1. RC1 of ConFusebox 2 with all the features and music and help in place. Fun time-wasting goodness for you!
2. An announcement for the official Bargain Basement Blog Tenth Birthday Contest tomorrow! That's right folks. The BBB turns ten years old at the end of the month, so I'm going to give you a present. Okay, I'm going to give ONE of you a present.
3. A minor announcement regarding how I'm going to do reviews. It's not really a big deal, but it's an announcement all the same.
. . .okay, I'll post number 3 now. I do occasionally get products for review that have little (and by "little" I mean "nothing") to do with game development. And up until now I've posted 'em to the front page, usually with some mild complaints from the peanut gallery about the products. Now then, it's not like the reviews are kicking out valuable product-space for other stuff, but it does seem anachronistic to post reviews for things like mouse-pads or headphones as featured articles.
So what I'm going to do with those products now is to post the reviews to the blog, presumably on Thursday or Friday so Drew can feature 'em in the "best of the blogs" Friday news.
Case in point, last week Razer sent me a couple of their admittedly ostentatious products, specifically a Razer Destructor Precision Gaming Surface With Padded Carrying Case and a Razer Piranha Gaming Communicator. While their products are high quality and are absolutely ripe for snarky commentary (it's a mouse pad with a padded carrying case for cryin' out loud), it's a bit of a stretch to say they're game development related.
So I'm going to write up those reviews here and let Drew link to 'em from the site news.
On an unrelated note, I got Vista SP1 installed. I tried installing it about a week ago just to have the install fail with a link to a Microsoft support page with a couple of links with suggestions that were no help at all.
Fast-forward to this morning and I see a Neowin post mentioning that a couple of old XP-era audio drivers are giving the SP1 installer fits. Noticing that one of 'em is for the Creative Audigy (which I had in my machine), I figured it'd be worth a try to update the driver and see if that'd fix the problem. So I went to the Creative Labs site to get the latest driver. It popped up a list of about 20 Audigy cards and asked which one I had. Seeing no "I don't freakin' know what freakin' version of the freakin' Audigy card is in my freakin' computer" option, I went with just the base model Audigy. Creative's little installer then helpfully told me "You don't have that model Audigy card in your computer" without cluing me in to which one I actually had.
[John is suddenly filled with love for ATI's driver install which does indeed include a "I don't freakin' know what model Radeon is in my computer" installer that figures it out for you]
So I decided to defer the problem for later. I shut down the machine, popped out the card, downgraded to the audio on the motherboard, and installed SP1. Wonder of wonders, it installed just fine.
At this point, I could probably figure out what Audigy I have and reinstall, but I'm in no hurry. The only reason the card is in there is because it's a leftover from another machine upgrade and I'd heard that Audigys are superior to the generic who-knows-what audio controller on my motherboard. I'll probably just leave the Audigy out.
So the upshot is that the prize for the tenth birthday of the blog contest will probably include a slightly used Audigy card :)
