So as a word of warning, don’t ever lose your wallet with your social security number. Tracy had hers stolen more than two years ago and now it’s coming back to annoy us because someone opened up phone line using her social security number as a credit line. She had cancelled her credit cards and switched bank accounts and a bunch of other stuff, but it wasn’t enough apparently. The bill went unpaid for 6 months and $900 before it got disconnected, and now it shows up as a big black mark on tracy’s credit report. What a big freaking annoyance.

Oh yea, forgot to mention. The new War3 beta patch allows 5 players to play at once on a single CD key, so if you know me in real life and you think I’d share my key with you, send me some email and we’ll see what we can do..

So we got a new Warcraft 3 patch this weekend, version 1.20. It’s got some interesting changes, most notably that it’s more Starcraft-ish. Upkeep limits were raised and penalties for more units were decreased, so larger armies are punished less than they used to be. Only 3 days into this patch and already there are a number of types of broken strategies going around. Humans can speed build buildings, so they can get up the tech tree fast and make some really insane stuff quickly. Fast steam tanks and offensive towering are very common. People feel that ranged attacks are much stronger, probably too strong. Heroes are a lot wimpier and they get a lot less experience from killing creeps. There’s a dragon roost that is neat, but once you control it, it is severely overpowered.

This is pretty scary, but I actually got Cygwin running XFree86. It was actually pretty easy to set up, but the whole concept is pretty much sick and wrong. As much as I hate to admit it, Windows is just generally a superior desktop operating system. X has come a long ways though and it’s pretty competetive these days. The real motivation for this was that I wanted to get KDE 3.0 running, but cygwin doesn’t support it yet. Soon I hope, and then you can ph33r m3.

Hmm… doing my taxes, I realized that I didn’t make a single trade last year. I might pick up some options for the heck of it. Nortel is at quite a low among others. We’ll see…

Blah. been a while since I’ve updated. Oh well I suck. I was at my brother in law’s house in Phoenix AZ for the weekend and hanging out. That was cool. I realized that I haven’t been doing as good a job keeping in touch with people as I should have. So if you know me or want to know me and want to say hi, do so and I promise I’ll write back. I like Phoenix, it’s a nice town, it’s really new and pretty clean. Even the slums are nicer than average. It does get hotter than hell, but that’s to be expected. My in-laws are looking at buying a place there and the price differences between the Bay Area and there are depressing. There are beautiful 5000 sq ft houses outside Phoenix for 500k, while here, you can’t even get a mediocre 1500 sq ft. Makes you wanna quit your job and move there. OK not really, but sorta.

Ugh. I hate taxes, I wish taxes were simple.

Work is going pretty well. Privacy advocates will be happy to know that I’m working on the spammer portion of our product. Or as it’s more commonly known, our Campaign management tool.

Nothing too interesting going on. War3 is pretty good, every patch makes it a little bit better, but it’s still not as good as Starcraft was. I’m not sure it’ll ever be, but I am still holding out hope that it could be. This patch(1.13) has really strong ghoul rush, strong gargs and huntresses. People call those three cheesy, they are probably right.

I’m actually going back and playing a fair bit of counter-strike. It’s the kind of game you never really get bored of, and you can put it aside for a while and it’s still fun as hell when you come back. The new cs1.4 has a new delivery method so that it can download whole apps and install them automagically. They also tweaked it so that now a bunch of weapons are more useful than they used to be. I really like what they’ve done to the weapons. There’s also some cool new spectator mode views, including a top down map view and a first person view.