I've got my work cut out for me. Next week at Toast IT Toastmasters we're holding an open house meeting, and as the club's current VP Education, I'm going to be giving a speech about The Toastmasters Experience. Besides helping plan the event and watching out for unforseen problems I've still got the speech to write and practice before the meeting (which is on Tuesday, at Metro Hall). In addition, we're ramping up with TIGC, trying to finally lock down our location for 2007 and hopefully 2008. And then there's still planning to do for Anime North!

Over on his blog, Dave Weller has announced the latest update to the DirectX SDK, including the list of changes.

Thanks to a bunch of issues with repeating events, I went and did a manual reset on the events calendar. Pretty much deleted every repeating event and recreated them from scratch. One of the problems dealt with how repeating events will repurpose existing nodes instead of creating new ones, which screwed up all the URL aliases generated by pathauto. The other problem is with Drupal's handling of time zones.

Dave Weller now reports that the April 2007 DirectX SDK has been taken down due to a critical bug. He says that it should return today or tomorrow, however. Oops!

How did I miss this amazing site and its library of XNA tutorials, samples, and other useful bits and pieces? I feel kind of dumb for not knowing about their resource listings, and not submitting my article on Game Explorer to it. Well, I've corrected the mistake, and for doing so, I got a neat little site badge from there, a XNAResources.com DevTag!

One of the great things about attending Microsoft events, especially their launch events, is that you almost invariably walk out of the place with some quality software for free. Back in 2005 when the latest version of Visual Studio was released, attendees of the launch event received a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition, and a download for BizTalk Server 2006. But with the launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007, there wasn't any software being handed out. What happened?

It's my 24th birthday today. Happy birthday, me!

As part of my continuing battle against comment, trackback, and feedback spam on this site, I've instituted captchas against anonymous users. Unfortunately while the spam module for Drupal did a decent enough job of getting rid of comment spam, it hadn't done enough to stop trackback spam and absolutely nothing for feedback spam. Blocking two IP ranges from which most of it came certainly helped but the problem is returning.

I'm happy to announce that the Toronto Independent Games Conference is now open for both attendee registration and presentation submissions. We're seriously gearing up to have the biggest, best game conference ever seen in Ontario!

If you like to use Lua for game scripting, this is a useful library to check out. Xnua is a library that helps integrate Lua scripting into XNA based games. It uses a content pipeline plugin to convert scripts to .NET assemblies, which rely on the Xnua runtime for support. You can load and run the assemblies more or less normally, and hook them into the Lua states provided by the runtime, in order to add the scripting functionality to your game project.