doom 3 is way scarier than this hurricane
We've decided to stay home and sit through this hurricane, unless it does something to change our minds in the next 24 hours. It's the same strength as the last one, and seems to be heading even further north (viz. away from us) than Frances did, and since the house came through with no damage at all, we think this is the easiest place to be. Not necessarily the safest - that'd be a couple of hundred miles away, but moving Patch and the cats at such short notice would be tough.

No sales yet on Mercury MailRoom, but I've submitted it to lots of shareware sites and signed up six affiliates, who will take 30% of whatever sales they generate for me. It's an interesting world, this shareware business, with forums full of arguments between vendors (that's me) and affiliates (that's the guys who built sites designed to sell vendor's software) arguing over affiliates "stealing" sales from vendors by offering discounts, or falsely claiming that the vendor's price is higher than it actually is. My program is pretty expensive for a shareware program ($99) and I'm not banking on making a lot of sales to the general public. I'm actually looking for working tech support staff to find it and buy it. When I get into the next phase of promotion I'll be trying to get it in front of such people in a more targetted way; in the meantime I'm just putting it out there and seeing if anything interesting happens.

I just downloaded the Doom 3 demo and fairly shat my pants when the zombies started lurching at me while the lights went out. I tried turning up the brightness level in the game, but it did no good :) They want it dark and shadowy ! Even on my low end video card (FX 5200) it does a very good job of terrifying you. I'm a total wimp when it comes to things like horror movies...why did I think I could handle Doom 3 ? I think I'd better play it during the day (non-hurricane conditions) with the lights on and happy sunshine daisy sunflower bright cheerful posters on the wall. And happy music playing too :)

Speaking of music, I signed up at emusic.com intending to try it and dump it quickly, but I'm very impressed. It's the first online music service that doesn't assume you're a thief who needs to be punished before you've done anything wrong. For $9.99 a month you get to download 40 high quality (192K) mp3 files. That's it. No DRM, no "limited number of burns to CD", no "only plays on an iPod". They're unencumbered mp3s, they're yours forever, even if you cancel the service. There's not a lot of mainstream music on there, but luckily I was looking to beef up my Steeleye Span collection, so this is a good thing for me. They have a wide range of music, editorials etc, so if you're interested in music at all I can recommend it.

I'll be taking video and stuff during the storm, so come back for some choice cuts of real life hardcore weather.