Hello there my faithful readers! It’s been forever and a day, and I wanted to just drop a line to say we’re still alive and kicking… The running theme these days seems to be sickness. Rhys has a cough right now, but he just got over (or is getting over) a real nasty stomach bug. It turned him into a human lawn sprinkler if you catch my drift. Poor kid just can’t seem to catch a break! On top of that, Heidi was diagnosed with Bronchitis! YAY! So much for riding this out until we get back on insurance. Chalk that up to another one of my brilliant foresights… I have remained sickness free, which is important when you have a new job.

I’m still working on websites on the side, and have been working with a local politician. A friend of mine and I are thinking of marketing to the local political scene to see if we can drum up some beer money. The market is ripe, and we have the skills. Might as well try capitalizing on it. At the worst it’s a learning experience — such is life.

Not too long ago, Rhys when #2 on the big boy potty for the very first time! So, he got himself a brand new red bicycle! He’s so excited about it. Even in his weakened condition, he insists on riding his bike outside a little bit each day. He gets about two good pedals in and then has to rest to catch his breath and drink some Gatorade! LOL  He’s a trooper! Of course, we don’t let him take it too far! What’s more, with me concentrating on studies, mom seems to be the one taking him out most of the time. I swear I will do more here soon, but studies take priority right now.

Speaking of studies, I’m studying up on .NET programming. Both the Win32 side and the Web App side. It’s so good to be back in Visual Studio, even for my Open Source projects. I have to hand it to Microsoft with Visual Studio, it’s just some bad ass shit. I gave my old copy of Studio to the neighbor kid who has shown an interest in programming — my good deed for the month. Hopefully he doesn’t squander the opportunity to take the free time in his life right now, and get a leg up on the working world.

That’s about it. Nothing too interesting, and I’m sure I am forgetting quite a bit of shit, but I’ll write more in here, I promise. Even if it is fluff, like this. :)

I’m goin crazy here. Due to various factors in my life, I’m currently pretty broke. I’ve been working like crazy, both at my day job, and at my wanna-be job, and I’ve been goin nuts. I haven’t gamed in weeks aside from an occasional Angband quest.

I decided to give Freeciv another shot. I’ve always been a Civilization junkie in the past, and I’ve followed the Freeciv movement for years. It never seemed up to snuff, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling it. Those that know, know that Civilization is a pretty serious addiction. You have to be ready for the plunge. :) Well, I think I’m ready for the plunge.

I’ve got a Freeciv server on my main server and my main workstation now, and am picking the game up pretty quickly. I’m really excited to see the flexibility of this game. You can set coefficients for research, the year the game will end, production penalties, etc.

Another neat factor is the multiplayer aspect. It has always had a tilt to multiplay, which is something that the commercial Civilization always seemed to lack. Even when they finally implemented it, it just sucked! I haven’t had a chance to sample the multiplay on Freeciv yet, but I’m looking forward to it! Do you play? Drop me a line and let’s set up a game! Haven’t tried Freeciv yet? If you were or are still a fan of the Civilization series, then you MUST give Freeciv a shake. It’s totally worth it!

So, you salivating over Vista because it’s pretty? I don’t blame you one bit. Just before I finally became fed up with Microsoft (again), I was salivating over Vista too! I was totally willing to overlook the poorly thought out security enhancements. I will still admit they are on the right track with the whole running at the user level thing. But, seriously, with all the great examples of how it’s done in Linux and BSD, you’d think they could have stolen that code and made something a bit worthwhile. Mac OSX implements this perfectly — it is a BSD OS, but still.

Anyway, then I came to my senses after hearing about Windows 7, the little stealth update stunt that Microsoft pulled, and of course their desire to move toward subscription based revenue for Windows products.

I was a bit distraught. Happy to be back on Linux of course, but sad that XOrg hadn’t really made any leaps and bounds since I last saw it. No alpha transparency still!? Come on! Or so I thought. A friend of mine turned me on to the Beryl Project. Last night after a bit of fiddling I got it installed. It looks to be a gtk app, and thus built for Gnome, but it does work fine in KDE, and no real annoying inconsistencies.

If you are running Linux as your main desktop and you haven’t checked out Beryl, you must! It brings the pretty GUI to the Open Source community! So far no problems with it crashing, or getting along with KDE! Just had to give them a plug and a thanks!