Justin Thorn

Last weekend Lauren and I were faced with the challenge of entertaining ourselves on a tight budget with nothing to do in Greenville, dreary weather, and the desire to get out of the house and do something for a while. We decided to drive to the Streets of Southpoint in Durham. Its only 90 minutes away from Greenville. We got there around 3PM in the afternoon. We enjoyed window shopping for a couple hours since we couldn’t spend any money. Of course no trip to Southpoint is complete without a visit to the Apple Store. While there we played around with the new MacBook Pro laptops with the new iSight camera. That is what that colorful picture above is all about. It was taken with the camera using their built in PhotoBooth software which allows you to take funny pictures. It was a good time. I fell in love with the laptop but $1999 price tag brought me back to my harsh reality quickly. Lauren was a bit more conservative with her planned purchases. She was eyeing a $90 piece of Photoshop software for her growing digital photography hobby! Near the Apple Store is also The Sharper Image store which is another must stop location. I got quickly attached to a $900 massage chair with built in iPod dock and built in speakers. Talk about relaxing. It took Lauren 5 or 10 minutes to get me out of that thing. I know I have expensive taste…I can’t help it. Good thing I didn’t set in the massaging recliners. Later that evening we met some of Lauren’s family for a nice italian dinner at a restaurant across the street from the mall.

I recently dug through the closet in my bedroom to drag out my Super Nintendo for some classic oldskool gaming. I guess after all the stories I posted last month regarding Nintendo’s 20th birthday of the original NES made me feel all nostalgic. Plus sometimes it is nice just to pickup and play a quick game for fun. On today’s consoles the games are so big you really need a couple hours on your hands to get into a game. Anyhow over the years I had sold off all my old Nintendo games leaving me with just Super Mario Bros. This week I picked up some classics cheap on eBay to build back up my SNES collection. Contra III, Mario Kart, Mario All Stars, Donkey Kong Country, etc… The other night I was over at Lauren’s playing Super Mario World when I noticed her wild and crazy orange tabby cat Milo taking a great interest in the TV. His eyes were glued to the TV as his little head followed Mario all around the screen. Eventually he got right up in front of the TV plotting his attack. Suddenly he makes his move as he stretches up at the screen in a failed attempt to catch Mario with his fuzzy little paw. He did this for a minute or so and gave up in frustration. Mario left unscathed. Well not quite I think I might have accidentally killed him once when Milo was blocking my view of the screen.

If this is the first time back to the site in a while Im sure you will notice a ton of changes to the design. As I mentioned in the post below I felt it was time for a drastic change to the design. I should mention if you are still using Internet Explorer to browse this site it is going to look like crap. IE is an old, outdated, dead browser. Download Firefox and you this site will look much nicer. Your whole browsing experience will be nicer. Anyhow take the time to look through the site and let me know what you think. I have spent a couple weeks designing this in my head before coding it. That has taken about a week to get everything updated just the way I wanted. Every single page on the site has been completely updated with new features. Some areas like the News section have been updated with dynamic RSS content which automatically updates it with the most current content without the need for my direct interaction. This makes it much easier to keep things relevant and fresh content here without a lot of extra effort. I feel good about the design and hope you really enjoy it. It will probably stay this way for a long time until I grow bored and need to think of something new again.