I2k.

Life out in the boonies is great. No neighbors, big yard, plus, you can do whatever the heck you want and nobody knows or cares. But there are a few downsides as well.
One of the worst, is the internet. You can either get satellite internet, or get some weird wireless stuff, that has the download speed of dial up, that even sometimes fails.
We are using a wireless internet provider called I2k.
I2k is better than dial up, but it still never gives us what we pay for, because somewhere in the fine print of our contract, it says that our internet may not always be what we are paying for or something along those lines... We have never gotten what we pay for, which is 1 MB/s
Instead, we get something along the lines of 100 KB. That's on a good day... at 3 am.
On a bad day, we have gotten as worse as 100 bytes per second. on average, we get about 30KB.

Lets think about this. 1 MB is made of 1000 KB, 1 KB is made of 1000 Bytes.

When we get to those low points, I imagine the i2k building housing the internet generator with all of its huge switches that take 3 men to turn on and off gets overloaded, and the generator spits out sparks and flames, setting the building on fire.

Ooh,

Oops, our last post was 20 days ago...

Thats not good.


Sorry about that long delay in posting, Rob and I have been really busy lately.
We've been trying to think of a post, with no luck, plus, our emergency blog post list, is outta juice.
We are going to try and have more posts that are smaller, rather than less posts, that are bigger.

Stay tuned!

Minecraft

There are many video games coming out these days from the big companies, and most of them are the same.
Shooter, Racing, RPG, etc. And sometimes these games have something special about them. Like amazing physics, graphics, effects, or some other thing that no other game has done before; like Spore, for instance. But in the end, most of these games are generally the same. They almost never make a leap of faith toward a new idea that has never been done before. And why would they? They don't want to lose their reputation. Plus, they are making great money! These massive game companies have great reputations, and are pumping out lots of games with a ton of work into them that look great, and are great fun.

But what if we took away the amazing graphics, massive amounts of polygons, amazing physics, great effects.
Wouldn't we get a lame game? NO. Indie developers are making amazing games every day. Pushing the limits in games, exploring new ideas, and so on. Games like Minecraft.

Minecraft is a 3D sandbox game with the classic pixel-y look. In fact, the game is made of blocks. You are 2 blocks tall actually. You are placed in the middle of nowhere, with nothing. Around you is a randomly generated world, infinitely big. Expanding the more you explore. You are forced to chop down trees, mine minerals, fish, hunt, and survive until night; by then you had better have a shelter of some sort, because when the sun sets, Giant Spiders, Skeletons, Creepers, and Zombies come out to ravage the open world. This is generally when you craft your tools for the next day. There are many different things you can make, Transportation devices, mechanisms, weapons, armor, tools, food, and other things. Make your decisions wisely, because what happens is forever because this game saves very often.
There are 2 ways of playing Minecraft, though the maker, Markus Persson (otherwise known as Notch), plans on making more modes. The first mode is creative mode. Where you have no rules or objectives. You are given some blocks, and are free to make what ever you want with it! This mode does not have computer players (Mobs) you can't craft anything, mine anything, hunt anything, etc.- it's for creativity only. You can play this mode for free. The other mode is what I originally described: Survival mode. Your object is simply to survive, explore, mine, and craft.

Minecraft is still in beta, but if you buy it you can play it as it is, and get all future updates for free.
Buy it now and get it 25% off!