Monthly Archive for: ‘June, 2008’

Newport Bermuda Sailboat Race

My brother Bob and his friend Jason started their two-handed sailboat race from Rhode Island to Bermuda yesterday. The race should take about five days, with them sleeping in shifts and racing the whole time. There are many classes of boats in the race, from yachts with large crews of people to small two-handed boats like the 34-foot Paladin that Bob is sailing. Good luck Bob and Jason!

Each boat has a GPS transponder so we can watch the race from home. The orange line in the bottom pictures below shows the path of the Paladin.

Game Review: Bioshock

Bioshock was released last year, and won many awards from many gaming magazines and sites. It’s a first-person shooter that takes place in an underwater city overrun by mutated humans (like so many other games) who spliced their genes to gain super-human powers. The atmosphere, art, story depth, music, and sounds set this game apart from any other. Definitely one of my favorites. Much has been said about it on other web sites, so if you haven’t played it, do a search and read up.

Game Review: The Orange Box – Team Fortress 2

If you look through my gaming posts, you’ll recall the The Orange Box contained five games on one disc. Portal and Half Life 2 were both excellent, and I was surprised to discover that Team Fortress 2 — which didn’t look appealing to me at all — is at least as much fun, if not more!

It’s a typical two-team strategy game, with variants of capture-the-flag, territories, etc., but is done in a kind of “Road Runner” cartoon motif that works surprisingly well. There are also many different classes of characters to choose from (soldier, spy, scout, engineer, etc.) each with very different abilities, and somehow they’re all fairly well balanced.

Our Xbox 360 gang played this game nearly continuously for 6 months, until we finally got tired of the somewhat limited map selection, and switched off to Rainbow Six Vegas recently.

Bagels

Since I recently posted about my search for good Pizza after moving here from New York, I also need to post about Bagels.

There are a lot of bagel shops around here, and they’re all quite different. Many are good, but don’t serve what I would call bagels. For example, Einstein Bros. serves round baked doughy things with holes in the middle that they call bagels, but they’re not (in my book anyway). Bagels need to be boiled, which gives them the hard, shiny outer shell. If they’re baked or steamed, they come out quite differently.

In any case, here’s where to find good bagels around home:

1. KSB Bagel Cafe in South Reston. Best bagels around. Quite a hike from our house though, so we only go there once every few weeks, and we buy a half dozen or so.
2. Manhattan Bagel chain. Very good. There was one really close to us in Reston until a couple years ago when it closed. Very sad.
3. Panera Bread chain. Pretty good.
4. Einstein Bros. chain. Taste good, but very different from bagels… very doughy. Unfortunately they put carroway seeds on their everything bagels.
5. Bagel Cafe, nearby in Herndon, Kathie likes them but I find their bagels to be too bready.