If I may...

Allow me to bitch for a moment.

Nero. Yeah, the CD/DVD creation suite. Remember when it was good? When it wasn't horribly bloated, infectious, and broken? Yeah, me too... Man, those were good days. What used to be a full-featured, clean, and very effective piece of software now tries to do everything at once, integrate itself into Windows, and quite simply doesn't work on many systems. I could've dealt with the bloat and the integration because I was able to cut them out and focus on the core application, but then my audio CDs started acting-up. If it wasn't skipping tracks (even when previewed in Nero, before being written to CD; this was fixed by manually reverting to an older mp3pro.dll), it was including huge chunks of silence at the ends of certain tracks (no other application had this issue, using the same source material). So I started looking into my alternatives. Roxio? Still bitter from their past pieces of trash; they've got some explaining to do :) Alcohol? Nice, but does some really strange things to the registry, and doesn't do audio anyway. CDBurnerXP Pro? Definitely a favourite, but doesn't support DAO burning on a number of newer drives, and still has some annoying bugs (reporting that the disc is full before anything has been added; having to force it to burn). Cheetah? Now we're getting warmer, but the feature set is a little sparse. Well, I'm currently trying GEAR PRO, as it looks like the product with most comparable feature set to Nero (the good one). I'll keep you posted about how it goes. Oh, and don't bother suggesting iTunes for burning audio CDs; the ones it burns are always really touchy and seem to randomly skip.

Next on the block is NHL2K7. I was off to a great start (3-0-0) with my Leafs, but then came Florida. The first time I played them, as my goalie was holding the puck to freeze it, one of their players poke-checked him well after play had stopped (but just before the whistle), took the puck, and scored while my goalie just kinda stood there... Obviously, Raycroft was as shocked as I was. So I reloaded my season and restarted the Florida game. This time, play was stopped, Bouwmeester suffered a major injury and was to be out for a few days... And then somehow scored on me later in the game!? I won in a shootout, but still, what the hell? Oh, and just to add insult to injury, at one point Jokinen skated from beside the net, around Raycroft, and scored. Here's the thing: RAYCROFT DIDN'T MOVE! HE JUST STOOD THERE AT THE SIDE OF THE NET!?!?!? Seriously, I'm starting to have doubts about this game... Maybe the dev team were Panthers fans.