Every so often I like to share what’s captured my interest, attention, and time. I did one of these columns last year where I shared my fixation with with the Shockwave mod for C&C Generals: Zero Hour, soul/funk legend Lou Rawls, Chai tea, wearing a wrist watch, and Mixed Martial Arts.  Let’s get started …

Red Alert 3: The gameplay, strategy, and graphics of the real time strategy game has not progressed much over the last ten years when compared to first person shooters or the Sims (god help us).  But I am an avid fan of the genre ever since I played Dune secretly on my brother’s computer when he forbade me to do so.  Hah!

RA3 is really not that much of an improvement over RA2 and in the graphics department seems to actually take a step back from C&C3, but I don’t care.  Give me Tesla Tanks and Kirov airships and dammit I’m in, baby.  One gripe about the game though – the campaign features the Allies, Russia, and the Japanese.  This is getting formulaic throughout all of the C&C games.  I’d love to see a surprise faction like they did with Yuri in the RA2 expansion pack.

Ok, I’ve got two gripes.  The other is that the campaign missions must be co-oped.  You can either find a random person online or get paired with one of the game’s AI personalities.  I don’t like this … I prefer to play defense behind a string of AA guns and Tesla towers until my super army is built and then unleash the hellstorm.  I don’t have time to play babysitter to an inept co-commander.

Biggest Loser: What could possibly be better than 12 fat people endlessly crying into their donuts while sadistic trainers berate them with profanity?  Making those 12 fat people Australian. “I’m hee-yah to change me life, mate.  It’s all that mattahs.”

Somehow, someway Australia stole the title of world’s fattest country.  The more perplexing part of this is that the Aussies on the show seem way more concerned with winning the money rather than losing the weight.  The grand prize?  $200,000 AUD … or if you win the special gold bracelet along the way … you get double that.  This is a couple’s season so I have to avoid vomiting everytime two whales start hugging and kissing on the weighing scale.

The highligh of the show?  When the biggest girl (Amanda) repeatedly sings shitty opera on the weight scales whenever she doesn’t lose many kilos … because gosh darnit, she’s still beautiful on the inside.  High comedy, folks.

To be honest, I love the show … loved it since I first saw it in the USA and now the transplant to Australia.  Better yet, its on six nights of the week.  Makes me feel like I’m in great shape and that’s all that matters.

Goal Setting: I’m an avid reader of wikipedia.  It’s like the fifth Gospel.  It’s the collective consciousness of world knowledge.  In my explorations, I discovered the Arnold Schwarzenegger would write down all of his goals on note cards at the start of every year and carefully track his progress.  The man is now worth nearly a billion dollars, banging a Kennedy, and governor of a nearly bankrupted US state.  Hey, that’s the plan for me!

So I started writing goals on color coded cards, as well.  Pink for relationship goals with my wife (Ask About Her Day, Wake Up At Night To Take Care of Baby), Blue for parenting goals (Story-time Daily, No Major Injuries), Green for career goals (each chapter of my slowly developing book), and Yellow for fitness goals (Break the 77kg barrier, exercise everyday).  I post these cards on the wall of my office so that I can see them and my progress each day.

Cheesy?  Definitely.  But so far I have to admit that I’ve been fairly successful, though the last week I’ve been slacking.  I even shared the plan with my oldest sister and she’s replicated the same formula.  I’m thinking of writing a self-help book based on the concept.  Maybe I’ll call it, “Reaching Mediocrity With Notecards”.  It’s a work in progress.

The Adam Carolla Podcast: Recently, Ace’s radio gig was canceled as the entire station was bought and reformatted to top 40 stuff.  He’s still under contract with the old station so he gets paid for doing nothing for the next  year, provided that he does not get another source of income.  So … he started doing a free, daily podcast from his house.

As Adam is fairly connected with the entertainment industry and comedians, he brings in his famous friends to sit, drink beer, use ample profanity, and talk about anything that comes to mind for an hour or more for each episode.  And it’s totally brilliant.  Such guests include Seth McFarlane (family guy), Kevin Nealon, Bob Simmons (the Sports Guy), Aisha Taylor (hotness), roastmaster Jeff Ross, etc.

I highly recommend it.  He started a month ago and quickly became the most successfully podcaster in history.  I believe that his podcasts have been downloaded over 5 million times already.  Check it out at www.carollaradio.com.

And finally …

Facebook: This was one of those things that came out when I was in grad school and too drunk to take notice.  I quickly wrote it off as drivel for the freshly pubed adolescents.  Even as an online marketing consultant, when social networking websites, became the flavor of the day, I refused to join.  But I have to admit that after trying it, I’m hooked.

One thing about online marketing.  Flavor of the day doesn’t accurately describe it.  It seems that a concept (i.e. corporate blogging) becomes popular in the blogosphere or through “expert” pundits and the entire online marketing community embraces it as if its do or die.  It’s all you hear or read in the tech sector, offline people are using it to smart like name dropping Nobel prize winners, and every strategy becomes predicated on building this new, fancy gizmo into the foundation of your plan.  It doesn’t matter that there is no evidence or successful model on how to monetize the idea without alienating your user base and ultimately destroying the effectiveness of the tool as a result (exhibit 1: MySpace, exhibit 2: Paid Search).  Ok, I’m off my rant.

Living overseas, social networking really became the only way that I could keep in touch with the people back home.  It’s supremely simply and I’m able to broadcast my updates (for you non-TCOM people out there that is a one to many message transmission).  I’m not as obsessive as others with the status updates and I still refuse to indulge in Twitter, but Facebook has me hooked.

Until next time.

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