I started playing Majestic last night, and I”m pretty impressed with it. It’s got some cool features and some things you definitely might not expect. It’s hard to describe it, but it’s kind of like a game that invades your real life is how they describe it. It’s a brand new experience really. I’m playing the pilot episode and it’s free, but after that it will be about $10/month and I’m not sure how long I’ll play it. It has won a bunch of awards for innovation and such, but it’s not the kind of game I usually play.

Sometimes the onion has articles that are astoundingly funny for no apparent reason, like this satire piece on a lutheran minister. Warning, lots of profanity and sex descriptions. I don’t exactly know why, but I just couldn’t stop laughing when I read this.

I watched the latest BMW Film called “Powder Keg” and it was really really good. For a 5 minute short film, it really grabbed me. The best of the series I feel. Anyways, bmwfilms are innovative advertising gimmicks and I like them, I think we’ll be seeing more things like this.

Oh and I ordered my new PC. I’m very excited about it. It’ll be my first AMD based machine. Here are the final specs. This is the first time

i’ve picked all the components for my own machine.

Creative Labs DTT 2500 5.1 Speakers

Cases: Lian-Li PC-60 Aluminum w/ 350 PS

Motherboards: ABIT KT7A Raid

Processor: AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz 266FSB

Memory: 512 MB PC 133 CAS-2

Hard Drives: DiamondMax Plus 60 Ultra DMA 100

DVD: Pioneer 16x DVD with 40x CD-Rom

Floppy Drives: 1.44MB 3.5 inch Floppy Drive

Sound Cards: SB Live X-Gamer 5.1 PCI

Video Cards: Asus V8200 GeForce3 Deluxe 64 Meg AGP

Operating System: Windows 2000

Network Cards: 3Com 905C WOL 10/100 PCI

Warranty: 000007 – 1 Year – Parts Only – Barebone/ Case & Mo

Heat Sink Fan: Tai-Sol CEK733092 CPU Cooling Fan

2nd Hard Drive: DiamondMax Plus 60 Ultra DMA 100

RAID Setup: 080011 – RAID 0 (Zero)

Basically, it’s a top of the line gamer system with an onboard IDE RAID. It should be the fastest machine money can buy for under $2000.

From slashdot, here’s proof that gamers are smarter http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/07/22/stinwenws03005.html.

So after a two month hiatus from playing Counter-Strike I played again last night and I had forgotten how fun it was. It turned out that the reason I could play was that my router got in to some weird state where it wouldn’t route half life packets. Something about UDP on port 27015 I think. Anyways, I upgraded the firmware on my router from a beta version to the latest released version. I have the fairly popular Linksys router and it had been acting up so I upgraded the firmware and everything seems better.

One of the big things going around the net is the ubiquitous x10 ads. They are just slightly less obtrusive than the popup ads, which are totally unavoidable. These are “popunder” ads which create a new browser window, but then the new window is immediately sent into the background, so it is ignored temporarily. x10.com has within the space of just a couple of months become the 5th most visited website on the internet because they have bought so many of these popunder ads. Thankfully there’s a solution. use this URL to stop them. http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=999&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10adsl.htm. I think in the future this type of thing will get harder and harder to avoid. People will either have to pay for content or be inundated with more and more intrusive advertising

Also last week Blue Martini went through our second round of layoffs. There were some surprises and it cut pretty deep. %25-30 and every department was hit.

Well after finishing Deus Ex, I started playing the Diablo II expansion and I am pretty impressed with what they’ve done. They realized that for a lot of higher level players and those who are really dedicated to getting the perfect characters, a lot of it is about finding the right equipment. So they vastly expanded the quality and variation in equipment. Big enhancements are new and better sets, uniques and higher quality elite items which can only be found in hell mode. Also cool are runes which can be combined together in socketed items to form extremely good items, and crafted items which can be created with the old Horadric Cube.

I’m focusing my time on building an assassin based on traps and shadow skills, and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s working out. The only problem is that an assassin can only have 5 traps active, which isn’t that big a problem really. Also I really like the Fade skill which gives a temporary resist all and Shadow Master is a must. My shadow has more than twice as many hit points and comes with higher builtin resistance than me.

So on the recommendation of my friend Alex I started playing Deus Ex and I am totally into it, it’s got a really good story and is very playable. The action and design are very good. I do have some slight issues because my computer is a little bit slow for it, and there are some UI annoyances, but overall I’m really pleased with it. I’ve temporarily set aside Cosmic Rift while I play this. I also have a copy of the Diablo II expansion pack but I think it’ll have to wait until I finish Deus Ex.

My friend Jason has been trying to convince me that I need a Comptech Supercharger for my S2000. Tracy’s response: “It’s worth it, because you drive so fast.” I admit that I don’t drive fast, but it’s all about the potential power, isn’t it? Although $5k does seem like a lot, it’d put a whopping 340 hp onto the car at the top end. Though you have to be concerned that it’s going to cause a lot of engine wear.