As the result of a phone call following a party the night before, Nadia and I got together. I’m pretty sure that neither one of us had any idea that we’d be in it for the long haul.

I’m spending our anniversary working from home, while she is at a mandatory training event. I think she mentioned doing some sort of unarmed combat training, I don’t remember. Not terribly romantic, I know, but at least we’ll have dinner together tonight. She chose the Cheesecake Factory, which is one of her favorite restaurants. Maybe a movie too. I’ve been wanting to watch The Number 23. We already saw 300 and thought it was excellent.

I’ve been playing the 360 version of Shadowrun for about a week now, but have been unable to talk about it on the blog because of the NDA. Now that it has been lifted, I’ll say these two things:

1. The graphics harken back to the good ol’ days of Quake 2 and Duke Nukem.
2. It is the hardest FPS I have ever played.

My first statement is harsh, but that was the very first thought that came to mind when the game started. Since the last two shooters I played were Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas, my bar was set a tad high for this title’s graphics. The screenshots shown on the Shadowrun site look nothing like the game that I’ve been playing, so I can only hope that the beta build saw absolutely no graphical updates.

My second statement is right on the money. If you have trouble with shooters in general, you may want to stay away from this game. In many FPSes, the only requirement for victory is knowledge of the board you are playing on and the ability to aim. In some others, knowing specifics about the class you are playing (like a Spec Op in Battlefield 2) is vital.

Shadowrun asks you to become familiar with the four available races: human, elf, dwarf and troll. While each race is capable of filling any role, each one is predisposed toward a certain type of play. Do you like being sneaky and assassinating people at close range? Then you need to play an elf. Maybe you aren’t much for speed or taking cover. Pick a troll and just mow through your enemies. It is actually pretty cool watching the opposing team scatter when a mini-gun wielding troll strolls into the room; you can’t go toe-to-toe with a troll and live without a good plan in place.

The complexity doesn’t end there; the technology and magic available in the game is essential to victory. You could just buy an SMG and grenades and run into the fight, but you will not last long. Remember the elf assassin-type I mentioned? How are your bullets going to hit him when he teleports through walls to get away from you?

I could go on for a while about this game, but I’ll stop myself here. I am looking forward to this game. Hopefully lots of other people will pick it up. As an online-only game, a healthy community is vital to its success.

Edit: I was right, the beta did not receive any graphical upgrades, according to a beta forum thread. The retail game will look a lot better, a fact that I am very happy about.

A few weeks ago I debated with a friend of mine about what kind of consumer would purchase the upcoming Windows Home Server, which can be thought of as a file server for non-technical people. I’m am fairly certain that there is a market for people who own multiple PCs and recognize the need for a central location for their files and automated backup routines, but do not have the technical know-how to set up their own file server.

This friend argued that any knucklehead could follow a few simple instructions to get an old PC up and running as a file server using any flavor of Linux. Tonight, I have learned that this fairly straightforward task is beyond my skill.

I’ve got an old Dell Dimension (Pentium 3 550) that has been running Ubuntu for several months now. I was pointed to this tutorial which demonstrates how to turn an Ubuntu machine into a simple file server that can be read by a Windows PC. Imagine my surprise when I could not get this thing running; all of the other users who posted on that Digg page mentioned how easy it was and even that there were better soultions out there.

Now that I have wasted two hours trying to get this working, I have realized the genius of Windows Home Server. I buy a headless PC, drop a CD into my Windows XP PC, and run the install program. That’s it. No installing Samba or an SSH client. Not a single command line. No *NIX snob looking down his nose wondering why I’m too dumb to figure out how to get this running.

(Well, that’s the idea. We’ll see if it is really that simple).

The most frustrating part of this is that I work with this stuff every day. I’m no stranger to Linux, and I am quite comfortable on the command line. There’s just something about getting these machines to talk to each other that mystifies me. I suppose when HP rolls out their MediaSmart Server I’ll be first on line to pick one up.