Once again, I must apologize for the delay. I am currently internet-less in the house. My cable modem service has proven itself to be good on the speed scale, but awful on the reliability scale. The cable company has reported that my whole neighborhood is down, as it has been for a week. They're bringing me a new cable modem on Monday, which should fix the problem, but their response to the problem has been absolutely unacceptable. We've got a DSL line and service on order, and we should be dumping the cable modem early in 2000. The extra cost will be worth it if we can get some decent up-time.

Worst part of the whole drama was Shelly's phone-tag with the cable folks. When she stated that she was using the service for her business, and a week of downtime was unacceptable, their reply was that she should get a dialup account with a local ISP so that she can cope with their downtime. Ugh.



Also have had some real trouble here. Last Friday, my 87 year-old grandfather died. Shelly and I decided to head up to Michigan for the funeral, but we didn't feel that my 11 year-old minivan was up for the trip, given that it has had some pretty extensive repairs lately. We'd been looking for a replacement for quite some time, but we were planning on waiting until the beginning of the year. Given a choice between renting a car, getting me a new car for me, or driving my wife's Metro from Texas to Michigan, I made the jump. I am now the proud owner of a 1995 Chevy G20 van. It has a buncha stuff that I really didn't want (electric reclining couch and TV/VCR combo), but the deal was hard to pass up.



Once again, I've had absolutely nothing going on in game development. I decided that a lot of problems would be solved if I ran my Java server app as a CGI, but I have yet to find a web server that can correctly run a CGI in Java. I was hoping to get this thing online in January, but this past week has really set me back.

All in all, I'm kinda depressed this week. Hopefully things will look up sometime in January when I can get back to work.



Finally, I had a genuinely odd phone call a couple of days ago. I occasionally get programmer phone-spam, but this one was bizarre. It went something like this. . .

Me: Hello?

Salesman: Hello, Mr. Hattan. I'm with [company name], and we're an authorized reseller of Visual SourceSafe. . .

Me: Sorry, I'm not interested in Visual SourceSafe.

Salesman: [clearly angry] No, it's not about Visual SourceSafe. It's another product, but I'm not gonna tell you about it!

Me: Umm, If that's your sales pitch, I think you're in the wrong business.

I wish I could remember the name of the company, because I'd love to broadcast how rude their salespeople are, but I can't remember the name. Oh well.