I’m tired, and have less than an hour to go at work, which is a very good thing. Today was a frustrating day at work, because I spent almost three hours troubleshooting what eventually turned out to be a bad processor.
Enough about work – today, I met with my mom and we met my wife at P. F. Chang’s for lunch. I just love the food there, it’s so delicious. We didn’t have much left to take home, although I’m looking forward to the piece of the great wall of chocolate. So good. We had a great lunch: the food was good, I love the atmosphere, and we had a great conversation. My mom brought me my birthday card from my grandma (note: My birthday was February 1st, and I haven’t been down to the property where my parents and grandparents live since before it – that’s sad, but that’s a whole other story), and there was twenty dollars.
The reason that the twenty dollars excited me was that earlier, I had read a glowing review of Pok�mon Sapphire and Ruby earlier today, and was anxious to get a new Game Boy Advance game, so I had my mom take me to the mall quickly after lunch, and she picked up the price difference for the most part, so I paid six dollars out of pocket for a new Game Boy Advance game.
Yeah, I like Pokémon. Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be a kid’s game. However, I find it is also an interesting role-playing game with a unique fighting mechanic. Plus, with the two-hundred Pokémon to catch, there’s a lot of game to explore. The review over at GameSpy says that, if one were to invest the time to complete all of the side quests and explore the game, they could easily invest over one-hundred hours. I really enjoyed the Red version a number of years ago, and that was on the plain Game Boy, not even Game Boy Color at the time, so I’m sure I’ll enjoy this one. Of course, when the first Pokémon was out, the Game Boy Color had finally come out and I had one, so it wasn’t awful to look at, but it wasn’t meant to be in shining color either, so it just was easier on the eyes than the original Game Boy.
Also, I just got done reading this wonderful book by Michael Crichton. It’s his latest work, entitled Prey. It really sparked my interest in Artificial Life and neural networking, so now maybe I have something to develop a thesis on for my graduate studies. The book is scary, and at some points near the end reminded me of another work of his, Airframe, but is overall a wonderful book. I read it too quickly though, now I need something else to read. I have a copy of The Summons by John Grisham that I got at Christmas and haven’t read yet, so maybe I’ll pick that up.
Or, I’ll go and catch ‘em all.