I know there hasn't been much activity from me over this past week, but following the end of the World Cup i've been mainly spending time catching up on some very much needed sleep. During the World Cup i was getting anywhere between 3 and 6 hours of sleep a night, and now i'm doing about 9 just to stay awake. It's amazing what football will do to you.

Last week I took advantage of another EB sale and bought Call of Duty 2 (COD2) on PC for around only $50. I love my WWII games, and apparently COD was one of the best around it's time. The graphics for COD2 are pretty good, especially for my low-scale PCI graphics card. The thing freaked out though when I tried to change rendering to DirectX 9 (even though my card is a 9 card), so I had to leave it on the still impressive DirectX 7 rendering.

Work has been pretty busy this past week as well. In the past few days i've just finished a small redesign and reshuffle of the company's intranet, which was actually pretty enjoyable.

In other news, many will recall my post on VMware Player that i did a bit back for trying out pre-built virtual machines. Well it seems that VMware have taken it a bit further and have released totally free VMware Server software that allows you to also create Virtual machines. (i'm told that that is just a free re-branding of the now superseded VMware Workstation)

This is absolutely fantastic, as the ordinary person can now create quality virtual machines of a variety of operating systems (all sorts of Linux, as well as Windows (including the Vista beta) etc). I took the liberty of creating a brand new fresh install of Ubuntu Linux as a virtual Machine (see here for a screenshot).

Although running your own virtual machines chews up a fair bit of resources, it's great for trying out a new operating system or just using one temporarily without having to go through the hassle of partitioning a disk, configuring a boot loader, etc. One annoying thing was that the VMware Server services were installed to start on System Startup, which was irritating because they added a considerable amount of time to Windows starting. Though changing them to start manually is pretty easy.

Poker was last night was really good, we had seven players so the variety was awesome. Debutante Stel stole the show in the first game, riding an awesome streak of luck to absolutely hammer everyone else. We didn't have that much time for a second round so we started one with massive blinds to make it quick. In the end it was a war of attrition between me and Anthony (last week's winner), me eventually winning out.

Stel

Me

I'm looking forward to a good weekend: I aim to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and the new season of indoor football starts on Sunday night 😀