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About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, April 04, 2002

Video gaming - I played through Return to Castle Wolfenstein late last year and loved it, though I thought the supernatural elements took away from what was actually a really decent look at a difficult period of history. Anyway, along comes Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. My God! This might be the best game I've ever played, and it walks you through the course of World War II in a way that is very reminiscent of Wings, an old Amiga game that dealt with World War I. I recommend both Wolfie and Medal, but if you must choose just one, go with Medal of Honor. It's got Game of the Year written all over it.

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Baby. Jon's wife Jamie is pregnant! Congratulations!

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What I'm reading now. I just picked up a new edition of Pierre Boulle's excellent Planet of the Apes, which I've read several times in the past. Good stuff. Also recommended if you're a fan of the movies or TV series: Planet of the Apes Revisited: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Classic Science Fiction Saga. I'm also reading the eBook edition of The Time Machine on my PocketPC; like the Planet of the Apes, I've read it before but just can't get enough.

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Recent movies. Recently, I've seen Blade 2 in the theater (average; the original is a classic), and the following on DVD: The Beast Within (crap 80's horror, not recommended), Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (excellent, of course), MST3K: Mitchell (one of my all time favorites), MST3K: Manos, the Hands of Fate (again, one of my all time favorites), The Planet of the Apes complete TV series (my earliest TV memory and quite possibly the reason I'm such a sci-fi buff now), Jurassic Park III (crap, but I love JP), When a Stranger Calls (prototypical 70's horror: "He's in the house!"), When a Stranger Calls Back (surprisingly good 80's sequel), Black Christmas (underrated horror film that set the stage for Halloween and others), and The Man With No Name trilogy (Clint Eastwood, natch, and yes, he has a name), among many others. Like my reading, it's all over the place.

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Crap. Some moron named Scott Kelby has written one of the most dangerous computer books of all time, Macintosh... The Naked Truth. There's nothing true in the whole book. Avoid at all costs.

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Stephen King has finally published an excellent book after about a decade of mostly-crap (King's books from the 90's--Needful Things, Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne, Insomnia, Rose Madder, Desperation, Bag of Bones, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Hearts in Atlantis, Dreamcatcher, Black House--are mostly dead to me). But I strongly recommend Everything's Eventual, a collection of short stories that will keep you up late. Good stuff.

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Yeah, it's been a while... My blog experiment seems to have died an untimely death, but I'd like to resurrect it now. I honestly believe that this is the future of publishing and it's silly for me not to be in on it. Here's what we missed...

Baby. We had a second child, Kelly Amanda, on November 24, 2001. She's beautiful.

New house. We purchased an old Colonial home in Dedham, Massachusetts for $369,000 and will spend the month of April fixing it up because it's in tough shape. We had the floors finished between March 28 and April 1, the outside painting crew was in this week to clean, the inside painting crew started, I met with the carpenter and the electrician, and I got an estimate on the upstairs bathroom. It's never going to end! We will move in on the 26th.

Recent writing developments. I just wrapped up Windows XP Home Networking and am nicely behind on Windows XP Power Tools, but that will be easy to fix. Next up, a title on Windows .NET Web Server. It never ends.

Reading. I've read a bunch of .NET-oriented titles, which have really renewed my interest in software development for the first time in a long time. Other recent reads including Killing Pablo, Blackhawk Down, Jihad vs. McWorld, The Mothman Prophecies , Our Haunted Planet, Piloting Palm, John Adams, Stupid White Men, and probably many others. Yeah, I'm all over the place.

New PC. I picked up a 1.8 MHz Pentium 4 Dell Dimension 4400 last month, and for next to nothing. Good stuff. Perhaps most importantly, it's very, very quiet. Which I appreciate.

Mac OS X 10.x I continue to use the iBook just about every single day, and it's Mac OS X-only. Since last October, I've gotten an iPod, which is sweet too. But OS X isn't as good as Windows XP, and I feel I'm in a fairly unique position, experience-wise, on this issue.

Linux. Linux continues to improve. But it's still a problem. After returning the old generic Lucent wireless card to Barb, I haven't gotten any wireless working in Linux at all. New experiments include Mandrake 8.2 (various betas and now the final version), Lycoris, and Red Hat 7.3 beta ("Skipjack").

Travel. Two trips coming up this month, including a stint in New Orleans with Keith next week and then Seattle the week after that. I'll stay with Joe and Rachel, which I'm looking forward to.

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