Whew, but the Phantoms DID NOT have a good game tonight. Seriously. We did play very well in the third period, so we didn't get run out of our own building when all was said and done. But unfortunately, we had an absolutely dreadful FIRST period and dug ourselves into a hole that we weren't able to climb out of. So we lost.

Now, if we come out for Game 4 like we played in the third period, we'll be in great shape. If we turn in any more periods like our first period tonight, the only ones who'll be in great shape are the companies that produce things like TUMS, aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, etc. So come on, Phantoms, you guys know you can do this. Let's see more periods out of you guys like tonight's third period.

In other news, I had a great time at the XO Users meeting yesterday. I watched two people do complete installs of the operating system. Actually, in one case it was a reinstall of the current OS because he'd experimented and added WAY too much stuff onto the machine, and it wasn't working right. The other person upgraded to a new version of the operating system, but since what he was upgrading to was a developer's build (a version that's still being tested and having the bugs worked out), I just watched but didn't feel tempted to do an upgrade of my own at this time.

We have one XO user who started to work on a talking word processor program. It's not finished, inasmuch as it won't actually save documents yet. But it will recite your keystrokes as you type them, and will read whole words, parts of the document, or the entire document back to you, so it's certainly got its uses even while it's unfinished. For example, I copied and pasted the text from an entire web page into the program and had it read the whole thing back to me. Pretty darn cool. :o) Next up: I want to print the code out for the program so I can get an idea of what it'll take to add a few more features. For example, I'd like to see what it would take to control the speed of playback or add a "pause" feature to the playback. (Right now, once you ask it to read a large document, there's no stopping it once it's gotten started.) I'm looking forward to figuring out how to change the program to do the extra things I want it to do. This should be fun. (Said the geek. :o) )