Happy news, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne has gone gold, and will be available on July 1. Here is the official press release. I of course will be picking it up on release day.

News from this years World Series of Poker. An unknown player Christopher Moneymaker(great name, eh?) who has never played in a real casino tournament game, did the unthinkable and won the 2.5 million dollar 1st prize. He had won a super satellite at PokerStars.com , to get a seat into the main event and from there, parlayed it into his first prize.

I’m terrified about the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon I’m doing next Sunday. I’ve had really low motivation and my workouts have been terrible. I expect to finish, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be miserable. It wouldn’t surprise me if my paces were slower for this race than the last one I did, even though that one was nearly twice as long. That’s how poor I think I’ll do.

Well they slightly increased the experience you get in Planetside, which helps. I’m not sure, I think it’s be too late for the game already. We’ll see.

So my cousin got me a contact for a job, which was nice of him. What makes it interesting is that for their last quarter, they announced that they would layoff a lot of people. It always has seemed odd to me that they would be able to hire new people in a time when they are going through layoffs. Other companies have done the same and I’m sure it’s somewhat unavoidable, but it would still be somewhat uncomfortable for the new hire when you’re hired to replace someone, but that person just got let go. Layoffs are traumatic enough, but to compound it by bringing in new people, when you could just move people into new roles is tough for people to take. Sometimes layoffs are good, especially the first round because you get a chance to eliminate weak performers. Several rounds of layoffs just make people distrustful and bitter. On the other hand, people feel just lucky to have jobs these days, so they can’t really complain.

So my brother got me Planetside for my birthday. Which is pretty much exactly as it was in the beta, with one big exception. They severely cut down the amount of experience you get. So now it takes about 10 times longer to make a level than it used to. This is actually pretty annoying because one of the things that made it fun, was the ability to get new armor and weapons pretty quickly. Overall, the game is fun, but I doubt it’ll last that long.

Also I got sick yesterday. I think it was because Tracy and I went out on a 9 mile hike and it got a bit cold. We went out to Half Moon Bay and the weather was pretty overcast and cooler than we expected. So even though today is my birthday and we were going to go out to a nice prime rib dinner, I cancelled and we just stayed at home. I slept a ridiculous amount of time today. This cold doesn’t seem too bad. With some luck, I’ll be over it in a day or two.

I finally finished reading Cryptonomicon. It took forever because it’s more than 900 pages, but it was good. Stephenson uses an interesting style, a bit different than what I remember of The Diamond Age and Snow Crash. He frequently devotes pages and pages to metaphors and similes that are verbose and pretty well written. But that style is not exactly the most conducive to reading it as a nice, cohesive novel.

Oh my. This can’t be good for free software. MS buys Unix rights. SCO has recently been making headlines by trying to sue some big companies that support open source software claiming that they infringed on the intellectual property rights. MS buying them means that they’ll have a huge amount of resources to put the legal pressure and maybe actually win some lawsuits, and at the very least, they can annoy the hell out of open source software proponents.

Oh I forgot to mention, I saw The Matrix: Reloaded, and it was good, but not great. I wasn’t impressed with the how they did Zion and some of the parts were not that great. They had of course amazing special effects and some pretty interesting and elaborate sets, but overall, I’d give it only a B+. One thing that did impress me was Keanu’s kung fu moves. In Reloaded, he was actually believable as a kung fu fighter, whereas in the original movie it looked like he was fighting with something large stuck up his ass.

So I am browsing dice.com for a job and the I start to see this weird trend, with a bunch of different postings that look almost exactly the same. Finally it dawns on me that at least 8-10 recruiters have posted looking for the same exact position. They are using the exact same wording and it’s all in the same city. Maybe there’s a huge bounty to fill that position, but it was still funny..

Oh and I saw an interesting web site. Long Bets is a site dedicated to making important debates and turning them into long, measurable points of progression, by taking having two people take different sides and placing bets for charity. Here’s an example bet arguing that by 2020, there will be no Grand Unified Theory. Other interesting longbets are nothing will pass the Turing Test by 2029 and regular pilotless air travelby 2030. Just interesting to consider.

In the past couple of days, I’ve been playing a lot of PlanetSide, and I’m pretty impressed. It’s pretty and it has a lot of action. I’ve been playing the beta, but the full release comes out next week. I might buy it, I’m not sure yet. It’s ironic that I play so many games, but I buy so few. I probably buy less than 5 titles per year.

I installed and am trying out the Eclipse IDE for Java. Unfortunately I ran into some difficulty when I installed the gtk version and it didn’t seem to work at all, but I did get the Motif version to work. Unfortunately, motif is ugly as sin compared to gtk. But we’ll see how it goes. I have been a fan of JBuilder, but Eclipse is open source and supposed to be good.