It’s been just a week since I’ve last played Halo. I’ve been busy, I guess, with all sorts of things, the Easter holiday not being the least remarkable. Does that mean that it’s time for some re-runs? No, but I might dip into that “I wrote these a while ago” bag of Rants and run with some of those, so the site keeps moving along… some of those are actually pretty good and sorta timeless so I’ve got no issues with that – the only reason why they haven’t been posted is to spread out the Ranting a bit. But what else has been going on?

MCAD testing… I’ve got two out of three tests done, but I’m still trying to find time to read up on the last exam. Easier said than done.

Noah just cruised by and waved at me, on this third day of straight rain – if there’s another 37 to follow this one, I’ll leave a forwarding address.

Consequently, the entire state of Connecticut smells like a wet dog.

School snuck up on me and I have jam packed class; I’m told I have one of the most popular classes in the program right now, which is interesting – either students think I’m an easy A or they want to hear more about C#. If it’s the former, they are in for a shocking surprise: the MCAD testing has made me remember what testing is supposed to be like – mean – so the exam and projects will be harder than anything I’d done up to now. I’m just getting used to the notion of having a wait list created for something I’m teaching.

Class preparation is also a time eater: I’ve had my slides done for a long while, and re-read some of them last week which prompted a few changes. And then after showing them in class, they need more mods and that was more time. Updating the assignments and preparing a test too… oi. Lots of work coming in my downtime.

And then there’s the plug-in crap for SharpMT. That actually got an hour of time last night, and is coming along nicely… basically, a developer can download this DLL that’s a Class Library with the ISharpMTExtension interface in it. Build a DLL that inherits this interface and SharpMT will be able to see it and send (and receive) information to and from it. I also started on a couple of bug fixes for 2.5, because of some connection issues that might be creeping up through the proxy support… we’ll see. I’m hoping to get in the bug fixes and new plug-in support at the same time, but it will be a juggling act.

The 9/11 Commission didn’t hear me, so they’re still debating and causing an uglier case of gout. My cousin raised a good point during Easter dinner: “If we were ‘properly’ warned, and the Pres wanted to go and stem off an attack, the government woulda went nuts and the world would have called him land hungry – no one would have believed that an attack on the US was possible before 9/11″ – he’s right. Could you see how the Republicans would have reacted if Bill kept his pants on long enough to respond to a threat? The same way the Democrats would have reacted if Dubbya went running into Iraq or Afghanistan to preemptively root out a terror cell in 2000: they woulda flipped. No one could have prevented 9/11, so stop trying to blame anyone, other than the terrorists that performed the attack!

Oh and Easter dinner? Lots of good food. No pasta. It seems that the single comment I had with regards to Thanksgiving dinner has been misquoted and now I hear that we’ll have no pasta for any holiday, ever. How we got from “Gee, can’t we have turkey on Thanksgiving [in addition to or in place of pasta (because I didn’t say I was Anti-Pasta)]” became “I hate pasta and don’t ever want to be served to me again on a holiday and everyone else has to suffer because of it” is beyond my knowledge, but that’s the state of holiday dining right now – the food is always good tho, so I’ve got no real complaints… I just hate being misquoted or taken out of context.

Sometime this week, post 400 was added. Sometime over the last two months, the Blog turned two years old. I considered compiling an HTC Help File to package together the “archives” but who cares, really? Not only are they online, but I hardly think that my musings would be suited for a “take with you” text. Anyway, the site still grows…

And yes, my Halo fans, Donut will return to your local CTF server soon…