I've been a little heads down lately. Sorry about that. I've been slow to blog. However, here's a short list of the things that have been on my mind lately. (Also, I WILL be updating the Ultimate Tools List, but I want to do it justice, so bear with me.)

What has been on my mind this last week, in no particular order:

• I updated my Linksys Router from Sveasoft Alchemy to the new Sveasoft Talisman Firmware.
• Man, it is freaking shiny. It's Alchemy++, indeed. This new update includes a roughly 3meg read-write area of flash for external programs to be downloaded. Remember, the Linksys router is just a tiny Linux box. You can PuTTY into it and everything.
• Things that kick ass about this firmware. You can VPN into your home. You can setup Quality of Service (QoS) to make sure that the wife's Vonage call to Zimbabwe doesn't get kicked because of your massive pr0n downloads. You can easily assign specific IPs to specific MACs. Way easier than static IP addressing. There are a pile more. It's truly changed my whole home network and made it WAY easier to manage. Yum.
• GuildWars is truly the most amazing RPG I've ever played. Ya ya, EverQuest, ya ya, Diablo, whatever. This is the total package. From purchase to download to play to continued play, it's perfect. Why?
•  73 KB (yes KB) client to download, ala Steam, that streams just the levels and content you need now. No waiting for 40 Gigs to download. It's fast and it's brilliant.
• Graphics. This thing scales like nobody's business. I mean, it's good on my Dx9 ATI 9600, but it's even good on my craptastic laptop.
• You can you actually run it in a Window. How many times have you pissed off a DirectX app when some Blue Toast popped up or you accidentally Alt-Entered. GuildWars will scale as you resize it. Stunning.
• No local storage of your folks. That means I can pop the small client on my wife's system and fire it up. My character (Abeba Oluchi, a Warrior/Elementalist, thank you very much) is right where I left 'em.
• Graphics. Did I mention wheat that sways in the wind?
• Simple to buy. Gave them US$50 at http://plaync.com/store/gw_purchase.html and I was off. Seemless. Smoother than Steam and Half-Life 2.
• Coding4Fun. RSS here.
• I'm still doing my thing on the Some Assembly Required column. I still love that title. Coming soon? I've got NMEA 2.0 GPS code in .NET 2.0, Media Center fun, more Phidgets, a CrystalFontz display with input buttons, possibly some Legos, possibly some Robots, some iPodity perhaps, and something with Windows Image Acquisition.
• Professional ASP.NET 2.0. We're still cranking away on the book. We're making sure everything is technically accurate and insightful and ready for the final builds when they come.
• I'm pretty happy with the Caching chapter, the chapter on State Management and the chapter on XML in the context of ASP.NET 2.0. I've also got some good information while reading Oleg's blog. Seriously, if you care about XML, you need to know this guy. Unsubscribed, then RSS subscribed again, just to reinforce it. :)
• Jamaica. We just got back from a Cruise from Miami to Jamaica.
• Turns out I'm not a cruise person. We don't smoke. We don't drink. We don't eat in excess. Seems that is what you're paying for, so perhaps we didn't get our money's worth.
• I was more interested in talking about how the World Bank and the Chiquita Banana lobby has destroyed the Jamaican economy, but other cruisers were more interested in bidding on velvet paintings of dolphins.
• SO, I might have been a bit of a drag. That said, I got tan-esque, learned about this new kind of shoe that people who relax call a "flip-flop" and read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
• It was so much better than the crap Da Vinci code. Really, if you liked Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons (the prequel) will cause you to implode.

I will leave you, Dear Reader (both of you) with this. I've got potentially big news coming. I shall leave you to speculate wildly. Discuss.