James Chamberlin

Here are the pictures I promised the other day:

The young man is explaining some design ideas for a ride to a man was told is a new employee, when in fact he’s actually the company’s CEO. In this instance, the CEO is Joel Manby, President and CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment. I believe this was at Silver Dollar City, a park I haven’t been to since I was a child.

I watched a little bit of tonight’s new episode of the reality series Undercover Boss on CBS and was shocked by what I saw. One of the employees of an amusement park showed another employee some ideas he had for a ride and he didn’t pull out a sheet of paper and pen. He pulled out his laptop and on it was RollerCoaster Tycoon.

I haven’t played that game in a long time. Even when I was running RCT Station, I only played the game for a few years. I haven’t had it installed or playing in at least three years. I couldn’t help but be shocked and somewhat overjoyed to see that old game show up on television.

I’ll have screenshots up in the morning.

A week has passed since my sale of DVDs and I’m glad to see each and every one of them has sold. I had 17 auctions and I look to bring in a little over $400 from them all. I could use the money right now. Now I just need to get the winners to pay…

Kudos to eBay for lowering listing prices lately. They’ve had 3-4 sales in the last two months and it really helps. I find myself more likely to list something if I can do either for free or for a reduced price. eBay still gets you when something sells, of course, but every penny I can save is a win for me.

I put up over 20 DVDs today in order to get rid of stuff I wasn’t watching and to bring in some much needed money.

I haven’t had any success with my job search. The job with IGN is still there, but with the economy the way it is, my responsibilities and paycheck have been cut back substantially. I envy those of you with full-time jobs.

I don’t usually blog about movies, but I figured I’d share some quick opinions on the latest box office hit, Avatar. I’ve liked James Cameron’s past work, but I just couldn’t get behind Avatar.

The promos never impressed me and after seeing the movie, this movie reminded me of what’s wrong with the video game industry. So much emphasis is put into stunning graphics that the producers don’t put any work on the story. Almost every reasonably successful PC game now is some pointless first person shooter and the success of Cameron’s latest film reminded me of it.

There’s no question that Avatar looked stunning, but it doesn’t make up for a relatively mediocre story. The love story was worse than most made-for-TV garbage. The militaristic approach to dealing with a pesky a native population story was so cliche-ridden I wanted to vomit.

I lost interest in the film a lot earlier than I suppose I should have. There should be more to a movie than pretty graphics.

Thanks to my Tivo, I haven’t had to watch nearly as many commercials as I used to. The Super Bowl is another story however. While there were only a couple of decent ones, there’s one that I can’t get out of my head lately. It’s from Old Spice and I love it.

I haven’t used a piece of Apple hardware since I was a child and the local school had Apple IIe computers. I’ve yet to shell out cash for an iPod, iPhone, or any of their computers. I was holding out some hope that Apple’s tablet would be something that would make me run out to buy.

As news trickled in this afternoon, my heart sank in disappointment. The iPad is merely a supersized iPod Touch with the iPhone OS.

I saw some of the video demos and everything looked sharp. It was very responsive, but one of the glaring issues I saw was the fact that you couldn’t do much with it. There’s no multitasking. It immediately reminded me of Windows netbooks which restrict you on the number of programs you can run at once.

I had hoped the iPad was going to be a full-fledged laptop, shoved into a tablet form, but the functionality just doesn’t appear to be there and I therefore will remain Apple-free on the hardware side of thing. The only Apple on my PC is iTunes.

It was nice to have some time away from writing for IGN. It’s always good to get together with family around Christmas. Now I’m fighting off a little cold which I came down with a few days ago. I don’t get sick very often. I’m usually pretty good about eating a lot of nutritious foods, but I’ve gotten lazy about that lately and it caught up with me.

There’s not much else to report. I’ve stopped updating TV-Reviewed and am trying to find work outside of the house. It’s not easy. I’ve applied to a few jobs and I haven’t heard back. It’s rough finding a job when there are so many others trying to do the same thing. There are a lot of people competing for just a handful of jobs right now.

The U.S. is covered with a big weather system this week. For me, it’s resulted in a fair amount of snow. I’d guestimate our accumulation to be about 5 inches so far and we’ve got another day to go, so I’m guessing that amount will be almost doubled when all is said and done.

The only thing that might keep the number low is the rain. The forecast for tonight is mainly drizzle, so I’d imagine we’ll have a nice layer of ice on top of the snow come morning, followed by a few more inches of fresh powder tomorrow.

I haven’t been out of the house tonight, but I haven’t heard a snowplow yet. I imagine that if any are being run, it’s only on the main road downtown and the side streets are being left untouched until the storm has passed. This is how South Beloit typically handles it… really poorly, if you ask me.

One of my last entries before disappearing without a trace for a while was about SPAM and when I decided to return to my lolely little blog, I was greeted with some four hundred SPAM alerts.

Once hesitant about Akismet, I have nothing but good things to say about it. It’s turned out to be a lifesaver. I no longer need to babysit the AdminCP of WordPress. Akismet takes care of it all for me.