I'm a reviewing fool. I've reviewed about five books in the past week and have just completed a product review and plan to review two more before I start writing new games.
On a personal note, I've been a reading fool through the dog days of summer, although it's been a wet dog here in Texas. I finished "Farmer in the Sky" and "The Door Into Summer" by Heinlein and "On Basilisk Station" by Weber. I'm 90% through "Gradisil" by Adam Roberts and am about 75% through "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. Good reads for the most part.
Infrant (now NetGear) is a good thing. Possibly caused by the bad weather we've been getting here one of the RAID drives up 'n died on my Terabyte NAS box. The box emailed me to tell me that it had a dead drive and that, although no data had been lost, I should replace the drive ASAP. I replaced the drive this afternoon. It's gonna take about six hours to re-balance the drives, but it looks like I won't lose any backed up data. Nice.
Speaking of rain, we've been getting it in spades. There are parts of my yard where you can't walk lest you sink down to your ankles in moist mulch. An upside is that the soft ground makes pulling weeds as easy as moving your arms so I've been spending some time every day thinning out the jurassic weeds around the Hobbit Hole. Biggest problem I have now is that I can fill three trash cans with weeds in ten minutes, so I need a better place to put 'em.
Or more trash cans.
Or a pet goat.
I'm looking at pulling the downstairs carpet and linoleum and staining and polyurethane-ing the exposed concrete. I'm currently grappling with the "do it myself" versus "hire it out" question because it's quite cheap to do but quite expensive to hire out. It looks pretty unforgiving to mistakes and I don't have many spots where I can practice.
As a way of apology for a lack of posts, I have a good freebie. It's http://club.live.com sponsored by MSN's search (i.e. Microsoft's google knockoff). As a come-on for their search engine, they created some cute Flash games that give you points if you win. And you can trade the points for prizes. My personal favorite is "Flexicon", which is a rather simple crossword puzzle game. You get 25 points for every play, and after three days of playing during nighttime TV-time, I got enough points for a wireless USB XBox controller (which looks quite nice).
