Just a quick note to everyone that I’m doing testing on a Thesis skin, so if things look wonky on Signs of Sanity that’s the reason.

On another note, regular – such as it is - posting will hopefully pick up again in the next couple days.

Here’s where things currently stand:

Total Miles: 447.2
Runs: 135
Average Pace: 9’50″
Longest Distance: 3.1 miles
Total Duration: 73:21:19
Calories: 53825

This week was a slow ramp-up week in terms of the running. I was able to run Monday through Friday and clock 3.1 miles each run without any significant re-aggravation of the injury so I’m quite happy and will ramp up some more next week.

I became the recipient of a six-pound bag of Gummy Bears this week and that, unfortunately, pretty much killed my diet until I developed enough backbone to regift the remainder of the candy. With that in mind, I ended the week at almost exactly 160 pounds.

Here’s where things currently stand:

Total Miles: 431.7
Runs: 130
Average Pace: 9′ 50″
Longest Distance This Week: 3.1 miles
Total Duration: 70:46:33
Calories: 52011

This week was a light week in terms of running – only three runs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. After last week’s rest week I wanted to ramp things up slowly this week to avoid re-injuring my leg.

On the weight front, I clocked in at 158.8 this morning so I’m happy that I’ve been able to maintain my sub-160 goal. Admittedly, it was really tough with all the Thanksgiving leftovers still piled in the fridge.

In an earlier article I detailed my thoughts about the SWTOR beta now that the NDA’s been lifted for testers.

To recap, I feel that it’s a mixed bag with promise but ultimately will compete with MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online rather than the seemingly unassailable World of Warcraft.

I don’t know what it was – perhaps the amount and specificity of my bug reports – but I was surprised when my second beta invitation arrived.

The next beta that I was invited to was for the entirety of Thanksgiving weekend, which made sense from a capacity testing viewpoint but struck me as being inconvenient for the testers.

Luckily, we don’t travel for the holidays so I had the entire window open to test to my heart’s content. And that’s when something happened that I don’t think bodes well for SWTOR in the long-term: I just couldn’t build up enough interest to actually play the game at all.

Think about that for a moment: you’ve spent years and millions of dollars to create this game and after playing it for a good bit in the last test the only feeling your investment generated in me was apathy.

When Monday rolled around and I received the “thanks for testing this weekend” email from Bioware, I sat down and tried to figure out why I just didn’t feel like playing SWTOR much less playing it for free. After all, it’s not like I disliked the game.

In the end, I concluded that I had already seen the essential elements of what SWTOR has to offer and that that was enough to sate my appetite.

I honestly feel bad because I want the game to succeed. The MMO genre needs more than just Blizzard doing the thinking and innovating because Bioware’s got some really great ideas.

Just my $0.02.

I‘ve had a bit of time on my hands lately, so I’ve been watching a couple movies.

When I decided to finally give Netflix the boot, I was left without easy access to new releases (if I didn’t want to buy them, which I don’t.)  At first I thought of giving Blockbuster a go and gave the local store my first, and only, visit and it was a fricking ghost town.

A week or so ago, though, I was in the local supermarket when I noticed they had installed a Redbox.  I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the service and have been using them quite a bit.

Thor – I wrote about it when it first came out, but I really enjoyed it the second time around.  Just a fun, silly movie that knows not to take itself too seriously.

Batman:  Year One – I’m old enough to have read the original comic mini-series when it was initially published, and I have to say that:

• It’s probably the best of the DC animated movies.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.
• The source material has lost its impact and grittiness because it’s basically set the tone for everything Batman since.
• If you’re not aware that the comic mini-series predated Batman Begins by decades, you’re likely to be bored because you’ll think it’s just a rehash of stretches of the Nolan movie rather than the other way around.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – Please stop making these movies.  I really enjoyed the first Pirates, thought the second and third could have been good but were hamstrung by bad scripts and overly complex stories, but the fourth one is just plain stupid.  Bad I could take, overly complex I could understand, but this one was just lazy and uninspired.  Add to that the fact that Jack Sparrow is absolutely a one-trick pony of a character and the whole movie is a mess.

Now that Bioware has lifted the NDA on their still-in-beta Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, testers are now free to talk about their impressions.

Of the two sides, Jedi and Sith, I played exclusively on the Sith side of things simply because the Jedi in the The Old Republic era are rather boring to me.

Here are some thoughts off the top of my head, in no specific order:

I’m not going to go into any storyline-specific details because I’m sure there are a lot of folks who want to play through it cold, but I will say this: when the quests are good they’re great, but otherwise they’re pretty meh.

I’ll limit my comments on the feel of the game to my experiences on Korriban, but the game work feels remarkably antiseptic and empty. For a world that has 10,000+ years of history and habitation, it just doesn’t feel like it. World of Warcraft might have a static game world – less so since the advent of phasing – but it does feel feel lived it and, in places, gritty. Korriban feels like a museum that’s pretending to be a ruined world, if that makes sense.

The combat just doesn’t feel right. I was continually reminded of the combat in Lord of the Rings Online in that it really was just button-pushing without a sense of power or feedback other than numbers flashing on the screen. There a lot of room for improvement in this aspect.

The graphics are, by and large, quite good, but they begin to stumble when it comes to character animation and things fall over completely when it comes to the UI. As with combat, the UI needs a lot of attention because it’s not intuitive and a lot of the icons are simply indecipherable.

Other random thoughts:

- The Sith leaders are all fat. I don’t know if it was a graphics glitch but they were all morbidly obese, which did lend a certain amount of unintended humor. One of the Sith leaders, who becomes your mentor, has an Old Republic version of armor like Darth Vader’s but it just looks silly when the guy’s 300 pounds to begin with.

- The lightsabers feel more like wiffle-ball bats in combat rather than the doomsday weapons they actually are.

- On Korriban at least, there’s a huge amount of back-and-forth running across the same place for the first fifteen levels or so. A better implementation of fast travel is really needed.

- Quest givers are damn near impossible to find. They have this little gear-looking thing over their head but it blends in with everything else all too easily. The bright yellow ! and ? that World of Warcraft used over NPC heads on the maps really was a good idea and is sorely needed here.

It’s not all downside, though. Bioware did get a couple of things really, really right:

- The voice acting really is very good and does a fantastic job of making the quests feel immersive.

- Their approach to instances is quite unique and works well. In short, you have group instances and solo, storyline-driven instances and the entrances to the former are colored red and the latter are colored green. It makes finding them much easier than WoW, for instance, and is one of those nice quality-of-life improvements the genre needs.

- The character creation process is really quite enjoyable. Normally, I’ll just accept a preset look, grab a class and go, but I found myself spending about an hour tweaking my crazy hot, purple-haired, one-eyed Sith chick.

All in all, my experience with Star Wars: The Old Republic in beta was that it’s a mixed bag as-is, with some great ideas and a lot of things that need work. It’s a beta so it deserves to be cut a lot of slack as MMOs are always works in progress throughout their lifecycles. That said, any talk of it being a WOW-killer strikes me as being rather silly. If I had to bet, I’m guessing that it’ll end up taking its place alongside Lord of the Rings Online – a good game with a mid-size but devoted audience.

Here’s where things currently stand:

Total Miles: 422.4
Runs: 127
Average Pace: 9:50
Longest Distance: 7.75 miles
Total Duration: 69:13:42
Calories: 50,937

I’m kind of disappointed that I only managed to run two times this week. Following my long run on Monday my right shin and calf were really rather sore and it only got worse following the short run on Tuesday so I decided to work on an elliptical machine on Wednesday, take Thursday off, and finish up on Friday back on the elliptical.

On the weight front, I clocked in at 159.1 this morning so I’m happy that I’ve been able to maintain my sub-160 range even with the reduced workout schedule.

Let me start off by saying a couple things:

1.) I’m not going to say a word about the plotlines in Skyrim other than to say that the ones I’ve played through so far are really quite good and I don’t want to spoil anything for you.

2.) If you’re a fan of the Elder Scrolls series – and in particular Morrowind and Oblivion – then I’d say that you should stop reading now and just go buy the game. It’s easily the best in the series so far.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s a smattering of my initial impressions after about twenty hours into the game:

• In typical Elder Scrolls fashion the graphics are at their best when there are wide vistas in view but they occasionally trip over themselves when you’re close up to objects. That said, the graphics are quite excellent and head-and-shoulders over those in Oblivion – in particular the NPC graphics are much improved and they’ve lost the waxy sheen they had in past games.
• The voice acting is somewhat hit-or-miss in terms of quality, but if I had a complaint it’s that – at least on my PC – the dialog volume always seems to be way too low and hard to hear. In a future patch Bethesda should turn off background conversations when you’re in a conversation. More often than not they’ll be louder than the person you’re speaking to.
• The user interface of the game clearly shows the concessions made for console portability. I tried playing it with a mouse and keyboard for the first hour or so, but ended up playing the game with an XBox 360 controller and it worked much better. The Elder Scrolls has never been known for elegant interfaces and Skyrim doesn’t really buck the trend in that regard.
• The depth, breadth, and sheer volume of the quests in the game is nearly staggering. You’ll be hard-pressed to run out of things to do.
• The size of the game world is nearly ridiculously big. Morrowind was big, Oblivion was big, but Skyrim really takes the cake. Fast travel will become your friend after you’ve explored an area to death. Pro tip: fast travel is available in the world map once you’ve discovered a location. Choose the place you want to go, set it as a location, and you’ll be prompted for fast travel.

Skyrim made a great initial first impression on me and it’s only gotten better as I’ve gotten farther into the game. After twenty hours I’m enjoying every second, have only explored a fraction of Skyrim, and have only done about three or four of the main storyline quests. Skyrim’s been worth every penny.

Here’s where things currently stand:

Total Miles: 411.5
Runs: 125
Average Pace: 9:50
Longest Distance: 7.50
Total Duration: 67:25:22
Calories: 49,665

On the weight front, I clocked in at 159.1 this morning so I’m happy that I’ve been able to maintain my weight below 160.

For the last couple days my knees have been unusually sore so I decided to take today off and give myself a three-day rest weekend. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal for my long run on Monday – hoping to shoot for 7.75 miles.

I put up a couple good articles over on ADtecHD this week that might be of interest to folks:

How to add reminders to new Outlook emails
How to share iCloud calendars

There’s lot of other good content over there if you’re interested in leveraging technology to best aid with ADHD.