Wotta week...

Umm, wow. Got a lot accomplished, gaming-wise.

Finished Half-Life 2 & HL2 Episode 1 and drove my gamerscore to a nice even 3K.

I must write, though, that HL2 was enjoyable playing even through the extremely frustrating freezing and puzzles. I read somewhere that the freezing problem in HL2 was caused by an issues with the Source engine, but I'm not sure I buy that line. If that were true, why would Valve port such an issue to the 360? And why wouldn't the bug have also shown on HL2 Ep 1? Kind of odd.

As for the puzzles...Damn! They get much harder as HL2 continues. Guess that is to be expected, but still. More than I few times I had to pause the game and go find a walk-through to give me clue as to what to do. Getting killed ~20 times in a row will to cause you to go those lengths.

At any rate, I finished all that activity in a week that also featured mind-numbing Solaris training. It seems the local instructor needs to refresh his teaching skills, or record these training sessions for people wanting to overcome insomnia. This is the second course I have taken with this guy as instructor and I don't think I can take a class lead by him again. I would come into class all ready to go and ~45 minutes later I would be nodding off to sleep. I just blamed being bothered by on-call, and in a few cases it was true.

Now comes the hard part - going back to work and applying what I was supposed to learn. I'll have to take the 'learn through experience' route - write-up 'cheat sheets' with commands and options and refer to the sheets whenever I my memory hits a page fault. Eventually I'll learn, as usual.

In the meantime I need to get back to exercising, choosing a new car and catching-up on TV & movies. I'm leaning toward getting a Scion xD after I learned that the Honda Fit would cost an extra $240 per year on insurance. The xD and Fit are nearly identical, and obviously designed as competitors, but some of the differences are frustrating. I guess I want a mash-up of the best of both cars.

I just need to get out of my current 14yo car before it breaks down again (or worse).