I actually played for a change!

Been a while, sorry about that.  Had some real life stuff come up.  We were going to buy this nice big new house here in Dallas, but once I started looking over the contract I noticed this thing called "Binding Mandatory Arbitration".  This basically means if you buy a house in Texas, and many other states, you give up the right to sue.  This sucks, it means when I blow $400K on a house, and in 3 years the foundation breaks in half from shoddy workmanship, I have to use an arbitrator and can't get a lawyer to sue the builder.  This is *very* bad, and basically you give up your 7th amendment rights.  Its unethical in *every* way, and until everybody realizes that and demands the home builders change, the companies will continue to screw us :(

On to better news.  Actually played a few small 1:1 BT games today, enjoyed it.  The event was a little intro game celebrating the release of the boxed set and Charlie Tango ran it.  We ended up having quite a bit of good discussions after the gaming ended, and a few things were mentioned about the history of CGL/FASA/etc that I didn't know, and helped me understand a few things about CGL now.  I kind of doubt I'll ever be "cool" enough for TPTB to accept me as one of their lieutenants, but I'm going to continue with my projects anyway, and just hope that Interstellar Operations blows me away :)

As for what I've been up to lately.... its been all over, but here is a breakdown:

• I have been entering in all the planets and who owns them from all the maps in all the new handbooks.  The maps are great, but we don't have a list of planets/owners/coordinates to make our own maps.  So I'm doing this.  Give me a short time after the Kurita book comes out to parse all the data and such, but I'll have *all* the planets on all those maps, and their coordinates.
• I blew $1K of my own money hiring a contractor to help me out with planet generation (accurate to 10km/pixel) and regional terrain generators (10km chunks, accurate to 10m) so I can map out planets of all types, at all scales, with relatively small amounts of drive space (64mb or so per world, uncompressed).  This will help me with what I have wanted to do since I started playing so many years ago.  That is the ability to conquer the inner sphere, one soldier at a time, on my computer, hopefully against other humans somewhere else or at least decent AI.
• Played Crysis 2, installed it and it was in the background running for a week until I finished it.  Not a bad game, not a great game, kinda boring to me but there were a few neat parts.
• Spent a bit of extra time at work creating a central server database, that has a list of all our servers, various attributes and properties, and will soon become the core of all of our monitoring and system information.  There are simply no applications on the market, at any price, that have the versatility that Match.com needs.
• Had a bunch of conversations on the forums about infantry being broken.  The overall consensus seems to be just to have Hard and Soft attack values, which requires recalculating all the weapon stats.  Good news is I have entered in all the weapons in a worksheet so I'll have that list soon.  While I still think infantry needs to be at the squad level, if one could accept the platoon actually is across all adjacent hexes, and never allow any 2 platoons within 2 hexes of each other I think I can accept it.

I'm off to finish inputting system data for the maps, hopefully I can finish tonight with what has been published, can go onto the infantry thing (which I may write up and create a PDF out of), and then on to learn some orbital mechanics.