The night before Jeff comes into town, I decide to check and see if America's Army is running properly. To my dismay, it's not. All the servers have upgraded to 1.9.0, while I'm still running 1.7.0. So, after wasting two hours with Jeff waiting for the damn thing to download (three attempts were made, but 678 MB is still a long time waiting even on a 100mbs connection), and installing, we get to have a little fun for a few hours. And then I took it home to investigate further. First off, the graphics are fantastic ... if we're taking about the people's faces. Lots of attention to detail, especially how the mouths move in time with the voice, and how the mouths change shape to approximate real speaking. Walls, wires, anything straight, however, has terrible pixilation. Anything diagnol in any way is just renderred horribly. And it's now pushing my system to the limit, as I'm getting render lag even in the standalone training missions. The sounds have a minor popping noise every now and then. You can't control movement while looking at the team stats. The squad selection screen is less intuitive. Oh, and thanks to Punkbuster (I suspect, it could just be the new engine), my lag is now horrible on a 28.8 hookup. Why oh why did they see the need to move from the Quake engine to the UT engine? Don't they know that's the secret to Valve's success? Keeping a primative but reliable engine around to draw in the maximum number of players. I just bought a $1700 laptop, $400 more then I needed or wanted, specifically to play AA. And now I'm nearly obsolete ... again! . . . . . . . . . . I'm not so bright in other matters either. I was riding on the train to meet Jeff, when a young (possibly too young) but scantily clad lady sits next to me. This being the subway, I don't pay much attention because this happens often enough it's not a big deal. Plus, you never know who's gonna put a shiv in your back, so you just keep to yourself (unless you're drunk). And I've got to review my chemistry because I've got to tutor my student in it later that day. About 10 minutes later I get that feeling. That feeling somebody's looking at me. And out of the corner of my eye I see said girl intently reading my chemistry book. Now, nobody voluntarily reads chemistry, no matter how bored you are, so she must be checking me out. Which of course is a good thing, especially since I'm doing much the same thing. But now I'm in a bind, because, frankly, I don't know what to do in these take charge moments. Besides let opportunity slip away. I could have just plain out asked her if she was interested in Chemistry (and possibly probed to see if she was in HS, she looked pretty young). I could have turned it into a nice pickup line about learning some more chemistry over dinner. I could have just said hi when she turned to me and got half in my face when putting on her jacket. Of course, these are all things that came to mind after I got off the train and could think clearly. I'm such a dork. So anyway, if you happen to be that lady who was reading my Regents Physical Chemistry review book on the 4 train, Saterday around 12:15 PM between Pacific and Grand Central (where I got off), let's do lunch sometime. Oh, and if you're that other lady I met at Macy's with the pots and rode home with on the W train 2 years ago, you can come along too.