Arrangements have gone forward for my grandfather. He requested that there not be a service or anything so there won’t be anything official. He was cremated yesterday along with his masonic apron, his drum sticks (he was an accomplished drum player) and his custom carved cane. His ashes will be separated and placed at a small memorial behind my grandmothers church in Saugus as well as at the Perry family plot in Maine. Everyone is handling it as well as can be expected. Personally, I don’t deal well with death and I’d just like to not talk about it. That said, something about mentioning it is actually therapeutic. Go figure.

So, other topics.

Widgets. (Damn Matt, transition topics often?). I like’em. I’m putting the four most popular engines through their pases to see what I like best. Of course Mac users will recognize the term widgets from the always popular Mac program Konfabulator. Windows users will get their hands on The K soon. Not soon enough for me however. I’m currently running Samurize, AveDesk, Kapsules and Desktop X. As far as my money is concerned AveDesk and Kapsules are winning. Kaps are so super simple in terms of use and setup. I was running in a 5 minutes. Compare that to the 30+ minutes it took my to hand configure Samurize scripts. AveDesk I like because of it’s flexibility. It can really do just about anything and theres a fairly large number of people trying to develop for it. Add to that the fact that you can use ObjectDock, YzDock and MobyDock plugins THROUGH AveDesk and it’s usefulness just tripled.

So… who wants to write some widgets with me? I’ve got a laundry list of simple things I think could be useful and yet no one has developed yet. First up would be a BF1942 server watcher. How many of those things did we have for CS? How hard could it be to simply get the player list and scores. Hell, they’re listed on ServerSpy, AllSeeingEye AND GameSpy thingies. How hard could it be to grab some text from a website or a java-script? You tell me.

Oh well. Hey, I know I’ve mentioned this to Chip, but for any of my other PC Gaming buddies, if you’d like to give Battlefield a spin and you’d like an experienced “tour guide”, just let me know. There’s so many nuances to that game that it’s scary. For example, if you’re an Engineer class and you have land-mines, you can be running toward something, hit the “lay prone” button which will cause you to jump and slide forward on your stomach, and essentially “kick the mine” forward underneath things… like a tank for example. Since the mine is under the tank you obviously can’t see it. You’ve just “booby-trapped” that tank. The next enemy to hop in it will be toast as soon as they pull forward. That’s just one of the oh so fun things YOU can see on Matt’s Wild Battlefield Adventure Safari. Tickets on sale now!