The unbearable lightness of being

I'm sitting here at work bored out of my mind. Most likely because the cruel bastards who control the proxy servers have become more and more adroit at blocking sites that are of interest to me. So I think I'm now down to two message boards that I can still use while at work. A far cry from my first year, 1999, on the base where home e-mail, Usenet, and even eBay were accessible from the base. Regardless, I've begun linking to this blog in some of my message board profiles in the hopes it'll pressure me to actually write more in this little online journal.

Melissa's pregnancy has entered the 7th month and both baby and mom are doing well. A recent visit to the doctor reinforced that Ian is well above average in size, so Melissa is thankful for the scheduled C-section. No middle name has been chosen yet, though Melissa is now fond of Ryan and I'm still waffling over using Andrew. Megan's excitement seems to be growing in expectation of her baby brother's arrival. Everything in the house now appears to be property of 'baby Ian's' according to our resident princess.

On the SimHQ/review front, I accepted an offer from Josh at Penstarsys.com to join this year's multi-GPU article series. It looks like we've got both NVIDIA and AMD onboard to support the series with midrange and high-end DX10 offerings and we're currently trying to lock down our system test bed. We're hoping to be able to seed a Core 2 Extreme (2.93GHz) CPU to all involved if we can get Intel's support onboard for this endeavor. We're also hoping all testers will have fairly high-resolution displays for use in testing these graphics boards, particularly the high-end parts.

Been reading Shield of Thunder lately, David Gemmell's final, completed book before his death last July. Gemmell as a writer was always something of a one-trick pony, creating the very formulaic situation of an innocent group of highland people coming under the tyrannical threat of an invading army. Yet he always managed to make me care about his characters despite his rehashed plot lines, and I always felt like I liked the man himself. I've been hoping GRRM finishes A Dance with Dragons this spring so as to give his publishers time to get the book on store shelves before year's end, but it's not looking good. If his recently announced deal with HBO actually goes into production, Mr. Martin will be so tied down with his executive producer chores he'll never finish the last two books in the series. The man breaths like forge bellows, straining to pull the air into his lungs against a diaphram that has too little room to expand.

Last, been in discussion with other family members in an effort to plan my mom's impending 70th birthday celebration. Drama is the word that can be best used to describe this task, thanks to a few family members being PITAs. Mom and Jerry should be back in Ohio the first week of May.