Now that Iris, the ARG created for marketing Halo 3, has completed, there's been quite a bit of examination of the game (which GameSetWatch summarizes nicely). As there are doings a-transpirin' regarding ARG coverage at the conference, I was interested in reading about how the game played out, and the usual postmortem stuff (what went right & wrong).

Well, it's the first day after Labour Day. And that means that kids are back in school, summer is only a couple weeks away from ending, and Toast IT Toastmasters is returning from its own summer break! As usual, the meetings are at Metro Hall (55 John St. at King) but we've only got a small room for today's meeting. Still, we are in regular sized rooms for the meetings following, and I'm still on track to complete my Competent Communicator before the end of the month. That means two speeches, one next week and one on the 18th or 25th.

Thanks to my friend Terry, I was able to get a new (well, used) PSU to try out in the dead computer. Lo and behold, the computer started working properly, and there was much rejoicing. However, it was not to last. Several hours later, the computer just up and died, again, without any known cause.

Over on the Shell Blog, David Vronay discusses some of the work that went into bringing Minesweeper into the 21st century. It's absolutely hilarious, what the design team and programmers at Microsoft went through just to make the game continue to be acceptable. Also good for a laugh is Raymond Chen's coverage and the comments on his blog post.

Despite not being able to get any work done on Alarm Clock at the given time, I have been continuing to think about what work remains incomplete, and how best to accomplish it. Here's two of those insights...

GarageGames, the producers of the Torque game engine and publishers of a number of indie games, has recently been purchased by American media conglomerate IAC. The official word is that nothing's changing at GG as a result of the purchase, and that the IAC purchase may lead to more opportunities for developers to get published via the company. CEO Josh Williams says it all his blog.

Here's hoping this makes the indie scene even more vibrant!

At last night's Toast IT meeting, I finally completed my Competent Communicator manual, giving an insprational speech almost off the cuff to complete project 10. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn't figure out how to express it when preparing the speech, so when I stood up to present, everything just came out unprepared. And yet, brilliance! I was amazed at how well it came out. Although it wasn't perfect (no speech ever is) I think I did a great job for a speech with very little preparation.