Easy Gold: Final Fantasy Four Heroes of Light

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

The town of Urbeth is the next stop on the adventure for Jusqua when he decides to leave Liberte in search of Aire, who went off on her own in search of the town of Arbor. I suggest you switch Jusqua over to the Bandit crown as you make your way to Urbeth in order to make the random battles easier to manage and be careful of Hellhounds you come across.

Urbeth is a place filled with greedy and deceitful people and like to take advantage of any passer-by who has money. Why not take advantage of this yourself and capitalize on a little trick to make a ton of Gil. The weapons shop in the northwest corner allows you to rent free counter space and sell any items you have in storage. There are 10 slots available each time you want to sell and can either be single or double slots. At most I have seen four double slots paired with two single slots.

Dusted Off the Old Playstation 2

It has been so long since I last played my old video game systems. Where I previously lived back in New York we did not have the ability to setup every game system. So, my NES, SNES, Playstation 2, and Gamecube all took a back seat and collected dust. The two consoles I did setup were XBOX 360 and Nintendo Wii. Luckily in our new place in Colorado we have a much better setup and the other night I finally opened up my PS2. I grabbed the first game I could find and fired that system up. Man did it feel great to finally be playing one of my older games. My random choice was the Mega Man X collection, which is a compilation of Mega Man X through X6.

As I was playing the game I could not help but think about all the PS2 and PS1 games that I either wanted to replay or never got the chance to play (yes that’s right, I have games as old as PS1, in fact even older than that, that I have not yet opened or played). Now that my PS2 is available my wife and I can finally finish Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XII, and begin Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded as well as Kingdom Hearts II. It is going to be great to play the games we love and get to spend that time together once again.

Next up on the list is purchasing a system selector so I can get Gamecube, NES, and SNES all hooked up.

SQL Saturday #104 and Other Database Stuff

My first encounter with SQL Saturday was #59 held in New York City on November 20th, 2010. I went into the city with my manager and the other developers on the team and had a great time, learned a lot of new things, and realized how much I love working with databases. If you do not know about SQL Saturday, it is an amazing event (held on Saturday’s) where developers, database administrators (DBA)’s, and other database related professionals get together for presentations on a variety of topics all geared to help people improve and learn new things they might not have come across by themselves.

The Last Lunar Eclipse Until 2014

I was so excited when I found out earlier this year that it was going to be possible to see the December 10th, 2011 total lunar eclipse. If you happened to be on the North American side of the Pacific Ocean or in Asia or in parts of Eastern Europe, you would have had the amazing opportunity to see the eclipse in its entirety. Living in the foothills on the eastern side of the Colorado Rockies, we were able to watch the Moon fully eclipse just as it was starting to setting behind the mountains in the west as the sun was rising directly behind in the east. What made this eclipse even more spectacular was that I witnessed my first selenehelion. This happens when the lunar eclipse occurs at about the same time the Sun is either rising or setting.

How To Install Red Alert on Windows 7

I always enjoy going back and playing some of the great old school games of the past. One of my favorite is the original Red Alert. I did not expect to run into any issues since most of my other old school games installed on Windows 7 without any problems. When it came to installing Red Alert on Windows 7, I was wrong. After searching for a while I came up with a fairly easy way to get it to install and run properly without needing to install any special third party tools. Just a few simple steps and you will be on your way.

Final Fantasy The Four Heroes of Light

With my 30 day trial of World of Warcraft coming to an end I decided to start playing Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light for the Nintendo DS. When I heard about the game I assumed like most fans of the Final Fantasy series that it was going to be a typical FF game. I was completely wrong. FF 4 Heroes has turned out to be a hardcore, traditional Japanese RPG (JRPG) with cute graphics to throw you off. Like most traditional JRPG’s from when I was a kid (25+ years ago), there was no hand holding in the games. If you ventured out too far or brought the wrong set of spells or equipped the wrong armor, the game wiped the floor with you. There were no warnings. FF 4 Heroes is pretty much the same way except with some modernized tweaks.

Git and GitHub

One of the first couple of things I was asked to learn for my iPhone development apprenticeship is to learn about the version control system known as Git and the largest code hosting company in the world, GitHub. The tutorials provided on the Git website are very informative and easy reads. I decided to go with the Pro Git book by Scott Chacon as my main source to learn Git.