OK, So the only game series that I care about has a new addition, although a small one. VALVe has finally released HALF LIFE 2 : LOST COAST.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, a single-player level custom-created to showcase High-Dynamic Range lighting (HDR) in the Source engine, is available now to all owners of HL2.
Valve states that system requirements for the new level are "very high" and that gamers with older systems shouldn't attempt to play the level. If the user's system does not match the requirements, Steam will display a warning, but not prevent the user from downloading.

Such a pity, I won't be able to play it for quite some time now. My machine can't handle it! Guess maybe I should play the the single player HL2 once again! I only hope I get to play AfterMath when its released.

Yesterday I learnt about a blog by an old college classmate. I visited his BlogSpot and spent sometime reading what he was sharing with the World Wide Web. I don’t know, I can't describe it but we were quite friendly most of the time while we were together in college but as our graduation was nearing its end we started drifting apart. I guess I started feeling an unspoken tension between us, our behavior changed from friendly to formal. I never knew what happened between us and though I felt sad about it as we moved away from each other due to career or academic pursuits I began not giving a damn about it. I mean you can’t force people to like you, besides my social engineering skills ain’t something to boast about.
But then yesterday while I was reading his latest post I realized that despite all the silent coldwar between us, he & I were probably the only ones who equally felt the tremendousity of the loss we both incurred on June the 29th. I can't explain why, but I guess that's not important… is it?

I just realized that it's been almost 20 days that I've been able to sit down and write about anything! The past 2 weeks I've been involved in shifting the development server (running on Fedora Core 4) to an older machine, and I've deployed Small Business Server 2003 and reinstalled 3 other workstations; including mine in the office. I spent the first week doing research involving various migration plans, (involving Web Servers and Domain Servers). And since I did most of the research after the office hours I was left with very little time to do pretty much anything else. And doing all the deployment & migrations the past week left me pretty exhausted that I even took an off yesterday to get a long weekend rest.

This pretty much means I have had little chance to learn ASP.net. But I'm hoping to resume on that path from Monday that is tomorrow.  Among other things this post by Raj Shekhar was like a wake up call for me, especially the part about neglecting his health. I've been seriously devoting more time watching out for my health now than sit on my chair and either play a game or simply wander off the various communities. And no I'm not saying that they aren't important just that I'm reducing my involvement a bit to watch out my flab before it gets any bigger so that its visible to people I haven't seen in a long time.

Steven Bink of Bink.nu reported yesterday that Microsoft.com is now running in ASP.net 2 (Whidbey). This signifies the imminent release of Whidbey & Yukon. This has again sparked off a yearning to brush up on my ASP.net skills, so I've set out the primary agenda for month of October to acquaint with the cool new things of ASP.net 2, like master pages & personalization etc. It's a fairly daunting task given I still haven't mastered the basics of ASP.net 1.x. And that I spend my work hours working on PHP. I am hoping to make myself accustomed to the new things in ver. 2 a little ahead of the official release in November.So wish me luck!