Maggie left for her school camp this morning which means I've got three days and two nights of pseudo-bachelorhood to enjoy. James and I are on the last act of Gears of War (on the middle difficulty), and we both bought Crackdown today, even though it's not officially released until tomorrow :)

If this time apart's anything like last time she went away (to China) then I'll be in bed before 8PM because I'm "lonely". It's so much easier when you're the one doing the away thing.

Those of you that pay attention to my Xbox Live Gamercard (look in the right column on lambie.org) will have noticed that I cracked 1000 achievement points. This was during a game of Gears of War with James, where I killed a Berserker character. The achievement was called "My love for you is like a truck" which I think is a great reference to pop-culture.

I've added two challenges to my list, after having completed zero so far this year.

I am getting hammered almost $200 a month on my credit card in interest fees, which has gotten out of control in recent years. I applied for a zero interest card from the National Bank last week so that'd give me 6 months interest free on the transferred balance, which should be enough time to kill at least half of the debt. Funny how it's snuck up on me. Not really.

I also want to beat Shane from BJJ. He's a 6'5", 120kg guy that works as a rancher. He's super strong but doesn't have much in the way of real skill. His game for the last 12 months has been just overpowering everyone other than the purple+ belts and it's annoying now. Adam's always telling him to slow the game down and not go like a bat-out-of-hell but he doesn't listen. I had him in a wicked ezekiel choke (arm behind his head, put your own hand down the opposite sleeve, slide your other hand infront of their throat) and he was gagging and gasping like I've never seen... but with his strength he just plowed through it and ripped apart my fingers that were holding the sleeve. Adam showed me a slightly better way to do the choke which I'm going to try out in about 2 hours.

After a few weeks on hiatus from Gears of War (on my Xbox 360) I went back to the game yesterday. Little did I know that I was only a few checkpoints from the end of the game when I last put it down. All I had to do was take out the bad guy at the end and I was home free.

But that was not to be. I read the online guides and watched a few videos outlining strategies other people had used to take out General Raam (on the hardest level no-less, unlike me who'd been playing on wimpy difficulty). After 45 minutes of abusing the Xbox I packed it in for the day.

Everyone claimed it was much easier to complete when you had a friend playing as Dom, your partner in crime. When he is under the control of the AI he's not much use.

I had a chat to James and he was available for some two-player action so I recruited him to take down Raam. He took charge of Dom and we finished the game within a few seconds on the first attempt. We then played a bit more co-op together which was fantastic fun.

Using the head-sets means we get in-game communication, which for games like Gears of War and Rainbow Six you really appreciate. Even racing cars against other people where you can talk to them across the globe is pretty cool.

For the record, as much as I don't like their operating system, Microsoft has smacked it out of the park with Xbox Live. Absolutely out of the park.

I've always been a fan of keeping the database and the programming separate, but I definitely like using the database to restricting the data that comes back from a query (by using WHERE clauses properly).

Traditionally I'd use PHP to calculate a date two days in the past, format it accordingly and then use a WHERE timestamp < = NOW() AND timestamp >= $two_days_ago, but Mark showed me this earlier:

SELECT *
FROM motorworld_stock
WHERE first_seen BETWEEN NOW() AND (NOW() - INTERVAL 2 DAY)

I like learning really basic things that are going to be useful over and over again.