I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, even though I do like to play on my Xbox and I have an online gaming account. I even have a gamer tag – SpaceDaisy (please don’t laugh!). But I’m not a gamer. However, I love this little web series I recently discovered called The Guild.

It's about a group of gamers who are part of the same online guild. Online they band together to fulfill missions, killing enemies and collecting gold and loot. However, when circumstances create an opportunity to meet in real life, their socially awkward personalities make for some very hilarious scenarios. Except for the Bladezz character, the acting is really top notch and believable despite the characters being over the top.

Each webisode is just 5 minutes or so long. So far there are 2 seasons of 10 webisodes each of the Guild and I can’t wait for season 3! I’m totally hooked.

Have a baby or toddler who likes to play on your computer? Check out BabySmash – a fee download that runs on Windows which displays letters, numbers and shapes in bright colours while keeping your little one locked out of your other applications. I love it!

I’ve kept meaning to update my blog, but life got in my way. I’m now the proud mamma of twin boys and life as I know it has changed forever. So much has happened over the past while in my life. It’s been a long, tough, rewarding, devastating, joyous journey through infertility, pregnancy, birth and now raising the boys who are 5 months old, but I figure that’s the subject for different, mamma-focused blog. I’ll let you know if I ever start writing about my experiences and learnings.

Last March, I wrote about a cool technology that Microsoft Labs is developing, called Photosynth. Yesterday was the inauguration for US President Obama and featured on CNN’s web site is a Photosynth of the venue. It’s basically a large 3D collage of photos that people took at the site of the inauguration. It’s quite something and gives you the full effect of all the people that were there – much more than any single or even a flat collection of photos could. You can also go to the Photosynth site to see the other photosynths of the inauguration, including ones from along the parade route.

What’s so neat about this is not only the technology, but the way the technology allows people to share their experiences in a full rich way to others that weren’t there. I keep meaning to put together a photosynth myself but so far I haven’t been inspired about what to photograph. Plus I’ve been a little busy lately with the twins and all…

I've been scratching my head the past few days.

My main computer is a notebook running Windows Vista Enterprise SP1 with a 110 GB C: drive and an external 150 GB F: drive. The only thing that's installed on the C: drive is the OS and applications - all my data is on the F: drive. Despite this, my C: drive was becoming full and was giving me warnings that it had less than 2 GB of free space. Very puzzling.

I ran the Disk Cleanup utility but it didn't show anything very large to delete. I manually checked the temp directories, took a look at the page and hibernate files, and listed the disk usage information for all the directories. According to my calculations, I was only using 30 GB or so. Where was the rest of my disk space being used?

After a little searching, I found an article on the My Digital Life site on how to use the vssadmin.exe utility to see how much space is being allocated for the Volume Shadow Copy service. So I opened a command prompt (with admin privileges) and ran the following command:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Sure enough, that's where my drive space had gone! Since the maximum limit on my machine was unbounded, Vista was swallowing up all my free space. The author details how to use the vssadmin.exe utility to limit the maximum storage space, but there is also another article on how to use the Explorer GUI to do the same thing.

My computer is now reporting 77 GB of free space and both of us are happy campers once again.

So how did you spend Earth Hour? I actually didn't shut down John's server as I had threatened, as we host several websites on it and he wasn't confident it would come up properly, but we did shut off all the lights and I powered down my laptop and monitor. I thought about unplugging the fridge which would have been okay as long as the door stayed closed for the hour, but didn't in the end. I feel there was much more that we could have done, however, it was still a fun activity and got us both thinking about energy conservation.

I lit a whole bunch of candles and set up the latest game that we play together (we're big into MayFair's Train Games) - the Settlers of Catan card game version. It's specifically for 2 players and although it has the same elements as the original Settlers of Catan, there is definitely a different strategy to playing.

I don't have any pictures of the city of Guelph during Earth Hour, but found plenty of pictures of the Toronto skyline. The one below is a panoramic taken by luxography and he notes:

"Although most of the city continues to be lit (the sky glow to the northeast stands out in particular), there are some noteworthy participants visible here: the CN Tower, the Rogers Centre, the Fairmont Royal York, Yonge-Dundas Square, and the ClearChannel billboards along the Gardiner Expressway (sorry, Rick Mercer!). The Bank of Montreal and TD Canada Trust also turned off their rooftop beacons."

Click on the photo to go to the original page, where you can view a larger version.

Now although this is all nice and warm and fuzzy, there have been some critics that say it's all for naught - that an event like Earth Hour, despite the efforts of millions of people, doesn't make a significant impact. My colleague, Rodney, forwarded an interesting paper written by David Solomon from the University of Chicago where he analyzes the impact of last year's Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia. That may be, however, I choose to believe that an event like Earth Hour brings the issues to the forefront and at least gets people thinking and talking. That in itself is a pretty significant impact.

So regardless, I'll leave you all with nice, warm, fuzzy thoughts.

Happy Earth Hour 2008!

I hope you were able to participate and that, if nothing else, Earth Hour got you thinking about conserving energy.