didn't fully recover and her eye sight wasn't perfect.  Additionally, her left eye developed micro-cysts which made her eyesight cloudy.  

The doctor prescribed a drop for her left eye which has healed the cysts, and he performed a second surgery on her right eye to correct her vision.  So it was time to wear the protective goggles again.

However this time her right eye had even more trouble healing.  There is a bit of skin which grows over the retina and this bit of skin wasn't sitting properly.  It's supposed to sit in place and the doctor described hers as floating around as though it were a throw-rug on a hardwood floor.  He waited a few (frustrating) days to see if it would seat properly.  At this time Erin's eye sight in her right eye was worse than 20/200.  Yikes!  

Apparently Shih Tzu's are one of the world's 14 ancient dog breeds who's DNA differs the least from that of a wolf.  Who knew our little girl was such a calculating killer inside.