The sum of my (Halo 2) life

My free 2-month Trial of Xbox Live is almost up, and I have to make the decision whether to fork out the AUD$70 for it. Just in case I don't, I made sure to go and grab my stats with one of the only Halo 2 Stats Viewers out there. If "level"equals "skill," then my skill has taken many clumsy dips and rises since I started playing. There was also that horrible period where I was stuck on Level 11, when I wished I could drop down to the safer sub-10 levels - at least I used to be able to occasionally dominate back then. Now I just get embarrassed by annoying twats that know how to use the Needler way better than me.

Halo 2 has just gotten some new maps, with even more getting released up till June. Plus all our wonderful stats will be reset, and I would be back down at the depths of Level 1. Now is either a good time to bow out, or a time to go buy a good quality headset and get right into it in a big way... Hey, it keeps me off the streets at night, 'kay?

Shiny, Shiny

Should get a lovely little one of these in a few days (May 4th hopefully). I shall be surfing the 'net from the hammock out front if you need me.

MacrAdobeMedia

Adobe just bought Macromedia for 3.4 billion dollars.

I had to check the dates of the press releases to make sure this wasn't a huge April Fool being played on the web, print and multimedia industries. It's bona fide.

Imagine Google buying Yahoo!, or Microsoft buying Apple - oh wait, they already kinda did... - how about Microsoft buying Intel? Huge.

If your company works with: web, print materials, sign-making, CD-ROM resources or anything to do with fancy static or moving images - you'll probably have at least a few products from one or both of Adobe and Macromedia. And now they are one.

I'm guessing that pretty much their whole suite of Applications will be able to publish to PDF and Flash fairly soon; not such a bad thing! Having Photoshop and Illustrator being able to author detailed Flash movies and then plug all of that into a Copy-Protected PDF in just one easy step... there are a lot of possibilities for improved productivity.

But this deal effectively kills the last ounce of competition in the industry; these two powerhouses had equivilent products that had to fight for market share.... Like Fireworks and ImageReady; Freehand and Illustrator. Look for "FireReady MX CS 2006" and "Freehand Illustrator MX CS 2006" next year.

Will this kill innovation and drive up prices (higher than their already inflated level)? Well every new version costs more than the last, anyway - so maybe nothing will change.

I'll continue to use Jasc Paint Shop Pro thank you very much. But it's not like there's an alternative to Flash or Director or Acrobat.

What a MoBlogging good time.

I now have a MoBlog: I can upload an image with a witty comment from my Mobile phone any time, day or night - and it will appear on the front of my web page. Should be safe, unless I'm drunk...