This week, Circuit City is selling Half-Life 2: Episode 1 for $8. You read that right: eight dollars. I paid $17.95, thinking I was getting a "pre-order discount." Although I am aware that I recently said I'd gladly pay $19.95 again for another episode, I'm afraid that this revelation has changed my mind. Never again will I pre-order a game from Valve. It's highway robbery, plain and simple.

Another thing that I'm mildly annoyed with is that episodes 1 through 3 are Half-Life 3, according to Gabe Newell. What? So why aren't they being called Half-Life 3: Episode X? Well, it seems that the folks at Valve screwed up. Things seem to be getting a little sloppy over there. Could this be the beginning of the end? I certainly hope not.

I surf Digg.com nearly every day. And the more I use the site, the more problems I see with it. Granted, the experience has improved over time, but we're still a long way from perfection. One side effect of the democratic approach to news posting is the introduction of stories not worthy to be labeled news. Sensationalist stories show up there all the time, undoubtedly posted by people who know absolutely nothing about the topic. Recent headlines to this effect include "Autistic or just a geek? Take the test!" and "40+ suggestions for better desktop" (yes, that headline is grammatically incorrect). Do you see where we're headed?

An internet "test" isn't news, nor is it a scientific way of determining whether or not you have Asperger's Syndrome. Likewise, a collection of suggestions for improving desktop software is purely opinion, not news. "So vote against the story," you say. "It is, after all, a democratic process."

Well, not exactly.

To "digg" a story, a user need only click once (after logging in) on the associated "digg it" button. But to vote against a story, a user has to click three times: once to open the "problem?" drop-down menu, once to select the problem, and then once on the JavaScript alert that pops up, indicating that the story has been "reported." Reported? To whom? I thought this was a democratic process!

So, voting against a story requires three times the effort. No wonder so much crap makes the front page. If Digg would make it easier to vote against a story, using only a 1-click process, I predict things would get much better.

I'm taking part in a Qt class this week at work, and the only web browser installed on each computer in the classroom is Internet Explorer. And the more I use IE, the more I realize why I switched to the best little browser in the world. While browsing through my web statistics before class, I clicked on a strange referral link (some sort of poker site), and was immediately drowned in a sea of pop-ups. I had forgotten that IE doesn't support pop-up blocking natively (although it may very well do so in Windows XP - we're running 2000 here in class). I had quite a difficult time getting out of the site without a million more pop-ups appearing. And the site didn't even have a link back to my website (so how did that referral string appear in my stats?).

And oh how I miss tabbed browsing! I must have tried to open a new tab at least a hundred times or more. Why anyone still uses the hunk of junk browser out of Redmond is a mystery to me. If you haven't switched to Firefox yet, please do so today. Won't you think of the children?

I love sugar candy. Not that gross "chocolate" that people rave about (yes Virginia, I dislike chocolate). I'm talking about the Willy Wonka kind of candy. Gobstoppers. Nerds. Runts. These things are my crack cocaine, and I always enjoy eating a box (or two). But lately, I've been having a hard time finding what I want.

The big boxes of Gobstoppers are available everywhere, but I try my best to avoid those for the sake of my teeth (I can crack them open in one bite - a mark of a poorly made "jawbreaker"). Likewise, Nerds are relatively easy to find, but I don't crave Nerds like I do the others, so I usually decide to pass them up when I see them in the store. But I have had the most awful time in locating a reliable retail outlet that stocks Runts. Nowhere locally seems to carry them. And if they do, the supply has always sold out by the time I arrive. Grocery stores, Target, Wal-Mart, drug stores ... the list goes on of the places I've looked.

Interestingly enough, the same goes for those tiny rolls of Sweet-Tarts (the ones that look like Smarties). You essentially cannot buy those things anymore, and that really fries my egg! What is a brother to do when a sugar craving hits? Apparently, these companies would rather push their "special" versions of these aforementioned candies: chewy sweet-tarts, sour sweet-tarts - anything but the normal ones. How can such atrocities be justified?