This is either shameless or brilliant

This just landed in my mailbox:
Friday, October 10 and Saturday, October 11, 2008. Live from the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California
DIRECTV Package Includes:
  • Over 16 hours of crystal-clear high-definition coverage
  • Exclusive interviews and commentary
  • Main stage presentations including opening ceremony
  • Select panels featuring Blizzard Entertainment developers
  • Tournament coverage and team highlights
  • BlizzCon 2008 World of Warcraft in-game polar bear mount with mounted, flag-waving murloc
- (details here) Yes, that's right. They are going to have BlizzCon broadcast on DirecTV Pay Per View this year. I'll admit, a tiny little part of me said "Actually that polar bear mount with the flag and the murloc is pretty sweet." Luckily that part of my brain isn't on speaking terms with the "should we spend $40 on PPV coverage of BlizzCon" deciding part of my brain.
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Seattle Dining

This is one of those things where I'm making a note more for my future Googling than for anyone else, but this information is not useless for other readers. One thing about going to PAX is sorting out the food situation. The conference center itself has a lot of fast food options, but A ) none of them are very appealing and B ) they are all jam-packed with PAX attendees. (I heard the Subway in the convention center ran out of bread at one point during the weekend.) There's a Daily Grill across the street from the convention center which is just pricy enough to not be swamped, but still casual enough I feel OK about going there in jeans and a t-shirt; but that only covers one meal really. The convention center is downtown, so you know there are plenty of dining options nearby but you want to identify good choices and move efficiently, right? Karin started using this site called Earthcomber.com to look for places to eat. If you go there in a regular browser it's sort of a weird site but it looks fine on an iPhone. There's a Yelp app for iPhone but A ) Yelp doesn't really work without a certain critical mass of reviews which Seattle didn't quite seem to have, and B ) it does searches centered on where you are which is usually great but sometimes you're at your hotel and searching for place for dinner and what you really want is next to the convention center. Anyway, she found two fantastic places that I can recommend for downtown Seattle. The first is a place called The Oceanaire Seafood Room on 7th Avenue, and the second was The Islander on Union Street (down by the water). The Oceanaire was almost too nice for a t-shirt and it was certainly more expensive but it was great food. In particular they served a little tray of pickled veggies and some pickled herring that I quite liked. Karin didn't even want to try it so that was just more herring for me! The Islander was a little more laid back. They had some nice tiki drinks and good polynesian-style dishes - I had a really good chicken coconut curry. The only downside to this place was we stuffed ourselves (had to get a Pu Pu Platter right?) and then had to walk like six blocks UPHILL back to our hotel. Anyway, next year I'll probably want to go to both of these places again. And skip the mediocre breakfast we had the first day in the hotel restaurant. :-)
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Out of the pool!

So that's it then. My Windows Boot Camp install started doing that "boot to a black screen" thing again, as bitched about previously. Now I'm suspicious that it's due to my OS X reformat and/or a VMWare Fusion upgrade but I've just had it with Windows. If it won't behave like a grown-up piece of software then it's going to get treated like a second-class citizen. I'm setting up a brand-new Windows install in a VMWare machine and once it gets all upgraded, patched, and activated I'm going to save the whole stinking virtual machine, burn a DVD archive. Next time Windows blows up I can just clone a working install. Shades of Norton Ghost, years later. I haven't decided if I'm going to try to resurrect the Boot Camp version or not. I'm sure the whole restore thing would work. And I further suspect that if I just resurrected the Boot Camp version and left it alone it would be fine. Except ... I think the last time I "activated" the obnoxious DRM I was in VMWare and so I'm not sure if the restored backup is "activated". Feh. I throw up my hands. Anyway, I'm going to try life without a "real" Windows install for a while. I don't think I'll really miss it.
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I don't know about this ...

Children's author Eoin Colfer is to write a sixth novel in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series, seven years after the death of its creator Douglas Adams, Penguin said Wednesday. The Irish writer, best known for his Artemis Fowl fairy stories, has the blessing of Adams' widow, Jane Belson, to continue the bestselling science fiction saga. Called "And Another Thing...," the new novel will be published in October 2009. Colfer said he was a big fan of the original books, which started as a BBC radio serial.
- Yahoo News As much as I like Hitchhiker's (which is a lot) and as much as I enjoyed the fragments of the novel presented in The Salmon of Doubt, I've got my grave doubts that anyone can pull off writing a "Douglas Adams" book. I'll buy it of course, but I'm dubious.
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Atari 2600 boxes for modern games

Before the over the top, logo heavy madness of today’s next-gen masterpieces became the visual norm for video game cover art, there was the basic beauty of the Atari 2600’s approach to package design. Clean composition and vague descriptive text came together to create something that was just so…intangibly fresh and mesmerizing. But what if the biggest games of now fell into the hands of a 2600-era artist? We’d have Atari Modern Classics, a vintage look at our new favorites through the pixelated beer goggles of an era where simplicity was king.
- Atari Modern Classics (I saw it via Wil Wheaton's Twitter) Good stuff!
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