A couple of weeks ago, I saw one of my best friends for the first time in years. Ryan had been in the navy and all over the world, and it’s nice to have him back around. We spent a lot of time hanging out in high school. We used to play old PC games with a couple of crappy machines and a null modem cable, thrashing each other in WarCraft (the original, Orcs and Humans, and just a demo version at that) and a pathetic shooter most of you have never heard of - Corridor 7, from the people that would go on to develop the unforgettably bad BUILD-engine based William Shatner’s TekWar. Corridor 7 was terrible, but it had multiplayer that functioned, which was good enough for us at the time. It was great talking to Ryan after so long. He agreed to be in the wedding party, despite reservations about having to wear a tux.

This Sunday sees the US release of the Nintendo DS Lite, and I will be getting one. Stacey will too. I’m actually selling my PSP to help fund it, though I have every intention on buying another PSP later in the future (it’s Sony’s worst-kept secret that a PSP revision is planned for the future, with a large additional internal memory as a likely feature addition). I can live without the PSP (and/or borrow Logan’s from time to time) in the meanwhile. I am very interested in Field Commander, LocoRoco, and Killzone: Liberation. Maybe we’ll rent those for the trip to Texas at the end of this month.

In other news, I dumped Gentoo Linux (actually, I just tar’d and bzip’d my root directory up and stored it on my file server) and installed Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu (and the Kubuntu desktop) has gotten very nice. I always end up back with Gentoo, but this one might finally be the binary distro that lets me live without wanting to go back to a tedious but flexible source-based distro. I especially love the now-very-workable NetworkManager (and KNetworkManager) utility, which is absent in Gentoo.

Lastly, my wife-to-be and I have been doing our wedding registries. A lot of stuff falls under the category of “don’t care” for me, so she’s had free reign over a lot of that (like, say, dish towels - just not my area of interest). I have won a few key skirmishes in the war of contested items, though. I got my silverware of choice, and I think we have finally agreed on my choice of bedding. Most stuff, however, is all her, and that’s fine. I’m certain she’ll make our home look beautiful and have it well-stocked with everything we need. I’ve even come around to her choice of dinnerware, which reminds me of “light speed” in the original Star Wars movies.

All is well. I hope to really get deep into writing code over the next couple of weeks. I’ve said that I’m going to do it, but so far it hasn’t quite happened. Starting is the hardest part - once I’m in, I’ll stay coding until I drop.