Quake 3 Arena

I also weighed myself in the morning and found that I weigh a pound less than I have at any time in the last year. Yes, I actually lost weight over the holidays. Don't hate me. It's probably just because I got sick, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.

I also found that I'm having trouble with my Handspring, specifically, that it seems to be refusing to back up to my Mac at home. I've tried almost everything I can think of: Using my scanner to test the USB card (works fine), playing with the configuration of the PDA and/or the connection software on the Mac, changing which peripherals are plugged into the USB card at once, and even taking the cradle into work and trying a backup there (works fine). The only other thing I can think of to try is to re-install the backup software and see if it works then. Otherwise, I'll have to call Handspring's tech support. Sigh.

Have I talked about how useful the Handspring is turning out to be? In addition to keeping addresses and my date book on it, as I did with my old Apple Newton, I also keep my want lists, my shopping list, and a variety of notes on it. I also used the To Do application to keep track of all the chores I wanted to do to prepare for my vacation. Handy! I'm really happy with the purchase.

Geekspace Update:

We've decided that the next game we'll play after work, replacing Starcraft, will be Quake 3 Arena. Quake is a "first person shooter", meaning you're wandering around a map carrying a gun trying to kill the other players. (Ceej plays a game called Team Fortress Classic which is based on the Quake rendering and gameplay engine, but is PC-only.) The only first person shooter I've played before was Marathon, which I was not impressed with.

Anyway, Quake's rendering engine is pretty cool, and there's something alluring about being able to kill your cow-orkers in a good facsimile of realism. Tom bought Quake 3 over vacation for his PC and played it a lot. The Mac version is due out this week, and we played the demo on Tuesday. (Even Ben, who at one point said he didn't have a lot of interest in it. But he has a hard time resisting when there's gaming to be done.) It was pretty cool, so I'm looking forward to the full version.

In more-relevant-to-actual-work news, I've spent the last couple of days at work dealing with what you might call "stupid problems". My administrative Mac is having problems with one of its hard disks, and I had to wipe the disk and start over. Unfortunately, this means that all my old e-mail got lost. (I'm using an older and somewhat brain-dead mail program which has a few nice features but keeps all the mail on the local disk. There are a few other options which I will look into, but I'm really looking forward to the move to Mac OS X which will help alleviate a number of these problems.)

I've also had to do some installs, and catch up on a few things I missed over vacation. This doesn't make for a really productive workday. And tomorrow I'm planning on going to MacWorld, which will torpedo most of that day. Aargh.

On the plus side, I did receive my business cards from work. Here's what one looks like:

(Yes, I have cards in each of the five iMac colors!)