Meet Alyx Vance. She's one of the main characters in Valve Studios' Half-Life series. She's also something of a rarity in videogames in that she's an actual character, as opposed to the 2-dimensional caricatures of women that dominate the genre.

I've had problems with Comcast as a customer. Sometimes big problems. Most recently, I noticed huge amounts of lag on my connections and interference on the phone lines. Most troubling was the type of problem I was having. The connection would be fine, then it would throttle down to zero over the course of a few minutes before restarting.

That's usually a sign that it's being managed and rationed.

Repeat after me: the magazine is part of the weapon. Again. Better.

It always amazes me to see people who keep their guns immaculate but never clean the magazines. Cleaning them seems to be an afterthought. With automatic firearms, the most common causes for feeding failures involve the magazine. A dirty magazine can cause all sorts of trouble.

"I shall exercise due consideration for the personal emotions of any competitor, and shall act in a manner so as not to embarrass or disturb the competitor any more than is absolutely necessary."

–IPSC Range Officer's Creed, rule 11.

That's all well and good for competition shooting, but a public range isn't IPSC. If you show your ass, prepare to get roasted for it.

If you don't have the Four Rules committed to heart, you have no place handling a gun, much less doing so in the presence of others. Violation of these rules not only brands you as an imbecile, it places the very lives of other people in serious danger.

I went ahead and updated to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) tonight. The whole process went smoothly, with only a couple of hitches, which I thought I'd share.

This lovely bit of advice comes from a Cops Writing Cops, a site dedicated to "outing" police officers who have the audacity to enforce the law on their brethren.

Particulary [sic] troubling is the talk about making phone calls after the fact and getting things fixed with certain agencies. Boy is that stupid to post, what are you guys thinking? You trying to get somebody who helped you out indicted? Shut the heck up about that stuff.

Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today. He joins such great historical figures as Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa and Martin Luther King.

I, for one, am incensed.

Gore was awarded the prize largely for his work on An Inconvenient Truth, a visually appealing movie filled with distortions and lies. It is a piece of irresponsible, fear-mongering propaganda masquerading as science.

Is this what science has been reduced to? For that matter, is the Nobel Peace Prize now so cheap and easily given on political merits?

Of course, I'm playing Halo 3. The single-player campaign, while entertaining, really isn't anything more than a training ground for the real meat of the game, which is the multiplayer.

There's a mishmash of a story involving the Covenant's invasion of Earth to retrieve the Ark, Cortana's imprisonment with the Gravemind and of course, the great question: how is it Master Chief can fall from space at escape velocity and survive, but he dies if he slips off a 30-foot embankment?

Well, that last one is never answered, but the rest wraps up nicely. Stick around after the credits for a nice little bit of closure.

There's been alot of attention paid to this one. Not because it's a Radiohead record, nor for its content, but for the manner in which it's been released.

See, you can download it for free. No subscription is required, and the songs are in unprotected MP3. What's more, the band wants you to download it. Pay whatever you feel is fair.

This is a big move, and one I've seen coming for some time now. Leave it to Radiohead to pull it off first.

You can write any kind of claptrap these days, and as long as you call it a "blog," you don't have to worry about backing up any of your assertions with facts.

Case in point: Laura Washington's silly little diatribe, called "Let's Pry Open Those Cold Dead Hands."

She starts by claiming that Americans are crying out for more gun control. Apparently, the standards in Journalism school have sunk to such a degree that the only attribution required is, "national news polls." It seems that corporate entertainment product has replaced research these days.

"If I lived back in the Wild West days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That way, if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like, 'Hey look. He's carrying a soldering iron!' and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, 'That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice.' Then everybody would get real quiet and ashamed, because they made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink."

–Jack Handy/Phil Hartman, Saturday Night Live