Alright. I've got to get better at posting to this thang! There's so much that has happened that I don't think I could list it all. I'm just going to start in and explain things as I post them here.

Right now I'm under a lot of stress at work (who isn't, right?). Many of my workgroup and myself included often have to work more than 40 hour weeks just to stay on top of our day-to-day issues. This is starting to affect my personal life since I can't be at home as much as I'd like to. Currently, I'm trying to get all of my co-workers to help track all of the projects that we just haven't had time to get to but know that we need to get to. Hopefully, we'll be able to collect enough of these items to justify getting some new people. It's going to be tough, however, because that will more than likely mean that we'll need to get rid of some of our other people to do it.

I had a question come in from a co-worker about using GPS with a Palm Tungsten T3. I've looked into this myself, and I suggested he get some kind of low end GPS unit, and some good software for the Palm. That way you don't have to spend a bundle for a piece of hardware that duplicates features from mapping software that could run on the Palm. I may do some checking later on this...

I'm working on trying to improve the performance of some Ascential DataStage jobs that are calling routines that use Universe BASIC SQL calls to call out to some stored procedures on an IBM iSeries server to perform key management, and some other data validation. I'll post what I find out about this.

Being lover of games, I found this story about the video game industry facing a crisis of creativity interesting: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=3&u=/nm/20040328/tc_nm/biztech_games_dc
I've always had a dream to be able to create some massive online world for some sort of game that is really fun for people of all kinds to play. I think There(http://www.there.com/) is a good example of a game that has wide appeal. The game is really whatever you want it to be: chatroom, adventure, racing, or whatever! I was in on the beta for this game, and I remember how much fun it was just to get in and fly around on a hoverboard in the game. Just seeing the sights, and doing tricks. There was no reward in the game for doing this than the act itself, but that was enough!

I'd love to come up with a game like that maybe as some kind of research project on human behavior in a game world. For instance, some people seem to degenerate into the most basest form of life when playing an online game.

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