Hmm… Got laid off on 7/25. Yet another bad quarter at Blue Martini cost about %10 of the jobs, but engineering was finally hit pretty hard with about %20 of us let go. It’s not a big deal. My parents have already suggested grad school. Although they weren’t specific about for what, and I have no idea what I would do at grad school either. Tracy still has her job, and I plan to find another job pretty soon, so I won’t worry about money for now. I’m tempted to go to vegas for a few days, but Tracy’s parents are coming into town for two weeks and so I feel obligated to stick around while they are here, and I expect that I will have a job shortly after that.

Now that I have some free time, I hope to catch up with everyone that I haven’t heard from in a while. I am also hoping to step up my workout schedule so that I can really get in shape.

Hmm.. was gone for a while. We had a week vacation in Belize and I’ve been busy playing the final release version of War3. Belize was good. We have a bunch of pictures from it. I’ve decided that I’m not a big fan of photographs that are just “I was here” type of photos. I like a nice composition or something pretty in a picture, not just a couple people standing around a nice landmark. Ah well, you’ll notice a few of those types of pictures..

Belize was nice. As tourists, we were of course the richest people there and it’s generally tourist oriented, like other vacation spots. But the wealth gap was pretty apparent. A lot of the villages are little more than shanty-towns. A large portion of the country is dedicated to a 200 sq. mile national jaguar preserve. There is amazing diving and snorkeling there which we did for a day. And finally we spent a mostly uneventful day touring a river.

There’s been a lot of publicity lately about the world health AIDS epidemic that is could easily kill tens of millions if something isn’t done. Hopefully we’ll see some fruitful action soon. The other big thing in the news is the various corporate scandals including Andersen, Enron and others.

War3 is very good. I’m impressed with the things they have done between the beta and the release that really put some nice finishing touches on it. It’s very pretty although it was crashing on me a lot until i switched to opengl. But it still has the fundamental problem of strategy not being as important as it was in starcraft. The single player on hard mode is really really hard. Even for a good player like myself, I have to do a lot of the missions multiple times. We’ll see how long the game continues to grow. I still consider starcraft better and I think a lot of people agree, but only time will tell.

I bought a bike. Alex set me up with a nice bike for the cost of parts. I’m really happy with it. A univega steel frame with nice wheels and shimano components.