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Alrightythen – the AIWA CDC-MP3 still kicks ass, but it’s got a few trouble spots. First, when you turn off your car and then start it back up the same song that played when you turned off the car (and thus the stereo) starts to play, but it plays from the beginning – different from the way, say, an audio CD plays. Ergo, if you have Led Zeppelin’s fourth album and you’re playing “Stairway to Heaven”, which runs eight minutes, and every errand you go on takes 7:59 or less to complete, you’ll never get off that track lest you do it manually. The other problem – and this is a bigger one but still not a fatal one – is that the “random” function only works for the directory the MP3 is in – so you can’t shuffle the entire CD. Why this isn’t available as an optional mode is beyond me. Oh well, makes that 11 hour Metallica grandstand occur in the proper order.

Still getting my hands dirty in the Torque engine. Lots of fun.

I think the apocalypse is near – my Mom is on AOL instant messenger now and my Dad is into downloading Bluegrass MP3’s. My freaking parents have Windows XP and a Pentium 4 and I sit writing the next great computer game on a Pentium III 500 with a Voodoo 3 and Windows 98. Actually that’s almost cool – kinda like writing the Great American Novel by using a child’s typewriter that sits on your knees (which is exactly how Stephen King wrote Carrie. Considering my wife has a more powerful system that can’t go more than a few hours without a random blue screen (she needs XP bad) things could be worse.

Oh, and I hear the Doubletree Club Hotel in Houston sucks.