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Photo Friday has snuck up on me once again, and I'll have to say that this one is really fun. Speaking of relaxation, I think this guy is about as relaxed as one can get.

It has been a couple of weeks since I have thrown my hat into the PhotoFriday arena, and I knew when I saw this week's challenge that I would have a photo that fit the bill. This shot was taken just outside of Priddis heading up a driveway of an absolutely gorgeous country home.

I like video games. I've been a PC gamers for years, and in the effort to simplify my life, I moved over to the console side to spend more time playing video games and less time fixing my gaming rig. After dabbling in the area for a while, I found one of the most addicting positive feedback re-enforcements that have ever been placed into electronic gaming: Achievements.

The basic premise is that game developers set up milestones, and when you reach said milestone you have earned the Achievement. The achievement is slotted onto your online profile, and the alloted points for the achievement is added onto your GamerScore. Your friends, your enemies and random people from the internet can view the achievements you have, your total GamerScore, and compare it to their own profile. Very quickly you will find people making the illogical leap, that if a person has a higher GamerScore than you, they are a better gamer.

This is not the case.

Digging deeper you will find out that having a higher GamerScore means you probably have played more games. A person playing 10 games earning 100 points in each will have the exact same GamerScore as someone who squeezed all 1000 points (the maximum for a retail game without an expansion) out of their game. Some of the people with the massive 10k+ GamerScores have reached them by renting (or perhaps purchasing, I don't know) every game they can get their hands on and superficially playing to unlock a few achievements. Through the law of high numbers, they are able to push their GamerScore to the atmosphere. This is the reason that comparing GamerScores is relatively futile.

On the other hand, if you compare, per game, achievements you can get a much better understanding of a person's ability within that game. Take, for instance, the '7 day survivor' achievement for Dead Rising. An individual who has this achievement has to have completed the 72 Hour Mode with the best possible ending, then went on to wrap Over Time mode, finally unlocking Infinite Mode and playing Infinite Mode for a whopping 7 in game days (14 hours). At this point, I believe this person has a good solid grasp on Dead Rising, but the fruits of his labour yielded him only 20 GamerPoints. Compare this achievement to some that can be found in other games, such as COD2's achievement for finishing basic training (25 points). Congratulations, you've made it though a tutorial, good job!

This reasoning is why GamerScore has taken a back seat in my world to the basic list of achievements you have acquired. You may only have a 1000 GamerScore, but if the only game you have played is Oblivion and you have every one of the 50 original achievements, my hat is off to you.

Now, it's time to get some more achievements.

Unless you haven't touched any mainstream news in the last two days, you've heard about the tragedy at Virginia Tech. While the tragedy is a great one, the largest ever perpetrated by a single person in the US, it makes me a little sick at all the people that are already jumping up onto their bandwagons to push their cause. The Gun control people didn't even wait until details of the shooter were released, before they started hammering on the VA gun control laws (You only need to be 12 years old to purchase a rifle in Virgina, BTW). The other side of the debate jumped right back saying that banning guns at all is the reason that the victims weren't able to defend themselves by being armed at the time. Jack Thompson had his statement out, within 12 hours, that video games were the cause (The gamers are screwed if they find an XBox at his place with GTA in the disk tray). The US State Department is already blowing it's horn about the fact that he was an immigrant, and that tighter screening is required.

I feel even more sorry for the families of the victims whose loved ones are being used as leverage for people's agendas. Nobody denies that it was a senseless tragedy, but very few seem to be willing to truly examine the cause of why that young man spent weeks planning out a mass murder. Everyone has an opinion, I know I have my share of mine, and I hope we can all keep them to ourselves as families and friends are healing their emotional wounds.

Where is the love?

Part I: here
Part II: here

Saturday was forcasting some nice weather, but there wasn't a sign of it in Calgary. Furthermore, being the nut bag I can sometimes be, I agreed to a 'Crazy Canuck' camping trip for Easter Weekend. For the first camping trip in of the year, we decided on a nice'n easy car camping trip out at Lundbreck Falls. We started out of town about mid day. We were socked in, but as we drove further south cracks in the cloud cover could be spotted. When we finally reached our destination, the sky was dominated by blue and a few lazy clouds couldn't do anything to stop the sun.

We set up camp, and then went on a couple of missions to get some firewood, before settling down for some dinner. It was a nice evening, and we stoked up the fire to fight off the evening chills. Jeremy and Jen were great company, although I have never seen anyone burn wood at the rate that they do.

After the sun went down, Jen pulled out The Camp Cooker and started making grill cheese sandwiches. I have never before had a campfire cooked cheese sandwich before, but it was delicious. I know that I will find one of these bad boys before heading out on my next car camping adventure. We had our fill of cheese and bread and before long, we were long into the night. We crept into our layers of protection from the cold for the night, and fell asleep.

The morning started with some sort of a goose fight on the opposite side of the river. I was the last to drag my lazy self out of the tent and was greeted by a nice cup of coffee. We lazed about the river for the morning, and we generally put off the tear down of our camp. The day was determined to be amazing as the sun shone down on us, and the sky remained blue. I got so much sun I even got a sunburn. A great deal of time was spent taking photographs before packing up and heading out to Frank's Slide for a little sight seeing. The giant rocks are pretty neat, but it only takes a couple minutes to reach the 'Yup, it's a bunch of rocks' point and we climbed back into the car and enjoyed a nice, windows down, drive back to Calgary. It was the perfect ending to a crazy weekend.