SLHS reunion

South Lakes’ Class of 1987 will be holding their 20th reunion on the weekend of October 26 – 28. Good lord, we’re old.

Three thousand miles, a baby and other commitments will keep me from attending. Maybe for the 25th.

StarCraft II

Blizzard has just drop-kicked South Korea’s GDP into the toilet with its weekend announcement of StarCraft II.

(When I was at Blizzard, the company had sold enough copies of StarCraft in South Korea for one person in nine to own one, although many of those copies were for cybercafes. I can’t think of a game with comparable success in America.)

Not surprisingly, the StarCraft Battle Chest, which includes StarCraft, the Brood War expansion (the team lead on that, incidentally, was Rob Pardo, who went on to lead Warcraft III and World of Warcraft) is back to #20 on the videogame sales chart at Amazon.com. Heck, I’m probably going to get it, since my complimentary copy that I got when I was hired there eventually found its way to my brother-in-law’s house, and has never been installed on my current computer.

The new Treo

So, about a year after I got my Treo 650, and mere weeks before I have a kid, Palm announces a new Treo, the 755p. It sounds like a pretty good phone, albeit an incremental upgrade other than a much-improved camera as compared to my current model.

Must. Be. Strong.

CSI: David Caruso

If the newspaper industry made pizza

I read this article in the American Journalism Review a few weeks ago, and it’s kept me irritated ever since. At first, I wasn’t sure what bothered me about the twentysomethings working at the Charlotte Observer referring to the newspaper as a “dying industry.”

Finally, it hit me: No one in Charlotte was going to say “OK, I know all the news I’ll ever need to know, no more news for me.” Charlotteans still want to read news, but the newspaper industry doesn’t want to sell it to them except in one format they’ve been using for two centuries.

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