- monday 04 17 00 -

Hidey-ho - Verndroid got around to Delta! To be honest, I didn't expect this map to do this well - I have been musing over some revisions for it for a little while, and after the success I had tweaking Gamma, I will probably tackle this sometime next week. Glad that some folks are enjoying my work, and hoping that I can find time to do some more eventually.

Still working on Dune - again. Every time I go through these books, I find new things that I missed the first time. Herbert crammed so much detail and information into every paragraph that it takes multiple readings just to get through the first few layers. I think I'm going to go through the novels again, and then try to pick up a copy of House Atreides that was released late last year. I don't have any illusions that Brian Herbert has matched his father's work, but I can hope to get at least a short fix ...

Summertime is rolling into Dallas already - it was a steamy 85 degrees today, and I'm pretty sure this summer is going to be nasty. Fingers crossed that we'll at least get the occasional rain shower this year ...

- saturday 04 15 00 -

Just to let everyone (yeah, all three of you who stopped by this year :)) know, I've uploaded the new version of Arrakeen Gamma, called Arrakeen Gamma 2 - original, eh? This version will retain a different bsp filename, but all other information remains the same. This will hopefully eliminate problems with people having two files of the same name and different versions. If you download the new version, email me about it.

More later ...

- friday 04 14 00 -

Broke and trying to buy a house at the same time .. yeah. Not much else going on - spent the week off messing around trying to pay bills, figure out where I'm going to be living in a month, and fixing Arrakeen Gamma. Got a middlin' review over at Z-Axis - they liked it, but not quite as much as my previous works of *cough* art *cough*. While Alpha is requiring a major overhaul to fix vis and gameplay related issues, Gamma really didn't need a whole lot of touching up. Two major architectural changes in two different rooms, some brush deletion, and adjustment of a couple of area portal brushes, and the map runs like a dream, both r_speed and botplay-wise. I'm not expecting the boys at Z-Axis to do another review, but if you've downloaded the previous version, check back in a day or two and grab the new file, tenatively titled, um, Arrakeen Gamma2. I'll link it when I get it uploaded.

Got in one session of SiN on my new machine, and it totally rocks, to say the least. Unfortunately, an excellent multi-player game has languished due to lack of servers to run it on, and the game-killing bugs that Activision released it with. Ah well, there's always the memories ...

Re-reading both Dune and Silence of the Lambs. And reading some MCSE certification books for NT4.0 Workstation - nothing like a bit of totally dry and tasteless tech manual to whet the appetite for a rich, juicy novel or two. Movies - The Siege and The Long Kiss Goodnight - both solid, entertaining movies, with lots of loud explosions, weird character motivations, and in the case of the latter, Samuel L. Jackson topping some of his own lines from Pulp Fiction. And Brian Cox III as Nathan - ROTFL ...

- wednesday 04 05 00 -

Damn, I feel like an expectant mother or something, waiting to see if any of the other review sites are going to get around to looking at my maps. In the meantime, I've reorganized and updated my mapping pages. Stop by and take a look, eh?

- monday 04 03 00 -

And they like Arrakeen Beta even better. Get it here - if you've downloaded one of my maps, send me some commentary.

On other fronts - joy to the world, I got it working! Win2K, WinNT, and Linux 6.1 are all up and running on the old Celery machine. Thanks to the gobs of online docs for Linux, I should soon be able to skip the boot disk crap for Linux and load it directly from the hard drive - just have to get some DOS formatted floppies somewhere.

Grooviness of a mathematical kind - UltraFractal - a very cool shareware fractal generator. Found the link from another very nice looking site, called Third Apex to Fractovia. Check 'em out if that's your bag.

Not doing much reading, aside from going back through The Cobra Event by Richard Preston, the author of The Hot Zone. I like the storyline, and the book certainly has a horrifying premise, but Preston writes fiction like he writes non-fiction. It's more of a clinical analysis of a fictitious scenario than a story - the reader never feels like there's supposed to be any emotional involvement in the story. The few points where Preston tries to connect the reader to his protagonist are awkward and feel really stilted. The Hot Zone had a few spots like this, but the underlying story was interesting enough to let you skip them. Nothing's worse than getting involved in a storyline and then suddenly being jerked back to reality by a paragraph or two of fumbling by the author. Guess I need to get back to Dune ...

And speaking of that, I just realized that my readme file for Arrakeen Beta tells you that I set my map in a palace on a character from The Tempest, instead of the planet Caladan from Dune - doh! It's fixed here, but some of you folks might have an older copy of the map. My apologies to Shakespeare ...

- friday 03 24 00 -

Well slap me on the ass and call me Shirley! The good brothers at Z-Axis have knocked out a review of Arrakeen Alpha, giving it a not-to-shabby 3 and 1/2 outta 5 stars. I agree with everything they said - this map was a learning experience, and the problems that still exist in it are, without major reconstruction, unfixable, with the exception of the item placement. Props to Verndroid and his associates for the support - go download the map and see if you agree.

On other fronts - I finally busted out, formatted my hard drive, and installed a little one. The old machine is ready for, count 'em up, three operating systems! As if Windows 98SE wasn't enough to make me pull my hair out, now I'm going to go for a WinNT4.0, Win2K, and Linux 6.1 install, all on the same machine. Anybody have a Zantac prescription to send me? *whimper* My masochistic tendencies run deep ...

- saturday 03 18 00 -

Ummm, yeah, err ...

Been a while, just working, reading, sleeping, and eating. Managed to get in a few hours of fishing with the kids - Lake Ray Roberts is looking promising. More on that later. Reading Galilee by Clive Barker - another wow there. I'd say this is his best since Imajica, and that was a hell of a book. Everville was cut off too abruptly, and Sacrament was just downright strange. I enjoyed them, but not enough to rave about them. Galilee is absorbing, fascinating reading, and I'm looking forward to the resolutions that are waiting for me.

Quake III Arena mapping - the new tools are finally out, so I guess it's time to spend some more energy mapping. Hoping to tune up and fix some problems in my current set of maps, after I see what some of the map review sites have to say about them. I've had some positive feedback, so I'm fairly confident that they don't outright suck. Regardless, the most current versions are available here. Swing by the mapping pages and check 'em out.

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