I just checked my CallVantage account management page and found they had added alot of features! Most for free! One premium feature, which I don't mind spending an extra couple of bucks a month for is call filtering.  Now I can completely block those dang Austin American Statesman and SBC calls.

I just played my first online Halo 2 game.  WICKED AWESOME!!!  Check out my stats for the game. The medals are interesting. I'm also pretty proud of my hits. The game viewer is awesome although I can't seem to make a link for it since it opens via some javascript. At least I didn't lose.

If anyone's interested, here's my Halo 2 games RSS feed.

I'm gonna jump on and play some more!

We had a great time today with Becky's family. I finally got Halo 2 and have been playing the campaign mode since I can't get online yet.  It's by leaps and bounds the most beatiful console game I've ever seen.  All the cinematic sequences appear to be rendered in real-time and look as good as pre-rendered sequences.  Very impressive.

Becky and I have spent the last few days here in El Paso for some of our Christmas vacation.  I took some time to clean my father-in-law's pc from the many viruses and spyware programs that were grinding it to a halt.  It only had 64MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 384 using some old RAM that I happened to have in one of my bags. In the process of cleaning, I upgraded his AOL software to the 9.0 “security edition“ which comes with anti-spyware and anti-virus software, which was actually pretty nice.

Anyway, it's working great now and we're having a great time. I always realize how much I miss broadband when I'm here. Just googling something is such a huge ordeal. It snowed quite a bit yesterday evening, but the ground's still pretty warm so it's almost all gone now.

After tomorrow, I'm off for the rest of the year.  I'll likely be playing my fair share of video games.  I'd like to increase my XBox Live friends list so I can play online and actually feel some connection to the people I'm playing with.  So:

• Who's got XBox Live and what's your gamertag? Mine is, appropriately, “marklio” (I know it's lame, but I like consistency).  Feel free to leave yours here, or just send me a friend invitation (they really should have called that “friendvitation“).
• What are you playing? I should have Halo 2 by Christmas, but I'm looking for other cool online games.  I rented Star Wars Battlefront, which is pretty fun.

I've been using the MSN Desktop Search (I'll refer to it as that since I have no use for the rest of the toolbar suite and immediately turned it off) for the past few days and it is good enough to make me uninstall Google Desktop Search.  The fact that it, by default, indexes source code, xml and anything I can write an IFilter for was enough for me.  I also like the search as you type.  Very well done.

The only problem I have is it seems to conflict with WindowBlinds, software that lets me load thousands of visual themes for windows.  I have to unload WindowBlinds, search for something, and load it back up again.  Then everything works fine.  I suspect it has to do with the order that applications register hooks (which has caused problems like this before).

I picked up the component cables for the XBox last night (they're different than the ones in that link.  It looks more like the Monster Cable version).  I must say, they are the highest quality first party component cables for a video game system I've ever seen.  They also add the digital optical audio output.  For only $20, there's no need to waste a colossal amount of money on the Monster Cable ones. 

There's nothing like shooting Jar-Jar Binks with a sniper rifle in HD widescreen 5.1 Dolby Digital goodness.

I've also updated my holiday wishlist accordingly.

[UPDATE:12/16/2004]  I took the box over to Dave's last night where we romped on Jar Jar for a couple of hours.  He's got a direct view CRT which is inherently sharper than my rear projection CRT and it is definitely quite beautiful.  Can't wait to get Halo 2.

Today is the birthday of my good friend Jason Owens. Happy Birthday!  This is a picture from last Christmas. I miss the old birthdays where we'd all go spend the night at your house and play slaughterball and watch The Three Amigos.

Happy Birthday!

If you're interested in photography, you might be interested in the comments that Jerry left on my wishlist entry, especially if you've got a Canon Digital Rebel.

Jerry, I think the stabilization will help with my indoor problems.  I'm sure you know the situation I mean.  The light is just perfect on a sleeping cat, so you don't want to destroy it with a flash, but you can't capture it at a low ISO setting without camera shake and the tri/mono-pod would take too long to find/attach/adjust before the cat wakes up and ruins everything.  So I think the longer range becomes more important.  I enjoyed your lens quite a bit, so I think that's the one I'm going to aim for.  Besides, at wider angles, the low light problems become less prevalent.

BTW, I picked up the battery grip very soon after playing with yours this summer.  I love that thing.

I think you made a copy/paste error on your sweet bag url in your comments.  What was it?  I couldn't find it in the short time I searched. I'm going to add that too.

I've updated my wishlist accordingly.

Brad Abrams points to an article that shows an upcoming feature of Oracle 10g that appears to be CLR support for stored procedures. Wow, that's very interesting!  I wonder what runtime they're using for their *nix platforms.  Mono?  Or is this only for Windows installations?  I'm going to have to find out.

We use Oracle as the persistence layer of a rather enormous (in terms of disk usage) web-based data analysis tool.  The questions I am really interested in here are:

What runtime are they using? .NET? Mono?  Will this be available only on Windows boxes?  I doubt very much that Microsoft, which is soon to release CLR support in SQL Server (Yukon), would be working closely with Oracle to give them that same feature.  Maybe I'm wrong.

How will they map between Oracle types and CLR types?  This is a huge issue right now just with using Oracle with .NET.  If we're forced to use Oracle-specific types for numbers, it defeats part of the argument in my mind.

I'm going to do some more looking into this, but I'm pretty excited that the CLR would get an endorsement like this from a company that has been pretty far in the Java camp.

I recently began putting just about everything, especially at work, into a revision control repository.  I find that I feel much more comfortable toying with changes in a presentation or document if I know I can easily get the previous version of it.  I noticed Martin Fowler seems to be headed in the same direction and has come to the same conclusions I have about revision control support in applications.  For instance, right now it's very difficult to tell the difference between two version of a presentation.

I noticed the latest version of FxCop has an option to save the file in a format that is friendly for version control.  Perhaps the new XML-based office formats will give us similar capability?

[Update 12:35] I forgot to mention Subversion, without which, the above would be very painful.  I'd also be interested in other people's revision control story.  How much has it seeped into your computing life beyond coding?