In which @wilW cements his position as Chief Overlord of Infotease, Inc. If I got a dollar, or even a picture of a unicorn, every time you said something along the lines of "we talked about cool/awesome/hawesome/fantastic/exciting/ZOMGWTFSQUEE!!! things that I'd love to tell you about but probably shouldn't/can't because of NDA/won't because of [insert relevant universe-ending paradox here]", I'd either be very rich, or have a very cool bedroom wallpapered in colourful mythical beasts. I mean, I get to do cool stuff all the time in MY job. I even have meetings with People Who Are Important. But do you see ME faffing on about it to my fans? OK, so aside from the fact I have no fans... I guess your training in the Dark Arts has paid off, though, since I keep coming back in the hopes of a followup with more Exciting Revelations. Sigh.

YWW, are responsible for my family's love of Munchkin, thankverymuch. And also for reviving my own interest in D&D, and its subsequent introduction to my wife and son. My wife is very active on BGG, having designed a number of her own games as well. It seems like every other week she's begging us to play-test some new Print-and-Play she's downloaded, or some new game she's designing. It is truly a Good Hobby, and one that consumes a non-trivial amount of space in my house! We absolutely LOVE Pandemic, and have the expansion as well. We don't beat it every time, but you're right- it fun to lose as well! (And for the purists, you can add another vote for open-handed play in that game. Duh.) Now that I have read up a bit on the BSG game, I am SO going to buy it. Frak, yeah!

And here's to hoping you guys get your Constitution back after the ass-kicking Bush and his good-ole' boys have been giving it for the last eight years. Maybe I will be able to lift my self-imposed ban on travel to the US again!

Congrats from Canada. I honestly can't figure out why so many people are freaked out about small-s socialism. It's not ALL bad, you know. And there is a real difference between socialism and Communism, in spite of what Americans have been told for 75 years. Who knows- in a few years, you might even be able to have that nasty lump looked at, courtesy of state-funded medicare! Also, have a look at Fivethirtyeight- this guy is a genius.

Thought it might be an appropriate time for this video, courtesy of my own geeky wife. Appropriate in several ways, in fact!

As a video producer that works with both iMovie and Final Cut, I can say with a high level of certainty that NONE of the consumer-grade hdd camcorders play nice with Apple's products. They all record in mpeg format, which means you need to either a) convert the video to Quicktime, or b) demux the audio to an .aiff file. Mpegstreamclip (freeware) does a nice quick job of it, but it adds a step- and you have to be careful in editing or your audio and video de-sync. MiniDV is still the best way to go, or even digital Hi8 (cheap cheap cheap!). And I haven't found a hard drive camera for less than $650 yet (though they're dropping fast). Also, they ALL only have USB ports for offloading the video, which is very slow. It can take an hour to dump 20 or 30 gigs of video- faster than real-time, but not a lot! Some people have said you need dv for iMovie, but it will actually play nice with almost any Quicktime file as well. Most others will need to be demuxed (separate the audio from the video stream) before you'll be able to include the audio in your project. One other advantage to MiniDV is better quality- however that's offset by larger filesizes for captured tape.

Thanks for the honesty, Wil. As a Christian, and a regular reader of your blog for a couple years now, I've never really cared about what you remarked about "Christians" in your writing, since I totally agree with almost everything you say about them anyhow! I like the term Christianist, though - I think it's a good word to describe the folks who are using religion as a stepping stone for their careers, or for political advancement. I would also agree with almost all of the other Christians posting replies here that what Christ would do is pretty clear from Scripture - he'd be hanging out in SanFran with the folks that the Religious Right blame for most of society's ills. Here in Canada the political situation is somewhat mellower, although with our recent election results I expect that to change (since our current Prime Minister is pretty intent on kissing GW's ass as much as possible); and we have our own micro-version of the Religious Right even here. Fortunately, most Christians up here still seem to vote left-of-centre, at least as evidenced by the most recent set of results. Personally, I was raised in a very right-wing, conservative Christian home where tolerance wasn't really an option. Fortunately, I've been able to form my own opinions and raise my family with a (hopefully) better set of values that treat people as persons, not just "Objects of Evangelisation". There is a lot of truth in the perception that the moderate and left-ish Christians are quiet, but that is changing. Magazines such as Geeze are tackling the issues in a serious manner; writers and bloggers such as David over at FearfullyHuman are dealing with the question you asked in frank and honest ways. A lot of us are fed up with what we see as the abandonment of Christianity's core values (Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself). We are realising that by saying "Homosexuals are going to hell" we're missing out on a lot of valuable friendships. We're realising that judging others by a standard we really can't hold ourselves to is as much a sin as anything else we point at. And yes, we are even starting to get noisy about it, but we're not loud enough yet. Sorry. How about an article titled "Everything I Needed To Know About Christianity I Learned From Star Trek"?