I hope everyone had a happy Easter.  (If your into that kind of thing, of course.)  We did; went to church and then to my in-laws for dinner and a movie.  Tonight I am getting together with a friend to play some Warmachine.  My wife is headed out of town for a friends wedding so I’ll be a bachelor for a week.  I’ll drop her off at the airport after work tomorrow.  That should allow me to get some PDF work done this week as well.

My brother had to evacuate his house over the weekend due to floods in Indiana.  He’s OK and his house avoided any flooding, but it was touch-and-go for a while.

My laptop is still kind of hosed.  I am using a different one right now.  Still not sure exactly what the problem is, but it is quite annoying.

I am trading emails with the Werecabbages to farm out some work on the Omens of Armageddon project.  It is still in the very early stages, but I hope to work something out with them and start the project moving forward.  The have been doing great work on the SAW series for LPJ Design, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about them.

Work has really had me busy this week.  Yesterday I worked fifteen hours!  (Not counting the commute.)  I’ll be working a little late today as well.  We have these conferences every quarter that require a lot of support; they used to be Friday/Saturday with a Thursday setup; but this time they are doing it Wed/Thurs with part of the setup on Tues and some Wed night.  (Thus my fifteen hour day.)  The overtime will be nice, as I am saving my nickels for a new version of the Adobe Creative Suite.

My laptop is all messed up.  The CPU is maxed out at 100% all the time, so it has spyware or some such on it.  I pulled the hard drive, put in a new one and am re-imaging it as we speak.  Since I have the new desktop I can do a “clean slate” on my work laptop and start over.  I am due for a new one this October or November as my work replaces laptops on a three year lifecycle.

I spoke with Louis Porter Jr. the other night about Paizo’s announcement to support 3.5 rather than jump to 4th.  I have always planned to keep supporting third edition as well as 4th edition.  (Well, depending on how the new GSL shakes out as none of us have seen it yet.) I think that PDF publishers stand to gain because they will be the only companies supporting 3.5; certainly WOTC will not be.  And presumably many of the “larger” mainstream print publishers will be jumping on the 4th edition train.  So I see Paizo as staking out a very large part of the 3rd edition support real-estate which is a very good move for them.

I found a mountain bike on Crags List the other day.  I emailed the guy and arranged to meet him at a local Metro parking lot for a test-ride.  I ended up with a Specialized Hard Rock in near perfect shape for $150.  (Thanks to the GM’s day sale I had the procedes in my PayPal account.)  I’m very happy with it, and can’t wait for the weather to get a bit nicer so I can put it to good use.  My wife splurged purchased a brand new bike last year, so now we can both go riding.

Unless you’ve been under a rock (or just aren’t as interested in Gun Rights as your humble author) you’ll have heard that the Heller case has been argued before the Supreme Court.  This will be one of the biggest cases of this century.  We expect to hear a decision in June.  I predict an individual rights decision invalidating Washington D.C.’s handgun ban at the very least.  How far it goes beyond that will spur a decades worth of lawsuits aimed at defining and repealing gun control legislation.

I put Adventurer Essentials: Iron Rations up last night.  I’ll work on the next project tonight so I will have it ready to go once AE:IR drops off the front page.

I got the new computer all squared away; I added two Gigs of memory, five USB ports and a 500GB hard drive to it over the weekend.

I am hearing all kinds of bad news about our financial system, from Bear-Stearns to the housing market and the value of the dollar.  I feel we are in for some very rough times ahead.

I saw the movie The Brave One last night.  Loved it.  It was very well done, and the ending did not disapoint me as I was expecting it to.   I also saw Hitman, which was a fun romp.  It will not win any awards, but it made for a good time.  Tonight I plan on watching No Country for Old Men.  Looking forward to it.

Big day tomorrow.  A REALLY BIG day.  The Supreme Court will be hearing arguments in the Heller case.

Wow, halfway through the month already!  Time is flying by, and yet my days seem so slow.

The last couple nights have been filled up with me working on the new workstation.  I had some trouble blowing away Vista and installing XP Pro.  Among other things, I had to turn off the RAID in the Bios.  I got XP installed, downloaded the motherboard drivers from the Asus website as well as the video card drivers.  Once those were installed I could get the Nic card configured so the box is now on the internet; which makes getting all the needed patches and drivers much easier.  So as of last night I have the dual monitors working and the internet connection configured.  I installed Firefox, the Adobe Creative Suite, Office and a few other apps.  I have an external hard drive, two internal drives and some memory to upgrade as well.  One of my monitors is a Wacom Cintiq 18SX pen-tablet display; which I love!

It acts just like a tablet, so you can ‘draw’ right on the screen.  Until now I have been using my laptop for all my PDF work, but now that I have a workstation I plan to give the tablet-display a workout.

I am also saving my pennies for an upgrade of the Adobe Creative Suite.  I want to get the Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Master Collection which will include everything; from Illustrator and Photoshop, InDesign and Flash, as well After Effects and all the video production products.  I would love to start working with Flash to do some neat things with my product pre-views.

I’ll be working on PDF’s this weekend, so look for a couple of releases soon.

I got a new computer last night! I have a laptop from work that I have been using, which works quite well. But with a wife and a teenage daughter at home, one computer isn’t enough to go around. I am always competing with them on the weekends and evenings for CPU time, which is when I do most of my publishing work. I have been toying with getting a better desktop, and with the sales from last month and the GM’s Day Sale I had enough in my PayPal account that I could swing buying a desktop. So last night I went to BestBuy to look at my options. I ended up seeing an “open box” CPU selling for half of what it normally sold for. 2GB memory, 400GB hard drive and a dual core processor. Best of all it has tons of room for additional drives and components, and a dual monitor video card. I am going to blow Vista away and put XP Pro on it tonight, re-load the Adobe Creative Suite as well as my other apps and transfer my files to my new workstation.

I got some work done on AE: Iron Rations yesterday. I did the cover and started the layout. I hope to have it out tonight or tomorrow. (Depending on how long I am installing software tonight.) I have several other projects “on deck” after that as well.

I picked up Dark Heresy the other day. I have been a 40K player/fan since 1986, and have been waiting for the RPG since then.

[BEGIN SIDE RANT]

Why GW waited twenty freaking YEARS before putting it out, then canceling it after the first printing sold out before it was even published I’ll never know. But, this is the same company that fought CCG’s for years and years, saying they would NEVER do a CCG and then decided to do one ten years later, you know…after the white-hot CCG market had cooled off. The list of GW’s famously bad business decisions are legion. Rumor has it that a small company called Blizzard once approached them about doing a game based on Warhammer. The deal fell through and that game later became Warcraft. Then Warcraft 2, Starcraft and later The World of Warcraft. Could have been World of Warhammer. But, true to form, GW will be releasing their own version ten years after they should have. And as a former employee of GW at their HQ in Maryland, I have seen all of this first-hand. Having said that, they are a great miniature company. Every time they re-do a range of minis they step up and create figures I want to buy and paint. I love the product, but those limey’s in charge have some real issues.

[END SIDE RANT]

Back to the 40K RPG. The production value on this massive book is great. They left out a ton of stuff; no stats for Space Marines, Orks or Eldar. They want you to start out as part of an Inquisitor’s group so you are limited in that way. All in an effort to get you to drop more cash on the next couple of books that will expand your options. I find it kind of annoying, but not a deal-breaker since it’s easy enough with the basic rules to stat-out just about whatever you want to do. My group will probobly begin doing this game after we finish up our Star Wars Saga edition campaign.

Speaking of the Saga Edition, I took a few pictures of the miniatures our GM converted and painted of ourr characters and a few important NPC’s.

I got the Flash flip book up for the 1980’s sourcebook late last night.  For some reason Photoshop was giving me issues with a batch job so I had to create each page individually.

Next up is probably AE: Iron Rations.

Back from sunny, warm L.A. and ready to get back to work.  I had a great time there; even the funeral was good.  (There was more laughing than crying, it was that kind of funeral.)  The weather was great, and I am now in love with Manhattan Beach.  If CA wasn’t run by socialists and just waiting for “the Big One” I would consider moving out there.  (Maybe a summer home.)

I’ll get the D20 Decade: the 1980’s up later today and follow that up with Adventurer Essentials: Iron Rations.  Sales are going well so far for the month, thanks to the GM’s Day Sale.  The trip cut into any promotion I was going to do, but people are still finding our products.

More info soon.

I flew back in on the red-eye flight early this morning. Dropped the wife off at her job and promptly went to bed and slept all day. Will get back into the groove first thing tomorrow.