Continuing from my earlier bad news story, my brother might be loaning me his old computer for an indeterminate time. It’s quite a bit newer than the Pentium II, and can even run Oblivion (although Fallout 3 would tax its poor little brain too much). The trick would be getting it home from Oshawa, and I’d need to get a new hard drive into it as he doesn’t want me to reformat the one currently in the machine.

Pretty much what it says. So, I got my brother’s old PC, and I’ve been spending most of my waking time getting Vista and various programs installed and happy. Unfortunately I’ve hit on a major stumbling block. The motherboard has no official Vista support (and indeed is out of manufacturer support) and there’s no working, usable audio.

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The latest version of XNA has been out for a little over a week now, and surely that's enough time for XNA fans to really start cranking things out with it. One of the neat new additions with XNA 3.0 is a starter kit, for building a platform game. (Remember the classic Sonic and Mario games? Fun times.)

So it turns out that the board supports up to six channel audio, and I just never noticed the additional audio jacks before complaining about the sound problems. An idiot is me. Still, it's not all my fault.

I get really annoyed when I see articles like this one on TechCrunch, confusing provincial and federal governments, when the author even bothers to make a difference. Even worse is when research for such articles are so half-baked as to ignore the fact that there's more to the story than what's being reported.

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Everyone knows that despite the current economic crisis facing the world (or at least Europe, the Americas, and east Asia) the banks in Canada are faring better than average, and that before the federal election up here, they were given some additional support by selling mortgages to Ottawa for cash. So, of course, the banks need to be bailed out!

That is, to make ends meet and get money for upgrading, I'll be taking up blue collar work for a while.

Perhaps you've heard of the Coding4Fun blog. Run by Brian Peek, it's full of interesting and fun programming projects that anyone can work on. Well, as you might know from reading my blog earlier this year, there's a Coding4Fun book on the way.

After over two and a half years with Toronto Go-Getters Toastmasters (since back when it was known as Toast IT) I'll be leaving the club at the end of 2008. Toronto Go-Getters was my first Toastmasters club (at least, the first I joined as a member) and it's been a fun trip with them.

Via VentureBeat comes news that Twitter will no longer be sending SMS updates to Canadians.