I joined a few of my fellow MS MVPs and a few people from the MS Malaysia DPE team for a friendly little game of paintball. This was the 2nd time I played paintball and I was pretty sure my experience playing FPS games would come in handy.

Getting to the paintball arena was an adventure by itself. While there was a sign in front of the steep stairs which took you down to the foot of the hill where the arena was.

It's a small banner situated quite a bit away from the road, which itself was already in the middle of a small residential area.

Then you need to walk down a little path down the hill.

Passing what seems to be one of the playing arenas.

And up another path

To get to the registration area and also where the hillside arena is.

As we walked in to take a little tour on the hill which we'd be fighting on I saw this

Hmm.. maybe they need that to do some map editing when necessary? There were 2 flag bases one at the bottom of the hill.

And one at the top... and the guys at the bottom will have to run all the way up the hill to get their flag. There was a little platform in the middle of the hill.

But no it's not a sniper tower and players can't climb it. From the top of the hill everything looks simple enough, have a better view of the people coming up, advantage of gravity on your side sending paintballs downwards.

Should be interesting. After the tour of the grounds our little group was given the Things You Need To Know So You Don't Loose An Organ Or Worst... Kill Someone talk.

After the talk I also plans for my Creative Vado, and a roll of duct tap.

During my last paintball game I tried sticking the Vado to my chest to take combat footage, but that didn't turnout too well cause I usually run around crouched behind cover, I told myself it would be different this time!

This time it gets strapped on the gun! So at least it'll be pointing at the general direction of where the gun is pointing. Well.. it worked.. But I don't think the gun's POV is any more exciting than the chests view. I'll put up a clip or two and all those of you without motion sickness can check it out. If I ever play paintball again, I'm gonna put on a helmet and mount the vado on it!

Anyway.. it's paintball and there are always injuries in paintball.

It's funny how I got hit in the same place I got hit the last time I played, I guess my hand's the only target when I blind fire off cover. I also receive three hits and bruises along my left arm, and one in my back as I was switching cover.

Final score? Guess the MVPs win cause all games ended in a timeout except the one where I capped the flag!

In summary, while my FPS gaming experience thought me well like how to roadie run, use cover, blind fire, flanking/avoid being flanked. I'll stick with games for one simple reason. I don't get TIRED playing games, DAMN.. my thighs are burning cause I was pretty much crouch running all through the game!

So.. Yoroi invited me to his house to rock out on Guitar Hero 4 : World Tour. I decided to play the drums cause I didn't like the feel of strumming a fake guitar. At least with the drums I can just keep hitting with no remorse.

And no remorse I did.. as I was playing I had this creepy feeling at the back of my head that whenever I missed and hit something other than the drum pad, like say.. the edge of the pad, the screw head on the snare.. the plastic board of the drumset. I keep wondering if I would break anything.

Then after a stop for some food and we started another gig, I brought my right drumstick down on the green pad and instead of the *pof* that it normally makes, that was a loud *snap* followed by the sound of a small bit of plastic hitting the floor.

I looked at the pad and.. seems like after the food break I forgot to fold the drumstick holders back into the base so I hit the right side one in deployed mode and.. I broke it!

Frantically I tried to repair it the best I can and thus this was the duct taped result.

It still works.. though it'll never fully park back into the base.. and it feels flimsy when you fold it in and out of the set. And Yoroi has gained an instant conversation starter whenever other people plays the drums.

"Dude.. why does the drum stick holder looks like it's bandaged?" "Yeah, cause dumb ass Marauderz decided that it was in his way and smacked it with his stick!"

I knew I was gonna break something that night!

For they were left without a voice. Majel Roddenberry has passed away. I wonder if she had the chance of seeing how Gene’s vision and story is raped in the new Star Trek movie? But then again… Brenna and Braga did that a long time ago anyway!

A new release of the Windows Live Apps Beta has been released. Or as the Windows Live team likes to call them the Windows Live Essentials!

Everything looks smashingly great, Live Writer is as good as always. Though I wish they didn't enable all the smart quotes and other character replacements by default. I feel that'll cause some amount of grief to some people.

Live Messenger looks spiffy! But they removed the signature sound which allows me to set a sound to be played on my friend's system when I get online, I liked that feature even if I did get scared by it sometimes. Hope they put it back in as a setting that can be switched on or off.

Live Photo Gallery... works, interesting point to note is that now the autofix tries to straigthen you photo as well. Somehow I don't think that's a good idea since the problem is that the program doesn't know the intent of the photographer's angle. Or actually understands the subject being photographed.

And then there's Live Movie Maker... oh god... what have they done to the Movie Maker name? I really LIKE Movie Maker, in my opinion it's a very underappreciated program that comes with Windows. It just works! you can easier trim and create movie clips, add captions, etc. etc. You can even customize your own encoding profiles so you can make WMV files for any usage. In the name of simplification.. They've redesigned the whole UI, and basically removed everything that gave Movie Maker it's charm previously. The team mentions that the engine powering Windows Live Movie Maker is capable of great things, and I WANT to believe them, I WANT to believe that there's a program capable of being as good as the old Windows Movie Maker. In it's state right now I call attention to this old Mac vs PC ad.

If you asked me how bad does the output of Windows Live Movie Maker looks right now? It's WORSE than the PC movie being depicted in the Ad! Come on guys, make me BELIEVE that Windows Live Movie Maker works!!!

Other then Live Movie Maker, everything else in the Live Apps suite works great!

So the new year is coming and what better way to start the year than by learning something new? There’s a Technet MSDN technology summit that’ll be happening on 15th January 2009 over at the KL Convention center. And there’ll be demos of the MS Virtualization platform, and more interesting to me would be that there’ll be sessions on AZURE, yum yum indeed.

Oh there’ll also be a demo of Windows 7 for those of you who like me haven’t bothered to acquire the preview released during PDC.

And maybe… just maybe.. and this is just ME saying this.

We *might* actually get a new Beta of Windows 7.

Just remember.. operative word here is *MIGHT*… with asterisks too!