Today’s post is a hodge podge of information: Everything from new obsessions to of course, the impending release of GTA IV (It’s only 3 hours away now). So let’s jump right into it.

First and foremost, I must apologize for my absence of late. I have been working ever so vigorously on some new features for Arcade Cow. Along with those features comes a new, and much needed, style upgrade. Although it’s still a few months off, I figure it can’t hurt to wet the lips of some of my adoring fans and followers.

What else is going on?

Well as a matter of fact, I finally managed to beat Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core today. It took me longer than most games, as I had to slot in time for the occasional social activity and of course, I had to leave time for the misses.

This completion comes just in time for…

GTA IV

Yes people, the day of reckoning is finally upon us. If I didn’t need to catch up on sleep from a night flight that got in at 12 this morning, I would be down at my local Game Stop picking up my reserved copy of this title. Of course, I can wait the extra night :-).

With all the speculation and hype around GTA IV, I got to thinking about how the video game industry as a whole was doing. As soon as I was able to capture the thought the New York Times published a great article that sums up the video game industries standings. Check it out for yourself.

Lastly, we have my new best friend in coding PHP, CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that lives by the MVC style of coding and designing web applications. I intend to use this framework to make some nice modifications for my sites going forward. The developers are the same people who brought you the Expression Engine CMS and they brought all their cards to the table with this framework. Unfortunately, I am only beginning to take the top off the jar but as soon as I dive in and learn some more, I’ll be sure to come back with treats.