Armed with a bevy of Christmas gift cards and old games to trade in, I finally broke down and purchased Xbox Live.

Currently, we’re equipped with the following Live-enabled multiplayer titles:

•Ghost Recon: Island Thunder
•MechAssault
•Project Gotham Racing 2
•Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield

Add us to your friends list if you’re up for some games!

Gamertag: Extrasonic

It is the gift-giving season, so here are some gaming freebies to enjoy:

If you’re like me, then you couldn’t wait for the North American release of Silent Storm and had to order the UK import version from GoGamer.com as a pre-Christmas gift to youself. You know who you are. Make sure to grab the version 1.2 patch.

If you can’t get enough of squad-based strategy, then don’t forget to patch up your UFO: Aftermath to version 1.3.

If larger-scale strategy is in the cards for your playtime, then I suggest checking out the Massive Assault demo. This is sci-fi, turn-based planetary-scale warfare. It mixes deceptively simple board game-style mechanics with some serious thinking about combined-arms tactics and overall logistics strategies. Entertaining.

But, come on, let’s face it. You want to get behind the controls of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier as much as the next person. Get the Nimitz and a whole host of new stuff (including the absolutely wild DC Urban Siege map) when you download the v0.6F version of the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield: 1942.

If you’d rather give than receive, then check out our firewall configuration for game servers page. (Provide any suggestions by commenting on this post.) Happy gaming!

Desiree and I are back from our assorted travels and are ready to enjoy some rest and relaxation here at home.

We hope everyone’s enjoying their holidays!

Magicians creep me out. Still, I thought I would report on this story about Houdini (there’s a rift between the Oatagamie “Houdini” Museum and the Houdini Club of Wisconsin) because he’s from the same small town that houses my alma mater (Lawrence University).

The “Houdini Museum” was literally right across the street from the University but not only did I never visit it, but I never saw anyone else ever set a foot inside.

I’m grumpy today. Really, really grumpy. It should be a great and relaxing day: holiday luncheon followed by an early dismissal followed by a two week vacation. But, it’s not.

Last night Dan and I went to see LoTR: Return of the King. I had sorta put my foot down by saying I didn’t want to deal with people on opening night this time, but after hearing my brother and his girlfriend (who went opening night) gush about it I suggested we go last night.

What a mistake.

First of all, it was sold out and while standing in line we had to listen to this moron behind us reenacting the Last Samurai with a fully detailed ending (no, we haven’t seen it).
We ended up being irritated but able to deal with it and eventually we sat down to watch the movie. In the row behind us sat a group of friends…taking up the entire row. One chick out of the lot. And next to me sat a family, their about-12-year-old daughter sitting to my right.

I’ll start with the 12 year old. I think she had the plague. She was so terribly sick it was all I could do to not throttle the parents as we were leaving the theater. When she wasn’t sniffing (which was approximately every 3 seconds), she was sneezing or coughing. I even offered her tissues (which she didn’t take). And as much as I tried to drown that out and concentrate on the movie, I couldn’t.

So if that wasn’t bad enough, we had the assholes behind us. Not only did they talk THE ENTIRE TIME, despite the scathing looks I threw their way, but they had to overreact about everything. Over-laughing, over-commenting, etc. And the one chick in the lot had to have EVERYTHING explained to her. What I wouldn’t have gived for a hand grenade.

Needless to say, I thought the movie was good, but I could barely concentrate on it. We left the theatre with me so angry I couldn’t even talk about the movie.

After we got home and went to bed, I proceeded to be woken up periodically by the kittens reenacting the battle at Minas Tirith on our legs. The last hour before I had to get up for work was spent listening to Oberon talk at length about whatever cats yodel about at 5am.

So here I am at work…already irritated and getting grumpier by the minute.

As of about an hour ago, I’m on vacation until January 5th. Another very demanding (but interesting) work year left on the junk-heap of history.

I’m not sure if being on vacation will mean more blogging or less, but there will be at least one lull as we will be gone for several days around Christmas to visit various family members.

Happy holidays!

As some of you might recall from old posts of mine, I am NOT a fan of our former Governor George Ryan. Well, today he was “indicted on federal charges of taking payoffs, gifts and vacations in return for government contracts and leases….”

And for some reason, that just makes me want to do a little celebratory jig!

*jig* *jig* *jig*

A combination of boring year-end meetings, the need to exercise my script-fu, and a rediculous amount of spam led me to the following idea and analysis - what are “people” (I use the term very loosely when referring to unsolicited bulk e-mailers) really spamming me about?

I use a spam filter that I wrote for myself and Desiree. Normally, I’m not a big fan of security through obscurity, but I’d rather not expose my methods here. However, like many spam filters, once mine has flagged a message as potential spam, it is sorted into its own “quarantine” area for later examination. When I took a look at this “spam trap” yesterday and extracted the false positives (there were 3), a little over 1500 spam messages remained, which seemed like a perfect sample size for some analysis.

Surprisingly, my spam broke down into a relatively small number of categories. Read more to see the results!
(more…)

This week’s theatrical release of Return of the King clocks in at a healthy 3 hours 20 minutes, but Sci Fi Wire reveals that one of the first cuts was over four and a half hours!

No telling how much of that will make it into the inevitable Extended Edition DVD when it’s released in a year or so, but I for one wouldn’t complain about the extra substance.

NVidia has new drivers - go get 53.03 at the NVidia site.

UPDATE: The release notes for 53.03 lists the following in its “Issues Resolved” section:

Windows XP: Rendering corruption in Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat.

Hopefully this means that the problems that I experienced earlier will be fixed!