Miscellaneous

I've started to play the bagpipes again, after a few-year lull. Had the chanter stock fall off earlier today. The rubber ring holding the chanter stock to the bag had disintegrated. Me thinks I should've taken better care of it; too late now. I think I'll give fixing it a try, but suspect that a new bag is in order. Some net-searching turned up zipper-openable bags, which seems like it'd make for easy cleaning, as well as making it easier to find escapee drone reeds.

Finished playing the New Super Mario Bros for the DS. It's fun. Nothing really new; the game is standard 2D Mario fare with elements from the 3D marios (wall jumping, double jumps). Ground stomping is in there too. Some of the new features are more novelty than anything. There's a big mushroom, which'll make you as tall as about 1/2 the screen, however it's really only cool for a level or two. The same can be said about the tiny-ifying mushroom. Regardless, the game is fun and the level design is especially good. I do wish the game could be played on a TV though, as this'd be a nice game to play with a few people.

Am starting to take up archery. I've gone to two archery shoots/practices run by a local club, The Carolingian Company of Bowmen, which is SCA based. They've been lots of fun and I plan on going to more practices. After the first shoot, the fingers on my right hand, the one I use to pull the string back, hurt quite a bit. By the second shoot, I started using a glove. That seems to have fixed that problem.

Miscellaneous

• It's still raining, and has been for the last week. Boston's North Shore region got pounded, with some areas getting up to 18" of rain. The house I live in (in the Metrowest area) has a small amount of water in the basement, but not much; no more than a quarter of an inch deep, and only in one spot. That spot happens to be under part of the server table though. It doesn't appear to be growing though, which is good.
  
  
• I just got Purple Motion's new CD in the mail. It's very good. If you liked demoscene-type stuff, it's a good buy. (Purple Motion wrote music for Future Crew, who did the PC/DOS demo, Second Reality.) Included on his CD are some new stuff and some remixes of old stuff, including a remix of his contribution to Second Reality. It's very good, although I prefer the original version. The remix of Starshine is awesome though.
  
  
• The New Super Mario Bros comes out today [for the DS]. A local EB Games didn't have it, and won't until tomorrow. Grrr.
  
  Another new Mario Bros game, Super Mario Galaxy, might be a launch title for the Nintendo Wii.
  
  
• A new beta of VSLua was released recently. VSLua allows Lua code to be debugged from within Visual Studio. This is the first version to support the use of custom Lua dlls, something the previous beta did not have, and a requirement for the code I work on. (I use LuaPlus, a C++ interface to the C-based Lua API.)