iPod 160gb, “Halo 3″ and more!0

Hey everyone, so here’s a post about what I’ve been doing for the last couple of days, as well as my first impressions of both Halo 3 and my new iPod! So without further ado, let’s get right into it!

I thought I’d start off with filmmaking. There’s been some serious studies the last week so I havn’t really been able to do a whole bunch of writing, although I have been continuing on sketching on some ideas for “Derby”. I bought some older soundtracks a few days ago from the iTunes store and I think I really have the tune which I will set the story and script after now. I won’t say which song it is, since I think it’ll be quite easy to figure out the kind of twist I’m giving the story just by listening to it. But basically, the ending might not be as happy as you might have predicted (although of course this can still change). I’m aiming to get my script done sometime during our next vacation in school, which is at the end of October. One of my friends, who is pretty closely involved with the story of the film, is coming over to Malmö tomorrow so I think I’ll talk with that person then and hopefully also get some feedback on some ideas I had. During the upcoming weekend and week I am also going to contact various friends I know and approach them with different ideas, and see if they would be interested to participate and help. This includes, but is not limited to graphic design, acting, location scouting and photography. I think I’ve figured out most of the story by now with ideas and concepts, now it’s just a matter of putting it on paper and then I guess the film is on it’s way for real!

So in school we had two tests the last week, Math and English. I think they both went quite good, even if I on Monday was a bit nervous when I learned how much we needed to know about Shakespeare in the English test. This actually later turned out to be much, much less then I had predicted; but I guess, it’s always good to be on the safe side!

So, after seeing it both online and in real life I decided to order a 160gb iPod Classic on Wednesday, two weeks ago. The shipping actually went a lot faster than both me and Apple had predicted, and it actually arrived two days later, on Friday. Unfortunantly it turned out that the shipping company (TNT) delievered it at our house at around noon, which of course meant that no-one was home. So my dad (being the great guy he is) decided for us to go get it at the postal office, about 15 minutes drive from home. We contacted TNT to make sure they had left it at the postal office, and drove there. Now comes the pretty fun/weird part of the story! When we arrived at the postal office the manager could not find our package anywhere, so he called up the shipping company. Turns out they hadn’t shipped it to the postal office, but to their own office. Which was located at the Malmö Sturup Airport. We drove there, and after having to go through a series of really over-the-top security controls (involving taking photocopies of ID cards and much, much more) we arrived at the TNT office, and picked up the iPod. I’ve been using it for pretty much exactly two weeks now, and it has worked great so far. I have about 20gb of music on it, and about 60gb of films. I found a pretty cool piece of software that allows you to rip your own DVD films to the iPod format pretty fast, around 1 hour for a 2 hour 20 minutes movie. So I used it on all my Star Wars films, all of the extended Lord of the Rings movies, the whole Saw trilogy, and much more. The picture quality is actually very much beyond what I had expected, and the battery life is pretty awesome (over 40 hours for music, and I would say, around 7-8 hours for films). The only downside that I’ve found with it so far is that it sometimes takes a little too much time to go from one menu to another, or to for example, quit one movie and start another one. I guess this is based around the fact that it uses a harddrive with moving parts instead of the flash disk my old iPod Nano uses. Anyway, I really have got to recommend this product, it’s a great piece of technology, if you can stand the anxiety of watching your clean iPod be turned into a scratched-up monster on the back of it in a matter of minutes, which will happen, trust me. As Fredrik put it brilliantly a few days ago: “You could even put it straight down on a table and leave it there for a couple of days, and when you picked it up, it would still be all scratched”. I decided to take some pictures of the iPod, links are right here:

Image 1 | Image 2 | Image 3 | Image 4 | Image 5

I guess no-one with an Xbox could possibly have missed that Halo 3 launched earlier this week (on the 25th in the US, and on the 26th in Europe and everywhere else). I had my doubts for the game at first, but after reviews started popping up everywhere stating how awesome the game was, I just couldn’t keep myself from laying out my hard-earned cash on it last Wednesday. And what can I say about it? It’s awesome! The first thing that right from the get-go stunned me is the value you get right from the box. There’s singleplayer, multiplayer (including ability to create your own maps and game modes), a great file sharing ability and also something called the “theatre”. The singleplayer is pretty much what you would expect: you battle it out against terribly unfair odds and save the world. The story is actually quite gripping though, and even though I hadn’t played the two prequals, I could quickly find my way around in the story, and was highly compelled by it. The multiplayer is awesome, and the ability to create your own maps and game modes is great. I’ve tried to create a map and it has worked pretty good so far, but unfortuantly it’s a bit hard to create your own game modes (i.e. I havn’t figured out how you do that yet). I had some friends over earlier today when we had a longer period of time off from school (no biology class today) so we went home to my place and played some 4-player multiplayer. We continued to talk about it, and now they’re all coming –plus some other friends– tomorrow as well to play a bit more multiplayer (which was, without doubt, extremely fun). I will probably post some pictures here on on my various other picture posting websites on Sunday with pictures from the “event”. Halo 3 has actually made me think about my PS3. I mean, pretty much every single game is available for both consoles, and the majority of my friends own 360s. Maybe it’s better to use the 360 as my primary gaming console for now, instead of the PS3. I mean, honestly, the only thing I do nowadays on the PS3 is watch movies. I still think it’s a fantastic system, but if there’s nothing to buy for it, the entire concept of it is a bit lost. I will of course keep you posted about this! I included some screenshots I took myself from the game (using the awesome theatre mode, which allows you to go back and check out what you’ve done earlier in the game, take screenshots and/or record clips and save them to the internet):

Image 1 | Image 2 | Image 3

So, as I said in my small update I did yesterday in the last news post, I also have a small “announcement” or a piece of news, which I found pretty exciting. I’ve been in talks with two of my friends to one day try to record a podcast about various news in films, games, gadgets and just talk about random stuff. I myself listen to a lot of different podcasts, including my good friend Andreas Petersen’s own one called “TaunTaun Burgers”. I guess I’ve become somewhat inspired by both their and a couple of other podcasts, that I think it would be cool to get hold of a few friends, and record a podcast of our own and make it publically available. It would be in swedish and I think it would be pretty cool if we had some kind of group of around 3 people that were the main hosts, with one co-host every week to keep things fun for both us, the co-host and the listener. This is still in the planning stage, but I promise I will post if we decide to make it someday and post it in the iTunes podcasts database.

That’s all I can think about telling you today actually, and I really need to finish with quoting 1up.com concerning Halo 3: “If you have a 360, buy this game. If you don’t, buy a 360 and buy this game.” And so far I agree. It really is that awesome!

I will probably be able to write again in a couple of days, but until then, have fun and take care!