odds and ends

Just want to cover a few things in tonights post.

1. Jimmie Johnson wins ANOTHER race!!! I'm going to cry if he doesn't win the championship next week. He only has to finish ahead of Busch by about five positions. Jimmie has one eight races this year, more than anyone else!

2. Just found this video over at the drudgereport.com It is not gross, but shows some of our troops fighting in Fallujah. Very interesting video, I thought. Don't worry, all the shots fired in this video are into buildings. You won't see any dead bodies. Check it out:
http://members.cox.net/macallan_the/falluja.asf

3. The new season of the Simpsons starts tonight. This has been my favorite show for a very long time, I've been waiting to see the new episodes.

4. Ok. The biggest PC game of year is about to be released. This will be the PC game of the year on anyone's listing without a doubt. The game is Half-Life 2. The developer is Valve.
The release of this game has been such a fiasco. It started a long while back. The game should have come out last year. But hackers stole the code off of Valve computers and posted it to the internet. Valve went in and modified the code, and continued work on the game.
Valve is also releasing the game on the internet this time around. Using servers and software they call, Steam. This is not really new, being able to buy a game and download it from the net. But this is the first time for a major AAA release. Ok. Now comes the good part. Steam really upsets the publisher, a company named Vivendi. They only make money when the boxes are sold in the store, not when the game is purchased online. There has been a lot of action in court about this that I won't go into here. Next, Vivendi says, everyone can have midnight parties Monday night, to start selling the game. This is like what happened for Halo2 last week. Stores open at midnight and gamer geeks celebrate the game in the weee hours of the morning. Well, Vivendi says it can't start until midnight, California time. D'oh! So much for a midnight party on the East coast. What prompted me to write this, is what has happened the past two days. The game has ended up on store shelves early. Even places like Best Buy have tons of copies out. It is officialy for sale. To help prevent hackers and warez, after you install the game, you must log onto Valve's Steam servers to authenticate your copy (like Windows activation).
Vivendi says that Valve can not turn on those servers until the release day, Tuesday. SO, now people are out buying the game, but won't be able to play it for several days. Vivendi says if Valve turns on the game, they are in breach of contract. This is getting out of hand.
I purchased the game via, Steam.

Last thing, the horse show last night was very cool. My friend let Meredith and Randy ride one of the horses and took us back to the barn and showed us some of his other horses. Very neat.

I'll write a real post tomorrow sometime.