I'll read it, but I'll wait until all three (or however many it ends up being) books are published. I'm getting tired of fantasy authors who are constantly deferring their series, splitting the next book into one or two or three, missing deadlines, etc. etc. Yeah, I mean you too George R.R. Martin. Get of the film set for Game of Thrones show and finish the damn book! I wonder if the publishers get the authors to do this deliberately to try and maintain attention on a series that takes decades to complete.

I've lived in Southern Ontario most of my life and have a fairly good sense of direction. I usually know where north is.I wonder if this is more a function of memory than an innate ability: if I am a passenger in a car and fall asleep, I'll be lost when I wake up until I see enough visual cues to reestablish my knowledge of where north is. The same happens if I'm driving through a subdivision with lots of curved streets. A couple of decades ago I moved to Saskatoon in western Canada. I was lost. It wasn't the kind of random sense of being lost you get when you move to the new place. My sense of direction was completely reversed. I'd go south instead of north, east instead of west, not east instead of north or south instead of west. One day, I realized that this probably had to do with the rivers. I have usually lived near rivers, in places where I can actually see the river most days. In Southern Ontario, most of the rivers flow north-to-south. In Saskatoon, the river flows south-to-north. I think I had come to use rivers as mnemonic cues for direction. As soon as I realized this, my mental map of Saskatoon reoriented itself and I was never lost again.

Maybe we're all getting trailer fatigue. The trailer kind of reminded me of the Phantom Menace trailer, and we all know how that turned out. I blame the marketing people who put the trailer together. Cameron's supposed to be trying to make us see the CGI creations as real characters. His marketing team slapped together a fairly generic looking trailer that looks like everything else out there. Maybe if they gave us some idea what the movie was about and showed some actual acting from the characters we would have had a better idea what Cameron was shooting for. The 16 minute preview might have done that. I don't know: I haven't seen it.

It also says that the survey covers the period from the XBox's launch to present. This might be faint praise, but reportedly Microsoft has made many changes that have fixed these problems. It might be more useful to see a survey that compared the failure rates of all systems that were purchased in the last 2 years. Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe the kind of people who read Game Informer and fill in its surveys are the kind of people who bought the 360 early on. So the sample group might be somewhat skewed.

Will the Natal be just a peripheral that is brought out and dusted off when curious company comes over, sort of like the WiiFit? Can it be a core controller for the X-Box, the way the Wiimote is for the Wii? The Wiimote can function as a traditional controller. Smash Brothers, for example, has almost no motion sensing functions at all and the Wiimote works just fine for that. Or it can use motion sensing as an enhancement to the traditional controller. MaroKart would be an example of this. Now if you want to get up and do something, you can put WiiSports in (actually we play WiiSports sitting down, but never mind that for now) or dig out the WiiFit. But how often do gamers really want to do that? Do gamers really want to get off the couch to play their games? If they just want to sit down and relax while they play, can they use the Natal, or will they have to put the Natal away and get out the traditional controller?

A lot of it depends on your exact job and the deal between HP and DHL. If you job involves systems that are unique to DHL, then you should be safe for a while. If it is a job like looking after a Windows server or Oracle DBA, I might start looking. If HP is going to start taking possession of DHL's servers and systems and moving them to their own server farms, then I'd start looking right away. If not, you'll find that much of your time in the future is spent training others how to do your job. That's what happened in my last job. Keep in mind that HP is buying EDS and there is going to be some rationalizing there. Even without the merger, these companies are looking for the cheapest IT labour possible, which means they are going overseas. So I would not count on any future in HP. Also oursourcers love to outsource. You job might not even be done by HP: it might be somebody they've contracted to do it. I once had a problem that involved five separate companies, five levels of outsourcing. It felt like I was working for the government or something. If you hang in through the transition, be prepared for the effect this will have on your relationship with your non-IT colleagues at DHL. I found this really stressful when it happened to me. I could not talk to anyone in our company unless they went through the outsourcer first. Then the outsourcer might not assign the task to me. I used to be the only computer guy for one of our sites. When somebody needed a new program installed on his computer, he called the help desk. They assigned it to a company they outsourced desktop maintenance too. I then had to show the person who came in from 100km away how to install the software on this person's computer. After a while this changes your colleagues relationship with you: you become more and more of an outsider. Soon they start to check to see if you might have a better office than they do.