I finally managed to purchase a laptop last week. After months of waiting to be paid for the Opper Project I picked one up at Best Buy on the 9th. Since then, I have been installing software. I always forget how freakishly horrible it is to move to a new system. Most of it is my fault since I still don't have an external hard drive. This would reduce the time it took by hours. A vast majority of my time is spent waiting for backup DVDs to copy over to the hard drive. I just won't think about the damage that I'm sure all of those DVDs did to my new DVD drive. The laptop itself is beautiful. Just typing this is heavenly. I went with a 15.4 inch monitor instead of a 17 inch with number pad like I had originally intended. This is mostly due to the fact that the 17 inch weighs too much and won't fit in my backpack. I just took the Vista voice recognition software for a test drive. That technology has come a long way since Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is still slightly clunky getting around windows with it. It feels very Star Trek talking to the computer though. later, -junc

Over the past year I've been telling myself I would abandon the Outline-Screenplay-Novel process for Keptosh. Instead I had decided to jump straight from Outline to Novel. Well, the outline has been done for at least six months now and I haven't touched it. So, I am planning to move back to the screenplay idea. Hopefully, this will push me to just start writing some content. I was kind of getting stuck on the opening lines of the novel. Putting way too much thought into how much that meant. When it comes right down to it I am well aware that I am a horrible "writer". When it comes to grammar, spelling, and my general grasp of the English language I just kind of…fail. I do believe that I have a very strong grasp of story structure and dialogue on the other hand. So, outlining and screenplay writing just kind of flow more naturally. Recently, I purchased another DVD burner because I couldn't read any of my old backup CDs and DVDs. After my last backup I realized that using DVDs just isn't efficient when you have a 320GB hard drive. The solution has been around for some time now. I've just been a little slow in picking it up. So, I have the intention of picking up an external hard drive this month. For less than a hundred bucks you can pick up a decent sized USB 2.0 drive. Of course this means the massive chore of going through all of my old CDs and copying them over to the new drive. Well, that is it for now. I will, once again, attempt to post more. later, -junc

Sorry, been out of the news loop again this week. The Tokyo Game Show is underway and I'm sure plenty of news will come out of that. Recently I read that the Nintendo Wii will not be on display at Walmart. They will be selling the Wii but claim that they won't have enough room for kids to be flailing about with the wiimote and nun-chuck. Nintendo should have predicted this anyway and released a standard controller based demo to head off this problem. Hopefully Nintendo thinks that their system has more to offer than a nifty controller. In related news the Sony Playstation 3 has had a price drop of 20% in Japan. I've seen a lot of people getting excited about this. As far as I can tell though, this is just in Japan. Another thing about it, this isn't a price drop. You can't really drop the price of something that isn't for sale yet. They are just changing the release price. My understanding is that this is at a loss to them as well. Sony still seems to have such a strong position in the market yet they are continuously stumbling with the PS3 launch. Most of it in the name of things not related to games and gamers. High prices and fancy video players don't help people play video games. They just seem a little lost right now. However, even though I'm the big Nintendo fanboy that I am, I predict that Sony will pull it together and still be the number one system. I don't think that will happen until next year though. I suspect they will fall pretty flat on launch. The key thing about a new console is games. It doesn't matter how awesome or not awesome the console itself is. If the games are lacking it will fail and if the games are abundant and of high quality the system will succeed. In unrelated news I discovered a nifty piece of software called nLite which allows you to integrated patches, service packs, and third party software with your windows installation disk. I've been toying around with building my default install into a Windows 2000 install. It has been a bit of a pain getting all of the correct command line switches for each program. This has left me to decide to create an install that places a folder of all of my apps on the desktop. Which I can then install after the OS is set up. This will end that whole endless search through disks and the interweb to locate all of the programs I use. Could be really slick if I get it set up the way I want. A while back I posted about my fear of Windows Vista and a possible switch to Mac. In the end I think I have decided that Windows 2000 is the solution to that problem. It is a stable OS, runs all of the apps I use, and is not infused with all of Microsoft's underhanded marketing techniques. I suspect that it will last long enough for all of the bugs to get worked out of Vista so that I can make a final decision about which OS I want to use. Until a major breakthrough occurs in computing though I doubt that the need to switch operating systems will arise. later, -junc