Halloween is just about over, for all useful purposes. I had two visitors… the were twins and they live next door. I managed to make it out Thursday night to the Miamisburg bar hop, which would have been point-and-shoot heaven except that my camera had fallen under a chair earlier in the week and the three days I spent looking for it beforehand didn’t pan out, while the five minutes I spent the next morning did. Oh well.

Summer went well — I biked a lot, swam a lot, and ran a lot — all that outdoor stuff that one wants to do when it’s warm. Cold is now imminent. It descends upon the Chip like Christians on prime-time nudity.

I’m not much for the cold.

So, it’s time to find things to keep busy indoors. November is, again, National Novel Writing Month, and with any luck I’ll do better this year than prior years. Hopefully I’ll draw some encouragement from everyone else doing it — my cousin Jennifer is in; hopefully Aerin will try it. A few of you others are considering it — I could use the additional motivation.

On top of that I’m working on a pseudo work/personal programming project, for which I’ve started another blog here (because, you know, I have all this free time). Thought I’d try out blogspot, get back into some real coding (Project Euler hasn’t been keeping me entertained any more), and, like I said, all of this can be done half-clothed and indoors.

The cold can just bring-it, cause I am prepared.

I’m about 5000 photos behind in terms of updating my photo gallery, but in the mean time here’s a few interesting tidbits:

Laura and Dallas got married, Congratulations guys! Mommalynch took some eight gadzillion pictures, and they’re up here:

I headed up to the very cold Wisonsin/Illinois border in South Beloit to watch Mike Green go racing. Plenty of pics from that are up here(but I took the videos down for bandwidth… if you need them, lemme know):

And I headed up to Michigan a few weeks back with Greg for Stephanie’s birthday, not to mention the three or four other birthdays we celebrated that weekend. Thanks for having me, guys! I even got to see George, Maureen, and family. Quite the weekend! Pics are here:

Wired recently ran this short article about Gridrunner Revolution, a new acid-trip game from Jeff Mitner.

Who?

Yeah, that’s what I said. But then I actually READ the article, instead of looking at the tripped out picture. Mintner is the Wil-E-Coyote level Super Genius behind Llamasoft.

Wait, Who?

RIGHT AGAIN! Llamasoft is the company that created Llamatron! I can’t even find an informative link to Llamatron except for this wikipedia link, even on the Llamasoft website, but, dangit, Llamatron was one of the games that defined my early gaming addiction and I’m just super-pumped to see that the company and the dude behind it are still spewing forth trippy games.

You can actually download the 1992 game from Llamasoft on various platforms. I can’t quite get the PC version to run on Vista, but I haven’t yet spent as long trying as I have writing this blog post.

If you get a chance, though, go read the Llamasoft history. It’s a great read about their experiences in early gaming development, and it has a lot of memories that make me remember the era fondly… hopefully you’ll have the same experience.

Viva La Llama.

—Chip