2008

Saved for posterity, or maybe for no particular reason at all. Here are some of the previous things that I blathered on about.

April 15, 2008.
Artemis Eternal.

Something awesome:

I'm really not good at talking up this sort of thing, but I love the whole grass-roots film-making movement Jessica Stover is going for with Artemis Eternal. I've enjoyed her blog and her written work for some time now, and I really hope she manages to pull this off. I'm really interested to see the result.

On the ongoing sneakers saga, my new, new sneakers are apparently not going to work out after all. Back to the store.

Also, over on the left side there, I have a new Twitter block, which will show my recent tweets on Twitter. At least, when they show up--for some reason two of the text messages I sent to it this morning never showed up.

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March 31, 2008.
The envelope, please....

This amused me:

And my new sneakers do seem to be working out fine, which is good.

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March 27, 2008.
Once More.

Got some new, new sneakers, which I tried out today. These seem like they'll work much better, but we'll give them a few more days to be sure.

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March 18, 2008.
Circles.

Needed new sneakers for walking in. Bought new sneakers for walking in. Tried walking in new sneakers bought for walking in. Tried walking in new sneakers bought for walking in several times. Tried walking in new sneakers bought for walking in over different distances. Walking in new sneakers bought for walking in sucks. Alot. Need new sneakers for walking in.

A haiku about this, for no particular reason:

New shoes for walking
Incredible pain in feet
Need new shoes again

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March 11, 2008.
Closures.

A few months back, I think just after Thanksgiving, I bought an HD-DVD player. It seemed that the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was going to go on for a few years, and I thought I might as well enjoy some high definition movie goodness in the mean time. Well, it turns out that the battle didn't last so long after all, and recently the HD-DVD folks signaled defeat. That kinda sucked for me, since I bought the more affordable HD-DVD player. At least I only had seven titles in that format, so it didn't suck too bad.

The end came about quite rapidly, around the time of the big Consumer Electronics Show. Warner Brothers itself sells about 20% of all DVDs, and they were releasing their titles in both formats. They had just recently evaluated how things were going, and found that Blu-Ray was simply outselling HD-DVD about 2 to 1. In addition, sales of new releases were down significantly over the same period from the year before. When they put this info together, it seemed clear that not only was Blu-Ray selling better, but consumers appeared to be holding off buying new discs until things shook out. So, of course, they decided to switch to Blu-Ray instead of continuing to support both formats. That pretty much signaled the end for HD-DVD.

So, long story shortened a bit: I bought a Playstation 3. It's pretty cool, and it has a built-in Blu-Ray disc player, plus a network connection to keep the firmware updated. And, of course, I can play games on it, which I have been doing occasionally. Just one game, actually, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. I suck at console games, and I suck at this one, but it's fun, and you never really die in it, so I can keep trying until I succeed. Sometimes that takes a while, but thankfully never (yet) long enough to get frustrating. The graphics are quite good, and it's a lot like playing in a Pixar movie, which is cool.

So, what else to talk about....

Oh, I spent most of last week preparing for, and then moving to, a new development computer. I've had this computer sitting around for many months, but was slow about moving things because I'm usually in the middle of something or other, and since it can take me a week to really move and reinstall everything (<sarcasm>thanks so much for that, Microsoft</sarcasm>), I wasn't exactly in a big hurry to disrupt things. It's a good move, though: the machine is much faster, much peppier, and I'm happy with the results. I haven't quite gotten everything reinstalled, but enough that I'm working again without apparent problems.

And....

Gary Gygax died on March 4th. He was 69. I don't have anything eloquent to say, but he was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, so he indirectly helped shape my life to some degree. Thanks, Gary. I hope your gaming continues on the plane you're visiting now.

GCA: GCA crossed 2700 downloads at e23 back on March 9, 2008. Steve Jackson Games finally released a PDF version of the GURPS Basic Set: Characters book (Campaigns is coming soon), which provided us a nice little bump in sales.

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February 5, 2008.
Eh.

Just updating some things around my sites. Nothing much to say at the moment. Life is still pretty much the usual for me.

GCA: GCA crossed 2600 downloads at e23 back on February 2, 2008.

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January 7, 2008.
Tap tap tapatapa tap.

I saw this little typing thing over at Phil Reed's blog, so I tried it out:

Touch Typing for free

I must say, I find it rather harder to type a bunch of random words than it is to type something that reads through properly, and I had to pause after every "sentence" to wait for the new one to appear, which was a bit annoying. Anyway, it was kind of fun, and I did wonder what my typing speed might be these days.

GCA: GCA crossed 2500 downloads at e23 back on December 26, 2007.

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