Sabin's Blog

Okay yesterday we hit up the fair again, this time to see Weird Al. It was awesome, of course. It was raining during the entire concert (the concert was in an outdoor grandstand), and it completely didn't matter.

I was surprised at one part, usually the Star Wars songs come at the end, I thought. They make up a great encore. But not this time, they were in the middle. At the end was Albuquerque. All like 11 minutes of it, with two minutes extra in the middle there where Al came up with new donut flavors. You have to know the song to understand...

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today we went to dinner at our favorite restaurant that we found last year. Nishino. We had the Exclusive Omakase. Oh. My. Gosh. A flavor explosion. For 75$ (you can get the normal omakase for 60$, but I mean come on, this was exclusive) they put together an 8 course meal for you consisting of the chef's choice from all over the menu. It was fantastic.

Mikel and I's favorite was the Miso marinated black broiled cod. It was like butter. So tender, so juicy, so wonderful. Honorable mention goes to the succulent salmon in the sashimi salad and the ice cream thing that I can't describe.

Tomorrow the food adventure continues. A couple days ago we hit up Kidd Valley for a good burger, and tomorrow we'll compare that to Red Mill. Yummy burgers for the win.

I'm vacationing in Seattle again this year. Spending a week with Mikel (Firemyst) before going to PAX.

I arrived on Saturday evening and after a good night's sleep we headed out to the Evergreen State Fair (named after Washington being the Evergreen State, it's not actually the State Fair---I know, confusing).

Blah blah blah, fair, booths, vendors, rides, good food. Here's the pics. LOOK AT THE CUTE CHILD. HER NAME IS VIVIAN AND SHE WILL RUN THIS WORLD.

Those of you who interact with me on a regular basis know I've been battling with Persona 3 for...a long time. This game has been not ending and not ending and still going and getting put off and getting picked up and so on since like at least last September if not earlier. So it makes me quite happy to announce, that finally.

Persona 3 is completed.

Now, I just have to get through "The Answer" expansion disc....it's never going to end.

Oh and no, I have no interest at this time in the upcoming Persona 4. No more > 100 hour RPGs for me. I have better things to do.

Just a quick update to folks that I'm out at E3 2008 all this week. I'm putting up podcasts almost every day, so you can check for those here: http://www.rpgamer.com/rpgcast

So many games, so many appointments, so much to post. :) That said, I'm really having fun using my new Nikon D60 and Zoom H4 to pick up pictures and audio to post. It's a great time and I hope everyone is enjoying RPGamer's coverage.

So I got up early this morning so I could wait in a line. Yes, the line for the iPhone 3G. So yeah, I got one, white 16GB. Everyone else seemed to want the black one, so I got the white just to stand out that much more.

Anyway, figured I live in freaking Madison, WI, so while there are surely some iPhone fanatics, it wouldn't be something I have to worry about. So I set my alarm for 6:30 am, showered and drove down to the mall to get in line. I was probably behind like a hundred people or something when I arrived near 7:00AM. Whatever, we waited and had fun talking about apple and iphones and stuff till 8 AM when the doors open and they slowly started taking people into the store.

And then took more people in.

And then took more in.

Half an hour later, no one had left the store yet...Eventually the first guy came out and it was clear something was wrong. The iTunes activation servers were not working. Ouch. But that wasn't all, the AT&T activation purchasing servers, where they set your plan and sign you up for a contract before checking you out, were going abysmally slow. Eventually, they had to give upon the iTunes activation and just tell people to activate the phone at home. But even so, the AT&T/purchasing part of the process was still taking over 20 minutes per person... and that was only after they decided what they wanted and got their credit checked if they were a new account. So I got to wait and wait and wait until around 10:30AM, when I was finally able to get into the store.

Of course, around that exact moment, the AT&T servers started working properly again, and the iTunes activation started working again. So the guy who checked me out praised me for being the fastest guy to get through the process so far (it helped that I had a current iPhone, apparently upgrading from one iPhone to the other is a simpler process), I was done in like 10 minutes.

I felt bad for being so late for work, but by the time it was clear I'd be late, there were a couple hundred people behind me in line, so I knew I either had to tough it out or wait until sometime next week for a new shipment of phones to arrive... So far, everyone at work has been pretty understanding. But if someone isn't, I'll just have to flash the new phone at them and hope it distracts them long enough to change the topic.