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ntroduced to myself via the Majornelson podcast is a photo stream from Flickr, now owned by Yahoo, that displays the most interesting photos of the day.  At first i was a little skeptical.  Being an artist myself I thought who has the right to decide what's interesting or not.  Then I looked at the photos for a few minutes.  Then minutes turned into hour upon hours of just staring at beautifully shot scenes, portraits, women and men.  I've never seen such a collection of...interestingness. 

Hit the link for the Flickr Interestingness feed.

**The photo above is from Ozgun ERDEM's stream.

By now everyone has heard of the end song from the hit game Portal entitled "Still Alive" written by Jonathan Coulton.  I've been a big fan of Coulton's ever since he was on the Dragonpage shows.  Take a look at the video courtesy of

If you love music and have a good collection then Audiosurf is right up your alley.  Audiosurf is a game where you choose the tracks from your own music collection and load them into the game.  Then Audiosurf figures out where to position colorful blocks that you have to collect in groups of three or more to ultimately give you the highest score possible.  Basically you move your ship across five lanes of an electronic highway and collect from one to five colorful blocks and group them into shapes consisting of three or more.  The faster you can link those colors together, the more rewarding.  Think of it as a musical Bejeweled times ten. 

The great thing about Audiosurf is that the tracks of songs are virtually endless.  You can pretty much load any song in your library into the game although I have had a few hiccups with DRM'ed songs. 

Another cool feature is that Audiosurf supports an achievement system rewarding players for high scores and special combos.  Along with achievements are worldwide, statewide, and friends list leaderboards that are sure to keep players competing to be the best at their music collection.

Overall I highly recommend this song for anyone who is a music enthusiast or likes pick up and play games.  But be careful.  This game can suck you in and before you know it three hours have passed.  You can find Audiosurf on Steam or at www.audio-surf.com. for $9.95.  The demo allows you to play four of your own songs and a limited time playing built in tracks.

It's no big secret that I'm a console gamer first and foremost till the day I die...or can afford a Falcon Northwest PC.  But recently I've taken the dive, officially, into PC gaming by buying my first PC game since Flight Simulator 98.  The game I bought was Shadowrun and although I've taken some flak for buying Shadowrun from some friends of mine, I bought it for specific reasons: I miss the fun of it, I can play with people on my Live friends list, and it was $20.00 at a closing Comp USA.

So I pop in the disc and begin installing Shadowrun on my laptop.  Everything seems to be going fine then about 15 minutes later when I'm trying to port my gaming profile over to the laptop, Shadowrun shuts down and is no longer able to open.  Already getting frustrated, I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it multiple times until finally after many cokes and deep breaths, woooosaah, Shadowrun worked. (I would like to take this time to thank the Gamercat Network Forums for helping me out)

After playing a couple bot matches i turned to the community over at Gamercast Network and asked the question "is this how installing games on the PC goes?"  I was met with mostly helpful replies but most replied with the phrase "why didn't you buy it on Steam, it's so much easier" which is true.

At the end of what was supposed to be a relaxing night playing Shadowrun turned out to be frustrating and a little annoying because what should have been a short install stretched out to over two hours.  But i won't let this deter me from PC gaming...as long as it won't happen to often.

Gateway is usually not synonymous with gaming PC's until recently where at CES they debuted their new line of FX Desktops and Laptops.  And most recently, as in last Sundays' newspaper ad, was it shown that the laptop, the P-6831FX, would be available at local Best Buy stores.

What caught my eye about this laptop were a few things like the 17" screen and the 250gb hard drive with the capability to add a second in a RAID 0 configuration, but what stood out the absolute most was the fact that under the hood of this sleek looking laptop was a fire breathing Nvidia 8800m GTS card with 512mb of discrete memory.  Okay, so maybe it doesn't breath fire, but it is advertised as one of the fastest laptop GPUs out there and at the low price point of $1249.99 who could argue?

I decided to take the plunge and purchase the Gateway FX after having nothing but problems and failed attempts at using a VAIO FZ-290 for not just gaming but everyday activities without crashing.  So I made the 45 minute or so drive to the nearest Best Buy that had one on stock and was instantly pleased as soon as I opened the box.  Most people would agree that Apple is the king of packaging their products but I wouldn't hesitate to say the Gateway would be a close second.  The laptop comes packaged in about as much foam as a gymnasts foam practice pit and also a second box with the adapter and half inch thick instruction booklet.  It's also one of the few laptops I've seen in a while that comes with a separate boot disc for back-up. 

With all the box opening aside, it was time to fire her up.  set-up only took a few minutes but updating Vista took a lot longer.  With Office 2007 installed i think i went through over 20 security updates.  Overall installing Onecare Live, my favorite and easiest to use security program, and many other programs i regularly use, i was fully set in just a few hours.  And after everything was set, i immediately downloaded Steam and signed in to download a bunch of game demos.  i downloaded Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Half Life 2, and Lost Planet.  Right away I was already impressed with the Gateways performance.  Maybe it was because i had never really had a gaming PC and the closest thing i had ever come to one was the VAIO FZ-290 i had before but I was simply blown away.  I thought to myself 'what have I been missing?"  Don't get me wrong some parts of the games, Bioshock in particular, had it's framerate issues but it wasn't nearly enough to make me not play the game. 

Besides the fantastic performance of the FX, it does come loaded with a few cool features.  Along with 3 USB ports is an HDMI output and an eSATA ports for fast back ups and data transfers.  Right above the full keyboard is a set of media controls that have a nice feel to them that take little effort to activate.

With all the many pros I listed above there are definitely some drawbacks.  The Gateway FX is a beast.  Weighing in at over 8lbs it's not exactly something you want to keep on your lap for an extended period of time.  Another major gripe is the fact that it only has 3 USB ports.  Would it be too much trouble to ask for one or two more.  And probably the biggest gripe of all is the fact that the battery doesn't sit flush with the back of the laptop and instead sits out about an inch making it awkward to carry outside a case.

In the end I would highly recommend the Gateway P-6831FX for anyone on a budget of about $1500 and below and that isn't afraid to carry around a desktop replacement on their shoulder.  The great thing is is that if you want to test out a real gaming laptop you can do it at your local Best Buy or sufficient electronic store.