D: Duran Duran - Death - Done - Dead Pixels - DOOM3

Duran Duran
Karen and I went to see Duran Duran on April 2nd at the Wachovia Spectrum in Philadelphia. That night there was a huge amount of rain which seemed to have the effect of making people stay at home. Because of this, the stadium was about 80 percent full.
The concert was really entertaining with Duran Duran singing many of their old 80's hits along with new ones from their new Astronaut album. They have a great stage presence and more importantly the songs sound just like they did in the 80's and in addition, sound exactly like they do on the records (i.e. no live modifications).
The Spectrum stadium is a tad on the crappy side and was pretty much leaking throughout the whole show. The cleaning staff were constantly wiping up the water to prevent people from slipping.
At one point near the end of the show during the introductions for the band members, Simon LeBon seemed very interested in one very attractive audience member and so got off stage and made his way back to her. Her name was Melinda and she was rather excited to see him. He asked her to introduce him, which she did and then went in for a kiss. Hmmmmm. I think that Melinda may have been seeing Simon up close and personal after the show. Just speculation on my part of course.

Death
On April 8th my mother's brother Allen Gosslett was killed in a car accident in Durban. Allen was a very mellow, easy going type of guy and would give the shirt off his back for anyone if he could. I have many fond memories of him throughout my years growing up and he will certainly be missed.

Cheers Allen.

Done
Done? The book is done, that's what. I finally finished the author review stage after a long marathon over the weekend. Karen helped out a ton by re-reading my manuscript after I had modified it and adding her comments for sentence structure, etc. She also typed up Appendix A which I just didn't have the bandwidth to do.
At this point, the book is out of author review and off to be type set. It looks like the page count is around 320 pages in total. Down from my original estimate of 500 pages but no less technically sound.

Dead Pixels
I bought a Sony Play Station Portable (PSP) when it came out a few weeks ago and so far I love it. I've never owned a Sony console before, jumping from an Atari 2600 straight to an XBox, but I must say that this platform is very impressive. I would have added a hard drive because its only memory sources are UMD and Memory Stick. So while it can play load and play MP3's, video, and view pictures on the device, you are limited to this being stored on the Memory Stick which has its limitations. Maybe Sony makes writable or rewritable UMD disks, this will turn out to be the way to play the media. So far, you can only purchase Sony movies on the UMD disks, and of course, all the games come on the UMD disks.
I have 3 dead pixels on my device and will be taking it back for a swap this weekend. In my case, the dead pixels do not detract from game play because they are not next to each other.

I love the fact that it has built-in 802.11b WiFi. Right out of the box, I plugged in my home SSID and WEP key and was connecting to PSP servers everywhere for some on-on-one Twisted Metal: Head-On action.

DOOM 3
I started playing id Software games back in the day when Castle Wolfenstein 3D and the sequel, Spear of Destiny were all the rage. Then came DOOM! I was totally addicted to this amazing game and when DOOM2 was released, I upgraded my PC so that I could play it. I upgraded my PC again to play Quake and Quake2.
Now when DOOM3 was released, I decided that I couldn't justify forking over $3-4K for a new PC capable of running DOOM3. So I missed out in the DOOM3 fun.
It has finally become available on the XBox and I must say, it is an excellent game. Very creepy in the beginning. Of course, playing on a TV means lower resolution, but the bump mapping is still there and the cool lighting effects so its not a total loss.
$40 for the game and $200 for the XBox (which I bought when it came out) is not a bad outlay to play DOOM3 instead of $3-4 on a new PC with the latest graphics card.