Back to it...

I know I have been out of the blog sphere for a long while...I guess my practice for the Star Craft tournament took up more time than I thought it would. Well, the tournament is over...it was not good for me. I did save the replays and as soon as Live get it's head out of it's a$$ then I'll upload them to my Sky Drive and post a link here for anyone that's curious on how the games went.

If you do want to check out the brackets, you can see them here http://qualify.us.wcg.com/?page=stem_schedule&stageid=2837 I got beat by Eric Rothmuller who was the number 2 Brood Wars player in the US last year...the replays will show you why!

So that was my first plunge into the world of professional gaming and I did beat my goal of making it past the first round, so I feel pretty good about that. I was talking to a friend of mine after the tournament and his exact quote was: "Sorry to hear about the loss, let's get some more practice in and we'll get you ready for the next one." So, depending on how life plays out, I'll probably give this another shot, just to see if I can make it past round 2 next year.

In other news, life in the IT world has been crazy. Haven't really been messing with Hyper-V as much I would like, but have been playing around a lot with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and then Sun's Virtual Box. The biggest draw back of the M$ product is apparently they have no 64 bit support for guest operating systems...I have NO idea why they would do this, but there you have it. Virtual Box does come with 64 bit guest OS support, but it seems to consume my entire system when trying to run it. I really don't understand the difference, since I've been running Virtual Box on my home system for months now with a Linux distro on it and I can do lots of other things while running Virtual Box. For some reason though, when I'm running virtual box on my 64 bit Vista machine at work and have a Vista guess OS open, it bring my system to it's knees...I mean, it's not like my work system is crappy, it's a core 2 duo with 8 GB of DDR2 RAM with a decent HDD, so I really don't see the reason why it runs SO slow. If any of you have experienced this or know why this is happening...PLEASE let me know!

It does seem though that most of the IT world is beginning to focus more and more on virtual environments and could computing. As I've said before, I do see a lot of promise and a lot of very nice possibilities of life in the cloud, but there is also a very risk if you live your life in the could. There is a very nice article over at Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5325169/the-hidden-risks-of-cloud-computing that goes into detail about some of the dangers of cloud computing...just a very interesting read. I do have a large amount of data stored on the could (this blog being one, plus my email, plus, plus, plus) and I do think it's very cool to be able to have all of your important data accessible from any system, all you need is a simple browser and you're good to go.

Speaking of browsers, I know a number of have heard about this, but I thought I'd post something here also. Google has officially announced the creation of their own OS: Chrome OS http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html [Google blog], this OS is designed to uproot XP which currently has a strangle hold on the netbook market. Maybe it will succeed where many other Linux flavors have failed...lord knows it has the monetary backing that Linux does not, but who knows...to date there is no official release date for Chrome OS, but you can bet Google is going to try their best to get a high quality good product to market as fast as they can. Hopefully this will not fall victim the Google Beta monster which holds amazing products (such as Gmail) in Beta for the better part of 5 years! Lucky for Gmail though, Google was able to bribe the beta monster and finally pull Gmail out of beta and into a fully grown-up web-app.

Ok, it's getting late and still can't get into my Live account to post the links, so I'll stop here for now and post more hopefully tomorrow.

~C