Sam's Insomnia

They call me the dealer... It's true. I have introduced Sam to Command & Conquer: Generals... and he's not slept since! Truly international appeal - I hope he doesn't work out how to build a nuke too soon. The team responsible for Sam's insomnia has been busy working on another RTS title called Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth, and it's due out next week!

XPlanner is now fully operational at home (I hear you ask... "Why?!"). The answer to that may be along soon and it will be SOAPy. Fact of the matter is that I have started to use XPlanner as a convenient work tracking / organisation tool for my own activities at work. My current role has a number of departmental responsiblities and projects, not least the "upward management" activities which seem to consume rather too much of my day. Tracking it for a week now I can see already that about a 3rd of my time is spent on this "upward management". Thanks to XPlanner, I now have some objective metrics to help me manage this situation and actually convince people that my time would be better spent focussed on completing things that actually work for the greater good of the department.

On a final note, before I actually turn in... I have tried out the CTP edition of Avalon (WinFx for WinXp) under my installation of Whidbey. I have tried it briefly, had trouble (not sure why; probably didn't read the readme) and I have uninstalled it. I have been forced to re-install Visual Studio .net 2003. Hopefully I will be able to try it out again some other time. I wondered why they said don't try it out on a machine you need! It's fairly early days, but they are starting to run to a tight schedule if they are to meet the 2006 deadline they have set themselves...