Summer Semester

So, most everyone should know that I have to take one summer class so that I can graduate this August. And the class that I am taking is French 101. Last week was the first week of classes. I have class every day of the week. Lecture is Monday - Friday, an extra lecture on Tuesday, and then a lab on Friday (why do you need to go to lab for French, I'm still not sure...)

My first class in French was pretty crazy. Our professor is from an African country and has a strong accent. Most of the time that he talked was in French, which didn't help me because I didn't know any French, and I'm not much of a "learn through immersion" person. He doesn't seem to explain things or give definitions much, which would be nice. The very first class he asked us to say our name and where we were from, but he didn't tell us how to say so in French, which I thought was ridiculous, but the first student he asked knew how to, so everyone seemed to just repeat what he said.

Since then it's gotten a little better, but I'm still not really keen on the class. Plus French is just a crazy language. They like to put letters in their words that they don't even say (mainly the letter 'T' that I've seen so far).

I just hope that the semester goes by fast and I get a good grade. Besides, all I need to graduate is get a 'C' in the class, so hopefully, I should be good to go!

One Whole Year

It's kind of hard to believe that Heaven and I have been married for a year now. We just celebrated our one year anniversary this past Saturday. It almost doesn't seem like it has been that long. So much has already happened in this one year. The biggest being having a baby :) But it has been a great year.

Saturday morning I took Heaven (and Noelani) out to eat breakfast at IHOP. She has been craving it lately, so I decided to do that instead of making breakfast (also, we didn't have any bacon...)

After breakfast, we went down to the Indy Zoo. We had a fun time there and it was Noelani's first trip to the Indy Zoo, but she slept through most of it. When we were at the baboon exhibit, one of the females walked up to a male and made some noise at him. She turned around and the male got on top of her and did his thing. It was hilarious because there were all these kids around, and when the baboons started doing it all the kids started yelling and saying "Ewwww!!". It made it even more hilarious because when the baboons finished the male sat down in front of the female and had her start picking insects out of his fur.

After the zoo, we came back to Lafayette and went to the theatre where we watched Up. It was a cute movie and we both liked it. But then again, it was a Pixar movie, so what do you expect? After watching Up, we went out to dinner at Outback. We had a really good waiter and he gave us free dessert because we were celebrating our one year anniversary, so that was awesome.

So one year down, and many more to follow. We're looking forward to the future as we live our lives together and raise a family. This one has been a good one, and we wait to see what else is in store for us as the years go on.

E3

For those of you who are big gamers, you probably have heard of E3. For those of you who haven't, E3 stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo. It is a huge conference/expo for video games. This is a very big time for video game developers to show off some of the new games & systems that they are planning to release.

This year was a huge year for Microsoft. The biggest thing that I was impressed with was Project Natal. Project Natal uses a camera that captures movement for the Xbox 360, but instead of using a controller like the Wii does, it captures the movement of the user's body. When you play a game, all you have to do is stand in front of the camera and move to play! You are the controller! You can check out a video of it here.

Another thing that Project Natal can do is interact with the user. One thing they had was what is being called "Milo". You can check out the video of it here. It boggles my mind how this can be done. There doesn't seem to be any lag between interaction with the user and "Milo". Also how you can "send" something into the game.

Some of the other things that Natal can do is voice and facial recognition. If your Xbox 360 is turned on and you walk into the room, the camera will see you and automatically log you into your Xbox Live account by using the facial recognition. If you want to see the commercial for Project Natal you can click here.

For those of you who are somewhat skeptic if this is real and that it works as well as it did in the videos, there have been several companies who have been able to test out Natal and they said that it worked just as well as it did in the demos at E3.

Microsoft also announced some new games for the Xbox 360. Some of these include The Beatles Rock Band, a new Tony Hawk game, and Left for Dead 2.

If you would like to watch that whole Press Conference for Microsoft, click here. I will warn you, it is almost 2 hours long, so if you have some free time, go ahead and watch it all. From that page, you can also watch the Nintendo & Sony Press Conferences.

Some new toys to play with

As I mentioned two posts ago, Lafayette/West Lafayette was having a liquidation sale last weekend. We decided to check it out Friday after I got off work. We got there and found out that they charged $7 a person just to get in to look at everything. OK, not very cool, but we wanted to look at everything they had, so we went ahead and paid to get in.

They had quite a bit of decent stuff. There were shoes, clothes, HDTVs, perfumes, computers, and much more. We checked out the computers they had, but most everything they were selling was too old for my taste. And the laptops that they did have that were new were pretty expensive.

There were a couple of good things that we did find though. We bought a couple's set of watches for $20. Somehow my old watch's glass got broken, so that worked out pretty well. We also bought a digital photo frame for $40 and Heaven got 5 bras for $15. And lastly, the best thing that we got, is a katana. I've been wanting one for a while and I finally got one! I was pretty happy.

And for all of you who don't believe me, when the zombie apocalypse occurs, my katana is going to come in extremely handy. So don't come crawling to me expecting me to help protect you, because I'll just say 'I told you so'.