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?