Been too long...

Let's start with the easy stuff...

Grabbed the demos for Iron Man and Condemned 2. Iron Man was kinda fun, if simplistic; I'm curious to see how the full game pans out. Condemned 2 is just weird. I wasn't really sure what was going on, couldn't see much, and then Yahtzee's video review of the full game just made me sad... I really dug the first Condemned, and this sequel's just rubbing me the wrong way. I'm sure I'll get around to playing it some day, but I'm suddenly not in any kind of rush to do so.

I did pick up a used copy of Assassin's Creed for XBOX 360, and it's a hell of a lot of fun :) SUPER repetitive, but the fantastic graphics, wonderfully cinematic presentation of a vaguely interesting plot, and freedom to run wild makes it all quite bearable. I like this game like I like Crackdown; it's the freedom that makes it fun.

My main PC is acting up. It's crashing at different points of the start-up process, sometimes with error beeps before POSTing, sometimes during POST, and sometimes while Vista is starting up. I've tested the RAM, hard drive, and CPU extensively, tweaked various settings in the BIOS, checked the motherboard for burst capacitors and the like, and even reseated and rerouted various cables inside the case... Still not doing the trick. The weird thing is that it only does this once after turning the machine on, and then boots fine after a reset... Gonna get going on some external data backup next :\

Now then, the big stuff. Finally got an opportunity to go to town on the server at work. The system is now split over three drives (two RAID 1 arrays and a backup-image drive); e-mail, database, user, and shared data is now organized in a sensible manner; backups include the RAID arrays, the backup drive, tape backups, and a clone of the system drive on another hard drive that's sitting in a fire/waterproof safe. I fixed various bugs during the overhaul process as well, including a few long-standing (from before my time here) Exchange and time synchronization issues that had been affecting things like backups and security audits. Up next is a RAM upgrade (Dell was late shipping it to us; just got here this morning) and some spring cleaning of outdated user profiles and enormous log files (many resulting from those Exchange issues). I was at work for some 20 hours straight getting everything done, but it was actually really interesting and a lot of fun in the end :)