I have been traveling so much lately that I haven't had a chance to touch the 360 in a long time. Many of you who have seen me online have no doubt noticed that it pretty much always shows that I am playing Gears of War for Windows. So while not being able to get my 360 frag on, I have had to take things mobile.

My setup for the road is actually pretty sweet. I got a new work laptop recently. It is a Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. It is not the ultimate gaming machine but has enough to get the job done. It has a dual core intel proc. The Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.20GHz. For those that are hardware junkies it is one of the first Santa Rosa based chips. For Video it is running an Nvidia Quadro FX 570M, Basically an 8600gt mobile. It also has 4GBs of DDR2 RAM and I am running Vista Ultimate 64bit. The screen runs at a ridiculous 1920x1200. It also has Wireless N (802.11N) built in but since it is rare to find an N network I stick to my verizon cellular card for Internet.

Gears runs great on this machine. I drop the res down to 1280x768 to keep the widescreen aspect. And I run everything at medium settings. This is more than adequate to play on. Now the main time that I end up getting to play is when I am between flights or in my hotel room. Now for the airport I don't want to bother others, but I also do not want to lose out on hearing or talking to my teamates. So to get everything running smooth and to have a nice gaming experience I decided to take a look at what I could get from the company store (Microsoft Company Store, I am cheap I want the employee discount.). I ended up picking up the wireless receiver so I can use my wireless 360 controller. It can be odd and uncomfortable to find proper mousing surface in the airport. So the wireless controller is much more convenient. For the chat portion I could go with the headset that came with the 360 but I want to hear the game in stereo without bugging those around me. So I saw that we make a USB headset/mic that should do everything I need. It is the LifeChat LX-3000. I have been very impressed. It does stereo sound well so I can always tell what direction the sounds are coming from. Also it picks up small noises much better than my speakers would. This is allowing me to hear enemies coming up on me way before they actually come into view, this is awesome especially if they are trying to run up behind me. Usually I can hear their footsteps in enough time to duck and wait around the corner from them and nail them as they run around it thinking to flank me. The mic on it works great as well so I can communicate with my team, though the airport people do look at you funny when you get excited and yell "Shoot him quick before he curbstomps me!". For anyone looking for a mobile setup I have linked the names for anything I am using that way you can check them out. I am not a sales guy but am having a blast with this setup. I love popping someones head with a nice snipe then telling them I am playing in an airport on a wireless connection on my laptop when they complain about lag. It usually either shuts them up or they just don't beleive me.

For those times that I am not in the airport and want a bit better control of my kill count, I have finally found something to replace my Logitech G5 (ok so I have 4 of them, but still). I recently purchased the Microsoft SideWinder Gaming Mouse. Many of you may remember I tried the Microsoft/Razer Habu earlier this year. Unfortunately that just didn't work out. Drivers and hardware oddness made me give up on it months ago. I ended up going back to my G5's. But now with the SideWinder I have a mouse that seems to fit my hand perfectly. It has all the common features, DPI on the fly, software settable levels for it with 3 separate buttons, 1 for each dpi settings. The scroll wheel is nice, metal and has good click to it.

But anyway, it has basically been a blast. I was in Phoenix AZ for Thanksgiving week. Then in Seattle the week after that. I then got a week working in Sacramento which is driving distance from my home which made for a nice week. This week I am in Ames Iowa. HOLE &#!% nobody told me how cold it is here!  When I landed it was 12 degrees! 12! I froze on my way to my rental car! Next week I will be on vacation in DisneyLand so no Fraggy for me! But it will be a nice week down and a good chance to get in some quality time with my wife and son who will be 1 year old this month!

I also happened to get a new 80GB Zune. I will talk more about that later. It is time to hit the rack. It is 12 midnight here in Iowa and I have to be up early to teach a workshop on Windows SharePoint Services v3 Development.

Frag you later...