Winning streak

Yes, that's right. the allies at iplay are on a winning streak! 4 games in a row now and counting, thanks to our new player "lachesis". shes the suprise talent that gives us the edge, and everyones talking about her :) just finished another round last night. it seems these days every single match is a drag-out dirty battle. its very even talent-wise now, so its more or less whoever comes up with the best tactics for the map wins.

battlefield 2 is coming out soon, i can't wait. also, i should pull out battlefield vietnam.. i bought that game and its just been collecting dust. ive been on a bit of a gaming spree lately. i finished off command and conquer generals, all 3 campaigns, and ive been tearing into star wars: kotor, and im about 40 hours into that one. its really enjoyable, and very similar to bioware's other d20 title: neverwinter nights, except with a better graphics engine, and everyone has voice actors. after that, kotor 2 is kicking around somewhere and needs finishing, and maybe ill work my way through some old snes roms.

Speaking of starwars.. the new movie is out soon, episode 3. which should wrap up the whole series quite nicely and answer all my questions. everyone wants to know how darth vader came to be, and what hes got that life support suit for. i know im excited, and i cant really say that about many movies these days.

i think i finally figured out a use for the psp. i haven't actually found it good for anything, because as far as an mp3 player goes, i've already got a better mp3 player (ipod shuffle), and as far as a video game system goes, ive already got a big pile of those with nicer graphics.. and i'm never really in a position to play a portable system: i never ride the bus... if i go on a roadtrip, im stuck driving... and if ive gone camping, i've got better things to do. so here goes, here's the only use for the psp.. bringing inappropriate internet videos to work and showing them to coworkers. that's it, that's all. it serves no other useful purpose in my fleet of technological gadgets that something else doesnt do better. and for that one purpose, i still can't justify 300 bucks. sony is off their rocker. i think as far as gadgets go, the people who buy those gay segway things, and the people who buy the psp, are an overlapping market. people who buy technology just for the sake of having it, not because it serves some actual useful purpose.

apparently Q6 is over now. its unfortunate that they closed the contest already, as our team was rising in the ranks. i think it should be a continuous thing, reset the standings every month or something. especially since it had a rough start, and now theyve got all the servers they need to handle the load, and like a week after they get it set up its done. our final rank is something like 172 out of 41,380. not bad, but we could have done better. i demand a rematch :)

my experiments with CSS are going fairly well. i was able to duplicate a couple example site layouts without tables almost exactly as they were. as with everything new though, theres catches. things dont work exactly the same as their html predecessors, so you have to make adjustments. also, theres browser compatibility, not every browser interprets CSS and html to w3c standards. mostly IE is the one with the bugs, and firefox seems to do ok. anyhow, the best part of doing all the formatting and layout in CSS is that it makes your content easier to deal with. scripting inline php with basic html, and then doing all formatting in CSS is so much easier on the eyes. its also more efficient code-wise as you consolidate repetitive formatting into classes and things actually inherit properties from parent objects.

Work is interesting these days. 3 people got laid off yesterday, so thats a bit of a shake-up. i dont think they were really happy here anyhow to be honest. i was assured my position was more long term, so thats good news. its hard to plan your life around your work in 4 month intervals. such is the life of a contractor.