Today wasn’t quite as hectic as yesterday, but I still had plenty to keep me busy.

I’ve posted, now and then, on the Carolina message board, but I’ve been doing it a little more frequently lately.  Why?  I’m not sure.  On the off-topic board the people are pretty cool, and a few people have recognized on the main basketball forum that I’m not a Duke fan who is there to bother people, but to have actual conversations.  Of course there are some on that board who are just so blindly gung ho that you can’t really have conversations with them.

I think the main thing is that it’s the summer and I miss the college basketball season.  At least I’ll be able to watch the Olympic basketball games before too long.  Coach Krzyzewski is coaching Team USA, so that’s good.  I can’t remember if I mentioned it yesterday or not, but most people think Team USA will run opponents off the court like we always used to do.  The only thing people are complaining about is that there should have been one more big guy on the team.

I played Catan with Michael after work.  I was close to winning but I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it off and he won.  I helped Amanda put up most of the rest of the clothes after that then Michael came over and the three of us played Settlers of Catan.  I won.  My strategy this time, which has come close to winning for me recently, was to pile up on one or two resources and get the port for those.  Michael’s plan lately has been to pile up on the stone and wheat in order to get cities, and that’s been working for him, but I think my plan is a pretty good one too.  I’m not sure if Amanda has any single particular strategy.

Michael stuck around a bit and we all watched Wipeout, an American version of the Japanese show XSE.  I thought it would be cheesy, and it was, but we enjoyed it anyway.  After that a show called I Survived a Japanese Game Show came on.  That one’s a reality show about these Americans who are unwittingly taken to Japan to compete on one of those silly Japanese stunt game shows.  Meh.

Jason called and said he’d gone through the setup process for his Xbox Live account, only to get a message at the end that something wasn’t working (a server issue or something it sounded like) and he wasn’t able to complete his registration at that time.  I guess if he had we’d have been playing some Halo 3 mission or another right now.

Oh, I’m also installing Ubuntu, a Linux build, on the desktop.  The poor thing is so slow now, bogged down with so much crap despite being a decent machine, that I figured I’d test a dual boot on it before installing it on the laptop.  My cousin, David Cherryholmes, installed it on my last laptop, but I never could get the wireless network card to work right, and that’s a pretty big thing for me.  It’s been a while, so I’m hoping that’s now better integrated.

Zach Dotsey