Yep, I’m still around. I haven’t really done anything earth-shattering in the past eight months but I am generally happy with my normal routine. Activities include, roughly in order of time: sleeping, working, eating, TV/movie/fiddling on the iMac time, playing the 360, and playing Magic. Its the busy season at work, but things have been going well. The college is less then 40 days away from launching its new web site and as its been noted, I am involved. Not a whole lot on TV that I watch except the Daily Show and Colbert Report. I have been subscribed to Netflix for a month or so and have been enjoying that. I recently finished Mass Effect on the 360 and my gamerscore crossed 10,000 for what little thats worth. Thats about it for day to day stuff. Below the break I have a few other tidbits I want to mention. I don’t know how frequently I will post, but I should be able to update more then twice a year.

I finally got tired of the slowdowns and outages that seem to plague the my ISP’s DNS servers and started using OpenDNS (Red Ferret Referrer). It seems faster then the ISP’s servers and provides relatively helpful error messages when sites are not available.

In October, Google Mail began supporting IMAP (UNEASYsilence Referrer, Engadget Referrer, Gizmodo Referrer, bb Gadgets Referrer, Ars Technica Referrer). Lack of IMAP access was the only thing stopping me from using GMail, so now I use it for all of my personal email.

As Tommy alluded to back in March part of the reason why I haven’t been posting is after I installed Mac OS 10.5, Photoshop 7 stopped working and that is what I had been using to resize images. As Tommy noted last year there aren’t many (if any) good simple graphics packages for Mac OS X. Everything is either really simple or on par with Photoshop. Adobe brought back Photoshop Elements 6 (Gizmodo Referrer) for the Mac but I am not sure its worth $70 to me. There is also Adobe Photoshop Express (Gizmodo Referrer, Slashdor Referrer, Ars Technica on the Photoshop Express EULA) which is their Flash browser-based free version that I haven’t gotten around to playing with. For now I am using GIMP for Mac OS X. Perhaps if I really start posting again, I will look at all of my options again.

The image at the top of the post is from Scott Ramsoomair’s (author of VG Cats) take on the song that plays in the end credits of The Orange Box - Portal entitled Still Alive. As usual you can find the original credits on YouTube. The song is rather amusing as is Scott’s Flash version and I enjoyed watching ndpants play through most of Portal. Some of the stuff that goes on in the later levels though were too disorienting for me to handle and I had to look away.