I spent much of the weekend trying to decompress from the week and finish recovering from the cold. I got a tiny bit of OpenGL work done, basically getting OpenGL extensions fixed for Win32. No big deal, after all, who uses Windows these days. Still, nice to have it fixed.

Also got the accounting for the company caught up. Got Rose's laptop to recognise the wireless network. Turns out (I sort-of remembered this) there's a button on it which (without any indication in the Windows software) disables the wireless network. The button is actually the light which tells you whether there's a wireless connection, beautiful, except there's nothing to tell you it's a button. Had to actually get out the manual to figure it out.

Won one game of Risk at a guys games afternoon on Saturday. Basically just won it because of a decision that we'd quit after two people were eliminated, using total land owned as the measure. My turn came up with my having huge defencive armies protecting my (small-ish) stronghold in Australia after a war between two other players in Europe left Asia essentially empty with one guy's entire decimated holdings sitting right next to me. Took a risk to conquer it all, leaving nothing in the homeland, grabbing most of Asia before killing off his last army.

The second game, unfortunately, I got bottled up in one continent and essentially never did anything of note. Probably wouldn't have gotten very far anyway, turns out that in Risk on longer games the cards become far more important than geopolitical holdings, as they can deliver ridiculously strong armies. Having not played for 20 years or so I'd somehow forgotten the implications of that aspect of the game.

All told, I think I far prefer Red Alert 2 (and similar computer strategy games). Risk just seems way too random. I wound up throwing away army after army on what in a more realistic game would be a fairly straightforward win (e.g. 20:2 and I wind up losing almost the entire force before taking over the country). Of course, I suppose some would say that is a fairly realistic scenario, given the US misadventures in Iraq.

Also got the cable modem updated. Rogers is apparently discontinuing their Terayon Proprietary service to go all-DOCSIS in this area. It's kinda neat knowing what that means (Cinemon monitors Terayon Proprietary or DOCIS cable modems). No other practical benefit from that project so far.

At various points during the weekend I either got into conversations with Soni about the nature of perception and its relation with design or was just sitting thinking about thesis presentation and structure. I think I'm actually to the point of itching to work on it. Every time the topic comes to mind I just want to drop everything and work on it.

Tomorrow is going to be somewhat nuts. I'm going to get to bed now so I can be up by 7 and hopefully at Linux Caffe and working by 9. Tuesday I'm off to Waterloo. Haven't yet got anything to do while I'm waiting there.