Woman sueing city and railroad company for being hit by a train - while she was walking on the train tracks..

For those who want a clearer story about what's going on in Iraq with regards to the marine who shot the wounded insurgent in a mosque, read the letter below. It's a definite must-read that gives a much clearer picture of what happened.

I used to build my own machines. I took great pride of getting the last clock cycle of power out of them. To get one more frame per second out of them.  Then I got married, had kids, and now just am happy to be able to play games at all let alone overlocking my video card or purchasing a premium motherboard.

So when Half-Life 2 came out, I decided to get a new computer. One that was pretty well set up for gaming. I haven't played HL2 yet because I want to experience it in its maximum visual glory. So what did I do? I bought a Dell.

Here are the specs:

Now, some of this stuff I'll end up putting onto other machines.  The monitor won't do of course. But I can bring it to work.  And yea, maybe I should have gotten 4 gigs of RAM but I decided that I didn't need it and could always add it later if I really had to have it.  But this should be adequate to play HL2.

According to the poll, the #1 way for people to want to visit WinCustomize.com even more (other than more time) is if the site had more skins and themes.

What we'd like to know is, what kind of stuff would you like? Is it more skins and themes of a particular type that we already have here or are there skins and themes you wish we had here that you have to go to other sites to obtain?

Let us know! Thanks!

There will be two new civilizations in Galactic Civilizations II (on top of the 8 from Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy).

The first one is called the Iconians.  The Iconians are the ones who actually created the Yor.  The Yor being a race of sentient machines.  The Iconians were once the servants of the dark Precursor race known as the Dreadlords. When the Dreadlords were gone, they considered themselves as the rightful heirs to the galaxy.  To that end, they built a race of machines to act as their slaves.  The Iconians possessed a great deal of Precursor technology but didn't fully understand it. This worked against them as they ultimately paid the price when the Yor turned against them and nearly wiped them out.  The Iconians fled to a distant corner of the galaxy where they slowly rebuilt.  Ironically, they independently had hyperdrive technology already but simply did not have the ability to exploit it until now.

The other race is the mysterious Thalan. They are an insect-like civilization with a centralized hive mind.  They are completely alien to us in how they work. Not much is known about them yet but we will fill you in as we learn about them.

In Galactic Civilizations I the races compete for their turf in the galaxy. In Altarian Prophecy the humans and Altarians learn much about each other and become allies. However, the real powers of the galaxy were the Drengin Empire and the Arceans. Humanity was left relatively free to expand into the galaxy because the Drengin were kept at bay by the Arceans.  But something has now happened. Something has given the Drengin an advantage and they are slowly wearing down the Arceans and the humans must now race to get friends and allies before the Drengin consolidate.  The problem being, there is something else out there lurking far worse. And don't count on the Drengin "teaming up" with the humans to battle it.  The Drengin Empire is evil. They're not misunderstood. They're evil. And through the course of the campaign it will become quite clear just how evil they are.

This is the part where we remind people that they will stil be able to play in sand box mode just like GalCiv 1. The campaign is there for those who are interested in playing out the story.  The story will be multi-dimensional (i.e. non-linear).

Here is a preview of what the main GalCiv UI will look like.

Click to enlarge.

A couple of points:

• The Angle and zoom level will be adjustable. If you zoom out enogh, the map morphs into a tactical view of the galaxy (it's very cool and subtle).
• You can look at the map top down or nearly at the same level.
• As you can see, influence is no longer based on sectors. Sectors are purely for geographic use now.
• What you can't see in this shot is that the night time side of planets has citiy lights (everything rotates, this isn't a static thing). The more crowded the planet, the more city lights there are.
• You'll be able to play at any resolution from 1024x768 on up. So if you want to play on your 1440x1024 laptop, no problem, it'll play at that resolution and it won't look scaled. It has dyanmic interfaces throughout (In our opinion, the resolution independence tech here is superior to any strategy game ever. Most either scale all the graphics or simply just make the viewing screen bigger and everything else stays tiny. we have total control of how the UI changes at any resolution).

Here's an article that pretty much sums up my views.

I'm sure people who already think the US is "the devil" are going to latch on to killing of a wounded terrorist.

I'm sorry but it's not like the terrorists are taking prisoners here. Our marines, in a combat zone, have to protect themselves and their comrades first. Second guessing our guys in a hot zone is ridiculous.

I have friends that claim that the right is just as bad as the left when it comes to kooks.  Yet, when asked for specifics they vaguely allude to Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or when really desperate some Christian religious zealot (as if being religious makes you right wing).

Yet time and time again we end up hearing left wingers singing the same hateful crap: Those of us who voted for Bush are stupid, moronic, unenligthened, and ignorant.

Today's example comes from Linda Rondstadt:

“People don’t realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves,” she says. Of Iraq in particular, she adds, “I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don’t know anything about the Iraqis, but they’re angry and frustrated in their own lives. It’s like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”

I finally broke down and got an Xbox. I have a Game Cube already but I'm mostly a PC games person.  I've been playing some World of Warcraft, Kohan 2, The Sims 2, and a few others games that recently came out.

No, I'm not playing Half-Life 2. Indeed. I'm waiting for my new mega machine to arrive. Only then will I begin playing it.

But in the meantime, I wanted to see the hub-bub about Halo 2 was.  So I went out and got the XBox and Halo 2. The XBox came with a pretty decent football game and a pretty lousy tennis game.  Played those for a bit but mostly I tried out Halo 2.

And it's a great game. I can tell a great game even if I'm not personally enjoying myself.  I think I waited too long. The XBox controller takes some time to get used to and I'm just not used to it.  I like my keyboard and mouse interface for FPS.  My friends tell me that "once you get used to it it's great".  But that's easy to say if you've been playing with an XBox on other games for a year.  I haven't really done fast action with a game controller..since..well ever.  I had an Atari 2600 and a C-64 and after that I was all PC guy.  No Nintendo until I got the Gamecube and I only got that because Nintendo gave me one as a gift because of a project I worked on with them.

As for the other qualities of the XBox, I actually prefer the Gamecube. First off, the Gamecube is much smaller. Which makes it more portable.  Secondly, I like the Gamecube's mini-DVDs. The lack of hard drive in the GameCube is an advantage I think. It seems to put more discipline into the Gamecube developers or something because games on the Xbox seem to take a lot longer to load than any of the Gamecube games I have.

It also annoyed me that the XBox won't play regular DVDs. Why use the DVD size if you're not going to allow the user to play their DVD movies without an extra option?  Sure, it's only $40 for the controller to enable DVD movies but that makes the XBox even less portable if I have some thing hooked into a controller port.

I'm not saying the XBox is bad. I liked Halo 2 and am happy with my purchase. But the real test for me is going to be Knights of the Old Republic II. That's what I really purchased it for and I'm looking forward to getting that this holiday season.

From a trip to Washington DC