Good GOD that was a rough landing! But the damn thing is done (well to a first draft anyway). I'm off to the "Thank God It's Over" party on Wednesday! It was a hell of a ride, and all but the last couple of days were a lot of fun. I'd do it again, but not right away. We'll see how I feel next November :-)

I've got a theory as to why some of the older links are acquiring spammers, but I'm not going to share on this forum :-) Today there was another spam on the "Great Electronica" post so I closed comments on it. Seems unlikely that somebody is going to comment on it at this time. This will be my new policy - if a topic starts getting spam I'll close comments on it. If we start having spam on new threads where active conversations are afooot . . . well I'll worry abou that when it happens. So if you see something you'd like to comment on and comments are closed I'd encourage you to send me a note - I can always reopen comments. I've only ever chosen to close comments on one post - so any closed comments are likely an anti-spam measure as opposed to some attempt to shut down dialog. I believe I can get a plug-in that automatically closes comments on older posts. Ultimately I'll probably get that going on, but that's probably post MT upgrade.

Apparently the copy of Half-Life 2 sitting on my HD at home went playable at midnight. But I've got a full day of work, a train ride, and a Tai Chi class before I get there. Hmmm - I bet I could download HL2 by lunchtime here at work . . . and he's off! :-)

OK, so coerced two buddies back east into buying or renting DOA Ultimate, and just got off about an hour or so of playing (We were playing Burnout 3 earlier, then I went to get dinner while one of them went out to buy DOAU). I gotta admit - I don't know how they did it, but DOAU seems to play flawlessly across the internet. I only saw two incidents of slowdown - and one of those was when the host quit the game (mid match). You can have up to eight (I think) players, playing 1 on 1 winner stays matches. The others observe and have full voice capability, so it's startlingly close to having a bunch of friends in your living room playing and passing the controller back and forth. We had three Xboxes, with two people rotating on one of the Xboxes - for a grand total of four people playing. If you have an Xbox and you have Xbox Live - go buy DOAU - it's just that simple. Then drop me a line - my GamerTag is ChromaticGnu (long story there, I'll tell it some other time). In other news, my NaNoWriMo wordcount is at 9374. But I need to be over 10K, so I'm going to go fix another another drink and hit the productive words. Y'all be good while I'm gone, hear?

So the iPodder feed from IndieFeed dumped a song in my iTunes/iPod sometime in last few days. I listened to it and rocked. It's a guy who samples GBA games, then uses those samples to make electronica. The album is called Hey Kid, Nice Robot and it will make your inner geek get his groove thang on. Which is kind of scary to visualize, so don't do that. But do grab the songs. There's no ID3 tags, so expect to fix up the metadata, but it's worth the time. (And if you notice the subtextual endorsement of IndieFeed then good on you. :-))