Oh Look! - I found the gaming holiday meltdown week.

Mass Effect (X360) Release Date: Nov 20, 2007 - In a diverse interstellar society, you must overcome other species' distrust of humans and battle a force that threatens to end all life. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) Release Date: Nov 19, 2007 - This new game from Naughty Dog features jungle adventures in a Pitfall-esque setting. Rock Band (X360, PS3) Release Date: Nov 20, 2007 - Rock out with your friends as you perform music from the world's biggest rock artists using drum, bass, lead guitar, and microphone peripherals.
New Video Games - New Game Releases - New Video Game Releases Those are only the first three entries on Gamespot's "New Releases Week of Nov 18, 2007" chart. Yes, yes, "Black Friday" blah, blah I know why it happens but still . . . . Sadly I think the big loser here for me may be the PS3 - I already have Rock Band (for the 360) preordered and I can totally see buying one of the others as a more traditional single-player experience, but buying two other games in the same week as Rock Band is right out. Uncharted versus Mass Effect is a tough call. On the one hand, I traditionally don't like Bioware's console games (KOTOR, Jade Empire). I think Uncharted has a much better pedigree. On the other hand, Mass Effect looks really good, and I think Bioware has been improving on the console front.

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Joss Whedon preps Fox series - Entertainment News, TV News, Media - Variety

Dushku will star in the Whedon-penned series "Dollhouse," which has been given a seven-episode order by Fox. News came as an extra-big Halloween treat for Whedon fans, considered some of the most passionate in all of TV.
Joss Whedon preps Fox series - Entertainment News, TV News, Media - Variety (Emphasis mine) Anybody have any leftover scary Halloween music this morning? We need an ominous musical sting to hit at the words "by Fox" . . . .

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Freshly Painted Office

Click either image to see a larger version. These are two HDR images of my office with the new paint. The wall with the Star Destroyer came out pretty well. I'm less happy with the window wall, but I figured I'd include it anyway. (I talked about HDR images from Photomatix Pro before.) I went ahead and ponied up the cash for Photomatix Pro, I like the effect enough to get the real version. I'm also poking at the recent spate of new Core Image-based graphics editors - specifically Pixelmator and Acorn. So far I like Pixelmator a lot more - even something simple like a crop was a fight with Acorn. I'd try to resize the crop and the whole thing would jump somewhere else on the screen. Very odd. I'd like something with more power than iPhoto for some editing (although I can do a lot of quick tweaks in iPhoto). I have Photoshop Elements, but it's a PowerPC binary which is slightly annoying - and it takes forever to start up. Not sure if that's a Rosetta issue, or if PhotoShop Elements is just a pig. It takes forever on my G4 Powerbook as well, and in truth when I bought Elements the Powerbook was still a very serious computer. Of course, if I get a new camera I'd probably start wanting to use RAW files, and that's likely to lead me to Aperture. Which is a stupid amount of overkill for my actual skill level but that sort of thing never stops me! On the camera front I've just about decided that I want a Canon Rebel XTi. It seems like in the sort of space I'm looking for the front runners are very much the Rebel XTI or the Nikon D80, but the D80 costs significantly more. The single biggest complaint about the Rebel XTI seems to be the pro photographers feel the grip is too small and I'm not sure I'm sold on that problem. It seems comfortable to me. I'll probably get just the body and go for a separate 50mm prime lens to start, and see what I think of that for a while. Later I'd probably add a zoom lens, but the one point of the prime thing is to force yourself to use it for a while, long enough to force you to rethink the way you compose pictures. Blake made a valiant argument for getting another point-and-shoot (in the comments of my Monterey post), but I'm still leaning toward separating the body from the lens.

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We're Fine

A moderate earthquake occurred at 8:04:54 PM (PDT) on Tuesday, October 30, 2007.The magnitude 5.6 event occurred 8 km (5 miles) NNE of Alum Rock, CA.The hypocentral depth is 9 km ( 6 miles).
Info for event nc40204628 A little exciting to be sure, and we got a firm "Do not want" from both cats, but we're fine. Nothing even fell over. Frankly the worst problem for us is that in about an hour both cats are going to clamp onto our sides and stay there for the next twelve hours, repeating how much they did not like the earthquake. I managed to snag Schrödinger and sit with her for the last parts of it, Heisenberg made it safely under the bed for complaining from there. Whee!

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