I've only played two games since spring break: Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, and Dungeon Seige. The first game is a budget title with an amazing 3D engine by a drugged up team of programmers from Croatia. The game is a first person shooter like Doom but with an endless stream of monsters at all times. It definitely has personality and oddball humour, and is worth the money if your system can handle the frame rate, but you will be sick of first person shooters for a while after beating it. Dungeon Seige is the latest big-hype game on the block, published directly by Microsoft. It's an action role-playing game like the Diablo series, but has a fully 3D world with user-maneuverable camera and no loading screens between worlds. The story is nonexistant, and it doesn't quite have the charm of Diablo, but it is very addictive and will keep you playing for hours on end if that's the sort of game you're into. This summer, I'm hoping to finish off Zelda 2 on the N64, since it's the type of game you really have to sit down at for a couple hours at a time to make any progress in.

I finally finished the gargantuan task of converting all my MIDIs and scores to being compatible with Finale 2002 and the SC-8850. Every file on the Music page now has an 8850 compatible MIDI file, and several employ extended MIDI techniques. If you are hurting for disk space, and have many old Finale files on your hard drive, even the simple process of re-saving them in Finale 2002 will free up quite a bit of space. Most of my older scores from Finale 97 and before were reduced by over 600% just through re-saving.

I've been considering starting an experimental website for next year's cadre of FSU composers, combining a message board, uploading ability, and the Finale web plugin. The idea I had in mind was something of an open forum or round table, where any FSU composer with an account could post MIDIs and scores of whatever he or she happened to be working on on a weekly basis. Other composers visiting the site could listen and view works at their leisure, and post their comments and suggestions (non-anonymously) in a message board thread specifically made for that piece. I can see lots of benefits from such a site, but it would entail a hell of a lot of work. At the most, it will probably remain an intangible brainstorm, at least until my thesis is done. If you have any comments about this, send me an e-mail with your witty thoughts.

In the News:
Man gets cat out of tree... with gun.
Abercrombie & Fitch's new line of stylish racist T-shirts

Portal of Evil News is really a great place to go for off the wall news (www.poe-news.com). For this story about a naked man's attempted assault in a Subway sub shop restroom , their headline was "Girls attacked in Subway store by 6 inch on white".