I posted about it today over at Two Guys Tech, but starting Friday morning and running through this weekend, (6/20/2008 - 6/22/2008), you can play team fortress 2 for free!

You can even pre-load the game now, so that you don’t have to waste one precious moment of game time.

This is really a terrific first person shooter, it looks like a Pixar film, and emphasizes teamwork.

Posted in Fun, Team Fortress, FPS, free stuff, Games No Comments »

This weekend, I was converting one of the CD Audio books that I legally own into MP3, for my own personal use, and I was a little bored.

Since I was using up too much CPU time to play a game, and was being interrupted too often to write anything, I was in the perfect zone to watch some Internet video on my computer.

That’s when I ran across a Team Fortress 2 Tournament on Gamespot’s Tournament TV.

The Tournament had actually taken place on March 14th, but it was still available to watch. The tournament was called Uber Destruction, and was for the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2.

This was actually the first tournament I had seen on Gamespot, but I’ll have to tune in and see when they have others. It was really great to see how others play, and the hosts of the show were pretty funny. Although to be honest, I’m a little peeved because I couldn’t imagine much of a better gig.

Anyway, it actually got me pretty pumped up to play some more Team Fortress 2. I love the game, but I haven’t played in awhile.

If you’re into gaming, you should tune into Tournament TV, looks like the next one is going to be for Call of Duty 4, with $4000 in prizes.

Posted in Team Fortress, FPS, Games, Internet TV 2 Comments »

I went to a LAN Party on Saturday, and boy was that a blast. I was thinking today that I need to spruce up my desktop again, I rarely see my background, so I keep forgetting to change the wallpaper, or to have a wallpaper at all.

Anyway, I found Warvan’s Flickr page, and wow, there are some really great wallpapers there. I grabbed the screenshot to the left real quick, but he also has a ton of Team Fortress 2 wallpapers, and you have to look at the Call of Duty 4 wallpapers. Some really great looking stuff to give your desktop a new look.

I’m generally not all that big on customizing the look of my desktop, aside from what icons are there. I don’t usually change the color scheme either. I’m usually more of a function over form type of guy.

Considering how much time I spend on a computer, which is a whole lot, I should make it look a little nicer.

I Hope you enjoy these wallpapers, and please feel free to send me any of your favorite wallpaper sites.

Posted in Wallpapers, Personal-Computing, Team Fortress, FPS, Games No Comments »

The big news this week, at least on the personal side of things, was the release of the Fortress Forever. I have been waiting for it for so long, and so far I’ve played a little over 6 hours.

I didn’t realize it until Monday the 10th, but the mumbler has returned! Art has returned from China with his lovely bride. I was heartbroken while he was gone, and not only didn’t I get his emails and blog updates, but his server was down, so I couldn’t even look at his blogs at all.

Art always refers to me on his blog as “MBM” for “my buddy mike”. I even have my own tag on his blog. One of his blogs is called “Incoherent Mumbling“, also accessible from www.mumblr.com, so I decided that I am going to start referring to him as “the mumbler”. At least sometimes.

Also it turns out that while I was goofing off all weekend, Phil from Thought Sparks has been busy launching his new blog, Tech Fires. Read his announcement for yourself. Phil’s been churning out some really great tutorials lately, so I’m really interested to see what he puts on his new site.

I’m also really interested in one of his widgets, it points to BlogRush. Looks like a syndication widget that gets you syndicated on other blogs as well. Looks pretty neat, I’ll have to go check it out.

In Tech News, one of the bigger stories this week has been the release of the iPhone software unlock, which I think I have covered enough for the week.

Also, last weekend I realized that football season has started again! What was I doing to miss that? I’m not a huge football fan, and as a matter of fact, last year was the first year that I watched more than the Super Bowl in about a decade.

If your curious, I’m a Denver fan, since I lived here for about a decade now, I should probably root for the local team. I also cheer for the Patriots, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh.

I also made a few minor changes to the blog, I added my Pownce feed, the MyBlogLog widget, and also some more adsense ads.

I’m looking forward to a more productive week, thanks to all of my readers, and to everyone who commented on the posts this week or provided me with valuable feedback.

Remember, you can reach me on Pownce, if you are on it, as well as my blog log or on email. My email address is “mike” at this domain name (port16.com). Feel free to drop me any thoughts or comments. 

Posted in Pownce, The Mumbler, FPS, Foretress Forever, Hacks, BlogNewsandUpdates 3 Comments »

It looks like Steam has some new community features, which were actually made live on August 6th, but these were new to me.

Each steam account gets their own web page, just like any other social networking site, and it shows your rating for the entire world to see.

The picture that you see at the beginning of the was my rating before I started played much last night. From what I have been reading, the rating is based on how many hours you have played steam games, not how many frags you have, or anything like that.

Back when I was playing Team Fortress for Quake, there was a server in Utah that kept stats, you gained more points by fragging higher ranked players than you did for lower ranked players. You also lost more points for being fragged by lower ranked players than you did for higher ranked players.

You can see my stats, and all that good stuff, on the Port 16 Steam ID Page.

I love Fortress Forever. Great job guys!

More later.

Posted in Steam, FPS, Games, Uncategorized 2 Comments »