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. :-))

(I wrote this Tuesday morning on the train but forgot to post it on Tuesday) So it's raining this morning - it will be interesting to see what I think of the train walk in the rainy season (I'm writing this on the train - haven't done it yet, although I will have by the time it's posted). This weekend we got some nice work done on the house. A big shout-out to Cyrus here, who was a huge help in getting some wires run. I have both of the surround speakers wall-mounted now, and no wires in the hallway! We did end up running one speaker wire up the well - the exterior wall in our living room has horizontal stud running inside it, so we couldn't run the speaker through it. But I've got some flat wire that looks pretty good against the wall, and it's paintable so I can paint it as well. I put a few holes in the wall, but I've puttied those already, and can paint it this weekend. (Hot domestic tip - if you have a chunk of drywall you can take it into Home Depot and get them to match the color. I got a quart of touchup paint for our living room for less than 9 bucks.) Karin bought and installed some nice curtains in the bedroom and got a new matching bedspread. Now we can open the window and get the air without the one badly angled streetlamp hitting me square in the face. Of course, now it's rainy and cold and we close the window - but the possibility is there! I got the beta for Jump To Lightspeed on Saturday and I've gotten to play it a little. The beta server is odd - the normal economy isn't functioning (everyone is testing space combat) so some parts don't work quite right but it's certainly a cool idea. One of the things I'm still curious to see is how the community takes to jamming two disparate games together like this. The ground combat could NOT be more different than the space combat. The balancing seems to be that space is not a profitable enterprise, at least not space combat.