The multiplayer demo of Battlefield 1942 has me all weak in the knees. My roommates and I have been playing for the past few days, and I can’t really remember if there’s ever been more shouting, yelling, and screaming in our house. There’s just something great about being able to drive an aircraft carrier, take off from it in a bomber, dogfight with another plane, strafe a tank and bomb it, bail out and parachute down, and then steal a jeep and drive it like a madman around an island all in the space of 5 minutes.

The Dismemberment Plan has a video for their song “Time Bomb” on their site. It’s a pretty cool video, and contains some pretty slick high tech trickery. Then again, I guess it could have been done on an iBook with a copy of Final Cut Pro. I can never tell anymore. The point is, check it out. Rock. (edited to correct the link… whoops)

The Stradley Fo’ reunion this past weekend went off without a hitch and was a lot of fun, although it was another one of the increasingly frequent reminders of how fast time seems to pass. I can’t believe that it was almost 5 years ago that I used to spend all my time on the 4th floor of Stradley hall. They were kind enough to adopt me (since my own dorm had nothing going for it), and countless wacky adventures ensued. Even though not everyone that I was hoping to see made it out, it was still a good time. It’s great when you’re able to get back together with people you haven’t seen in a long time and just jump right back in to the fun. The only thing that it really needed was a good game of Bond, but I can’t complain.

The other piece of news I have is that I’m no longer unemployed. Its nothing to get too excited about though, I just managed to get a cashier/sales position at CompUSA. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. However, it had finally gotten down to the point where I really needed to just get something to pay the bills. The job search continues. Now I’m even more motivated though, because my goal is to stay at CompUSA for as little time as possible. It’s just not really quite what I was hoping to do with my degree.

Rainlendar is the kind of program I’ve always wanted, but never had a clue how go about coming up with myself. Good thing somebody else finally did it, and did a really great job of it at that. Its a skinnable little calendar that can sit on your desktop with a transparent background and look pretty, like so. As if that weren’t cool enough, you can also add events to it that show up in a tool tip when you mouse over the date. Oh yeah, it’s nice.

I’d like to give “propers” out to my boy Neal. Not only has he just recently gone all out and starting kicking out daily updates of his site, but he’s serving his site off of his Playstation2. If that’s not the coolest thing that’s ever been done with a gaming console, I don’t know what is. Ok, so there’s this. Still, the idea of running a real OS on a video game machine makes the geeky parts of my brain all nice and tingly. Go stalk him electronically, its a good read.

Well, I certainly had an exciting and eventful weekend. I finally managed to work up the courage to tell Jolayne that I liked her and had been secretly attracted to her for some time. (I don’t know why I keep operating under the junior high mentality that if you like a girl, the last thing in the world you’d want to do is let her know that you do.) Longtime readers of the flutter may remember her as my sparring partner and one time partner in crime. And guess what? She likes me too! I know, go figure, but she actually does. (And she even knows about my dark TechTV addiction and that I named my computer Nerdstation.) How’s that for some good news?

Edsger Dijkstra passed away two days ago. Since computer science is still so young and most of its legends are still living, it just seems very odd to have one of them pass. Dijkstra’s name was one of the first that I learned as a beginning CS student, and one that I would hear often during my classes. He was brilliant without a doubt and did so much groundbreaking work especially in securing the mathematical foundations of programming. Not to mention that as I just learned from his obituary, he had a van used for travel that he called the Touring Machine. That alone sends his geek cred through the roof.

Back from Chicago, and I’ve decided that I’ve definitely got to move there at some point in the not too distant future. There are many reasons of course, but the clincher is that Chicago’s just the kind of place where Rob Zombie will hold the door for your grandmother on her birthday. Maybe. Let me explain. On Monday we took my grandma out to eat lunch at Ann Sather’s and on the way in we noticed a large bus parked out front. We were all kind of curious about the bus because even though it looked like a tourist bus, it only had a couple windows that were all covered with blinds. Then on our way out, as we were heading out the front door someone was coming in at the same time. It was one of those brief awkward moments where no one’s sure who should go through the door first. After a flicker of hesitation my family seized the moment and headed out the door. As I passed I only got a quick look at the guy, who had long dirty dreadlock-like hair, a goatee, and tattoos. If I’d had any reason to think so I would have thought to myself “Hey, that looks a lot like Rob Zombie”, but of course I didn’t… yet. Then as we were passing the bus that we were discussing earlier, my mom spotted a valet or something coming off and decided to ask what kind of bus it was. “It’s for a rock band.” he replied. Overhearing this, a guy standing near by jumped in and asked what band. The valet replied, “Rob Zombie, you just missed him by a few seconds.” And he pointed back up the street in the direction of the restaurant we had just left. So there you have it. I think that Rob Zombie held the door open for my family, but I can never be sure and that uncertainty will slowly but surely drive me mad. Still from now on if I see Rob on the MTV singing about the undead and whatnot I’ll just think “Sorry Rob, I’m not buying it.” I’ll know that deep down he’s a real sweetie that can’t help but be a gentleman to a sweet old lady out with her family. Kudos, Rob Zombie, kudos.

Found some disappointing news at Pitchfork today. It looks like DeSoto Records, a really great label run by two former members of the much too underrated Jawbox, is going to be shutting down soon. This raises the question “What’s going to happen to the Plan?”. On top of that Burning Airlines, a post-Jawbox J. Robbins project on DeSoto is breaking up as well. Sad news for the rock and roll.

I’m off to Chicago this weekend for my grandmother’s 80th birthday. Should be a good time, and I always love going to Chicago. I think I’ll be back either Monday or Tuesday.

The latest release candidate of Winamp3 is the first one I’ve really gotten excited about, and I do mean excited. After four previous candidates that just didn’t quite seem up to it, this one comes really really close to being everything I was hoping for. There are still a few minor quirks and things that I don’t know if I like, but at this point I haven’t found any real bugs to complain about. I’m sure all the Nullsoft developers are breathing a sigh of relief that it’s now Will Gorman Approved&#8482 At the very least I’m sure my friend Tobin is just grateful that I won’t be whining and complaining about how terrible all the release candidates are anymore. It’s not totally ready, but lets just say that if (and God forbid) Winamp2 were tragically lost at sea during a polar research voyage I could pick up the shattered pieces of my life and get along quite nicely with Winamp3 instead.