Happy Half-Way Day!

I can finally say it's official, I'm past half-way into my deployment.

The "Projected Leave Date" and "Total Length of Tour" are both high-side SWAGs (Scientific Wild @$$ Guesses). Really we should be out of here before I reach either of those numbers, but it's nice to predict longer and get shorter, kinda like going all day thinking it's Thursday and finding out at the end of the day that it's really Friday.

Only minutes after posting my last entry my Z800 arrived and now I've had it strapped to my head for hours at a time for the last three or four days. Unfortunately, I don't get the 3D effect yet because the computer I play on doesn't have an nVidia graphics card, but I still get the effect of having a huge screen in front of me. The head-tracking feature is also something to be admired. I fired up Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat 0.7 mod and jumped into HMMWV on the passenger side and as I turned my head around in real life I got a view of the inside of the cab as though I were really sitting in it. (Despite the obvious attention to detail that the developers put into the game, the inside of a HMMWV is really not that spacious.) The sore eyes and headaches passed as I played around with the settings of the goggles to get them aligned just so. All in all, I'd say that these things are a great buy and would recommend that any serious gamer get a pair ... of the goggles. There are only three improvements that I would make; 1) enable 3D on all cards, 2) get different ear-buds, 3) increase the resolution for desktop work (800x600 works ok in games, but not so much outside games).

More importantly, Katie and I are only a couple weeks away from being parents (by any definition)! I've been trying to get myself in the mindset that I'm going to have a son a little bit every day by taking a minute or two to repeat to myself "My son." Try as I might, I don't think it will set in until I see the little guy.

Also, I'm going to tap-dance a bit here because I don't know how much info the person who is the subject here would want me to make public knowledge, but someone very close to me just got word back from the doctors that things are getting better. Needless to say it's a great relief to me to hear this.