From the Associated Press:

Google Inc.'s rapid financial growth decelerated in the fourth quarter as the online search engine leader's profit fell below analyst expectations for the first time since its August 2004 initial public offering.

Tuesday's disappointing financial report rattled previously bullish investors, causing Google's stock price to plunge by more than 12 percent in a backlash that wiped out $16 billion in shareholder wealth. [...]

Google released its results after the stock market closed Tuesday. Company shares plummeted $53.65 -- 12.4 percent -- in after-hours trading after gaining $5.84 to close at $432.66 Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares had fallen by as much as 19 percent earlier.

The letdown might herald the end of investors' love affair with Google's stock, said Standard & Poor's analyst Scott Kessler. "If you ask a lot of people on Main Street why they own Google, they will tell you, `Because it goes up every day,'" Kessler said. "Well, that's a great thesis until it goes down."

Yikes! Is this just a one-time thing, or is the bubble getting ready to burst? Nathan Weinberg from "Inside Google" isn't very optimistic.

In twenty days, Google has fallen over a hundred dollars, sliding from the record high of $475.11 on January 11 to the current $371. GOOG bottomed out as low as $394.74 on the 20th, losing $44 on that day, but it seemed to be in recovery mode ever since, inching higher since, reaching as high as $454, but now I’d wonder if it’ll recover at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a new record high until after the next earnings report.

See more reactions on tech.memeorandum.

Microsoft, today, released a Beta 2 Preview of Internet Explorer 7. The Build number is 5296. Although the leaked build that made its way around the web last week was tagged 5299, no changes were checked in between the two builds, so they're essentially identical, apart from the fact that 5296 is an official release. Check out the tour for a glimpse of the new features and improvements.

Since I run XP x64 on my desktop, I can't actually install this build, but I keep a XP SP2 image handy in VMware for situations like this. Here's a screenshot of the Quick Tabs feature, which now looks a lot more polished compared to previous builds.



The performance is quite solid already, and Quick Tabs was able to handle 40+ tabs with ease, even within the VM with 512MB of RAM available. Pretty impressive. It also seems to uninstall and revert back to IE6 cleanly (I tried, just for the heck of it), so if you're willing to take a small risk, I'd recommend installing this. It's fun to play with. :)

The Flavor Picker now supports instantaneous switching.
No more waiting for the page to reload; just hover over your favorite flavor in the sidebar on the right. Don't do it too fast though, or you might get a little dizzy. :)

Of course, it still plunks a cookie on your machine, so your preference is saved across sessions.

My brother has posted a beautiful tribute to our grandpa, who suffered from Parkinson's disease for several years, and passed away on Friday.

My mom had a chance to spend time with him and comfort him when she and my dad were in Bombay last month, and she is so thankful for that. I wish my brother and I could have been there for him too.

We will never forget how much he loved all of us, and he will be missed greatly. May his wonderful soul rest in peace.

Since I don't have a TV or a cable subscription in my room during the week, I record anything I want to watch on the DVR at home and watch it when I come back on weekends (skipping through the ads...woo!).

Last night, I watched the 100th episode of Smallville that aired on Thursday. No spoilers here, but it was definitely a significant episode from several points of view. Quite sad too; if you watched it, you'll know what I mean. :( After watching the show for five years, you can almost sympathize with the characters and the things they go through.

I also finally caved in and started watching Lost. Thanks to everyone who recommended it to me. I've only watched the first four episodes of Season 1 so far, but it's an awesome show, and pretty addictive! I love how each character is fleshed out so well, and how each little "huh?" moment is explained later in the episode. Good stuff.

Mike Torres from the Spaces team has posted a long list of all the new stuff that has just been added to the service.

I know a number of people (including my brother) who use Spaces for their personal blogs so this is a heads up to go play with the new features and themes in case you hadn't already noticed them. :)

This should win the "Irony of the Year" award. :D

Apparently, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been accused of unauthorized movie copying and distribution. The Director of the film in question claims that copies were made and distributed to MPAA employees without his permission.

According to Mark Lemley, a professor at the Stanford Law School, the MPAA may have been within its rights to make copies of the film. Given that the MPAA's intent isn't financial gain and that the whole situation may rise above the level of trading barbs through the media into legal action, making a copy may be justified.

Huh? So the folks who rip DVDs and distribute them over BitTorrent aren't breaking the law? After all, their intent isn't financial gain either, right?

Besides, the MPAA's site empirically states - "manufacturing, selling, distributing or making copies of motion pictures without the consent of the copyright owner is illegal." Well, didn't they just make copies and distribute them without the consent of the copyright owner?

I'm no lawyer, but the justifications and excuses just aren't making any sense to me.

Scott Hanselman breaks the news. :)

Here's what Flip3D looks like in Windows Vista, in case you haven't seen it yet:

Maybe the insides of my ears are shaped funny or something, but for some reason, I've never been able to find earbuds that'll stay put without lots of adjusting, tweaking and fiddling. And even then, they fall out quite often, which is pretty frustrating.

I had enough of it and decided to order a pair of closed, semi-circumaural Sennheiser HD-202's earlier this week. They're larger, DJ-style headphones so I'll only be using them indoors, or on road trips and flights because of the ambient noise insulation. The stock Creative earbuds that came with my Zen Micro are still around for general outdoor use. The Zen's earbuds were better than most stock buds that I've listened to. Now the Senns make them sound like crap. :D

The HD-202's pack quite a punch in terms of bass, and they're slightly lacking in the mids and highs, but I like the sound overall. The sound insulation is great, and they're also comfortable, light, sturdy and pretty slick-looking. A good buy, methinks. :)

One important component has been missing from this site ever since it went live back in 2003 - search. As you might guess, Blogger doesn't provide this functionality, so whenever I needed to find something from an old post, I had to rely on Google's site-specific search.

The other day I decided that it was high time I added a search box to the site, but just throwing in a search box that directed you to one of the many search engines wasn't very appealing. It just looks out of place, and you're essentially directing visitors away from the site, only to have them come back in through a search result.

So I used the MSN Search API, which uses the SOAP protocol, to build a search page that fit in with the rest of the site. Now I know that most of you are scratching your heads and wondering - eh, why MSN Search? Search equals Google, no? Not quite. I personally use Google for all my web searches on a daily basis, and I'll admit that my initial intention was to use the Google API, but I experimented a bit and the results changed my mind. Read on...

1) Relevency: a good search engine should be able to take in a search query and return the "best" possible result first. Now the definition of "best" is subjective in most cases, but when you have a smaller subset of data (in this case, site-specific as compared to the entire web), it's sometimes quite obvious what the best result for a set of keywords should be. Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples.

Let's say a visitor came in and wanted to see what I had to say about desktop search apps. Google's first result links to the general reviews page, while MSN's first result takes you straight to my Windows Desktop Search review. In fact, the WDS review doesn't even appear in Google's search results, even though the page has been online for several months already.

Let's consider a more general example. If you remember, I went on a ski-trip on New Year's eve and posted the pictures a few weeks later. Searching for "ski-trip" on MSN Search includes a result that takes me right to the pictures page. The same search query on Google returns only a link to a page with a post linking to the pictures page. Again, surprisingly, the pictures page is absent from Google's results, even though it explicitly includes the term "ski-trip."

Just two examples right there, but I did try several other combinations of keywords and phrases, and the results matched my predictions.

2) Freshness: relevency is important, but effectiveness also depends largely on the freshness of the search index; i.e., how often the index is updated. I was unintentionally led into comparing this aspect of Google and MSN's index some time ago when we lost a chunk of the OSNN forum database. I was trying to salvage significant threads and posts from search engine caches, and the results were quite interesting - MSN's search results contained recent threads that the Google bot hadn't indexed yet. Apparently, MSN's crawlers are quite a bit more aggressive compared to their Google counterparts. I suppose this could be an issue if you had bandwidth constraints, but if you want fresh search results, it definitely works to your advantage.

That incident prompted me to do a similar experiment with site-specific search, limited only to this domain. Search for Honda, and you notice that the post about the ad appears in MSN's results, and, as you might have guessed, doesn't appear in Google's. Try searching for the blonde joke. Or try looking for XMPP (referring to the Google Talk post). Same results. In fact, searching for unique terms that were contained in posts made about 21 days ago return nothing in Google. Odd!

Anyway, the actual point of this post was to let you know that we finally have search that looks and feels like it's part of the site. But now you know the reasoning behind my choice too. :)

Technorati Tags: Google, MSN

Check out this great commercial that was created for Honda by an ad agency in London.

Thanks to Kam for the link.

Update: I have zipped and uploaded the Flash file here, in case you want to keep a copy, or if the server is too slow to play it properly.

Ben Goodger has just updated the Firefox 2 Roadmap today and writes about some of the new features and goals that the team is working towards for the 2.0 release later this year. While the post is still short on detailed information, it's interesting to know which general areas that they're planning to improve upon in the near future. RSS integration, for example, definitely has lots of room for improvement so that it becomes more appealing to power-users as well as beginners.

Something to look forward to. :)

Technorati Tags: Firefox

Gary Burd, a software engineer on the Google Talk team, wrote in a blog post earlier today:

I flipped the switch to connect the Google Talk Service to the public XMPP network this morning. Google Talk users can now chat with users on other XMPP services and vice versa.

This means that users signed in to Google Talk via their Gmail accounts will now be able to communicate across networks with people who are connected to other XMPP servers like jabber.org etc. It looks like their first step towards federating instant messaging services. Hopefully, decent interop with AIM will follow soon, now that Google owns part of AOL.

Technorati Tags: Google

Thought I'd take a little break from all the techie stuff and point you to this great blonde joke. :D

This is going to be a long post, so be forewarned. :)

I should start off by saying that Windows Live Messenger is one of the first releases of Messenger in a long time that I'm actually looking forward to. The team has been busy working on some fun and useful new features like music and folder sharing, offline messaging, better contact list management, and so on. The last few releases haven't been particularly exciting for me (sorry, not a big fan of winks and nudges), so it's good to see a release that's focusing on more interesting scenarios.

However, one thing that has always bothered me is the direction in which the user interface of the application has been going. Ever since the split between Windows Messenger and MSN Messenger came about, the MSNM UI has progressively been getting more and more "busy" with each new version. The current beta of Windows Live Messenger is no exception, and despite all the great new features that are making their way into the client, I feel like it has taken a step backwards in some sense from v7.5 in terms of the UI.

In today's post, I'll focus on the message window (click for a larger version):



One thing that might not be immediately apparent from the screenshot is the size of the window itself. On a 1024x768 display, a single message window occupies about 1/4th of the total screen area. Moreover, the window feels heavy and bogged down at first glance, a sharp contrast from Windows Vista's Aero Glass UI, which appears clean and lightweight. The main points of focus in the message window should be the two text areas for sending and receiving messages; instead, there is a clutter of distracting buttons and controls on the window surface.

On the other hand, here's an example of a spartan UI for a message window in Google Talk:



Now, you have to admit - Google's job of keeping the UI simple and effective has been much easier, simply because it presently lacks even some of the most basic functionality that every other IM client has had for years. The real challenge is to be able to maintain this same simple and effective UI even when your application is brimming with lots of great features.

So I thought to myself - how would I personally modify WLM's message window UI so that it feels clean and inviting, and at the same time, exposes all the fancy new functionality? Bear in mind that my goal was not to create a radically different UI; in fact, I wanted to stay as close to the current UI as possible. Here's one of the mockups I came up with (click for a larger version):



The picture is simply not complete without a brief explanation of some of the motivation behind the UI changes. The first two things that you might notice are the significant reduction in the amount of screen real-estate that the window takes up, and the clear focus on the two text areas that provide the core functionality of the application - instant messaging.

Redundant UI elements such as the Send button and the user's own display picture have been removed completely. The user's display picture is already present on the contact list window and serves no functional purpose on the message window. A new panel could fold out only when the user begins a webcam session. If a Send button is required, a smaller, less jarring one, similar to the "Go" button on the Internet Explorer toolbar could be added. The new Search button is a magnifying glass, the universally recognized symbol representing search - it occupies less space and the colors blend in with the rest of the window.

Hovering over the triangle in the upper-right corner of the screen opens up a fold-out panel that exposes secondary functionality, such as the ability to start a voice conversation or a webcam session, share files etc. The panel could be visible by default so that new features are readily discoverable; but provide a quick and easy way to hide it when it's not being used, similar to the button that toggles the main toolbar in the current UI. This gives the user the flexibility to minimize the amount of wasted screen space and reduces UI clutter to a minimum. Similarly, the formatting toolbar could auto-hide when not in use and slide out only when the user's pointer hovers over it. The tab for switching between text and ink could be incorporated into the formatting toolbar, thus eliminating the need for the large amount of wasted grey area under the input textbox. Remember, pixels are precious. Use them sparingly.

So now that I've put a few of my ideas down in pictures and words, what are your thoughts? Do you like the new UI of the message window in the WLM Beta (we'll get to the contact list some other time)? What do you think of the modifications and the UI in the mockup? What would you change in the original and what would you change in the modified version, if anything at all? There's still a good chance that we might see changes to the UI before the final version is released, so if there's something you don't like speak up now before it's too late.

Technorati Tags: WLM, Messenger

An interesting feature, initially proposed for the Three Degrees add-on for Messenger back in the day, has finally made a comeback in Windows Live Messenger.

"Music Mix" basically allows you to create a shared playlist with a friend that both of you can add songs to. The songs are streamed from one person to the other, and the playlist stays in sync, so both of you are listening to the same music at the same time.

The feature is also supposed to appear in the current release version of MSN Messenger 7.5 "very soon." If, however, you're still looking for a Windows Live Messenger beta invite, take a look at this post.

I'll have to try this out soon. Wonder what the quality of the streaming media is like.

Technorati Tags: WLM, Messenger

I just installed Hamachi on my desktop the other day. It's a free, cross-platform VPN application that requires almost no advanced configuration. The UI is simple and straightforward (and pretty nice-looking, actually), and it all just works.



So you're asking yourself - what would I do with something like this? Imagine connecting a set of machines together that are located on opposite ends of the continent (or the world, for that matter) and having them behave like they're on the same local area network. That's the basic premise behind a virtual private network, and Hamachi makes the process of doing this incredibly simple. Once it's set up, you can access network shares and printers, and map network drives on any machine connected to the private network, just like you would be able to if they were on the same LAN. You can even set up private LAN games without having to connect to a centralized server. The Hamachi UI also includes a basic instant messaging client so that you can send messages to other machines on the private network. And all communication over the channel is fully encrypted.

The app is available for Windows (works with XP x64), Linux and Mac OS X, although the OS X version is currently only command-line based. Check it out. My brother and I are planning to play a LAN game of NFS:MW using this sometime next week. Will let you know how that goes. :)

Kotaku has posted a series of images comparing real-life photographs to screenshots of the same places in Project Gotham Racing 3 on the Xbox 360. The photorealism is insane! I have never to this day seen the environment in a racing game look this good.

Unlike Fight Night 3, which I mentioned a few days ago, PGR3 is one of those games that I'd really be interested in playing on the 360. I love racing sims. I've played every game in the Need for Speed series on the PC, and I'm currently playing "NFS: Most Wanted" on the new desktop, which is lots of fun, but this really takes the experience to a whole different level, especially if you imagine how good it'll look in high-definition!

Technorati Tags: Xbox360

I have some invites for the Windows Live Messenger Beta to give away. WLM, currently a beta, is the next version of MSN Messenger. To find out more about some of the new features, check out this post on the official Messenger blog.

If you'd like to try it out, leave a comment here with your email address, or send it to me using the contact form if you wish to keep your email address private. :)

Update: That's it. I am currently out of invites. I'll make a new post if I receive any more in the future, so keep checking if you're still looking for one.

The first Intel-based Macs were launched at MWSF this week, and the marketing monkeys in Cupertino are already hard at work, doing what they do best.

Apple's latest TV ad says nothing about the performance advantages the switch to Intel CPUs brings. It says nothing about the advantages of OS X over Windows. So what does it do? Takes the characteristic, snide, cheap-shot at the competition, of course. Unlike the old "Switch" ad campaign, however, this time it's not against Microsoft. It's against other systems vendors - HP, Dell, IBM, Sony, Toshiba et al - the bigwigs that Intel's revenue has depended upon for decades; the makers of "dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks," as Apple so amicably labels them.

Naturally, Intel's flustered and in PR damage-control mode. Apple's contribution to Intel's revenue is but a drop in a vast ocean. Apple may have no qualms pissing of its competitors, but Intel certainly can't risk distancing itself from its most valuable hardware partners. "It doesn't mean we agree that all our customers are making boring little boxes. Never would we characterize our customers that way. We didn't know what the end result was going to be," says Intel's VP of sales and marketing. Intel publicly apologizing for Apple's arrogance? What a great way to start a relationship. And given Apple's past track record, it's certainly not going to be the last time.

Ken Fisher of ArsTechnica has a interesting post today about Apple's new-found love for all things Intel, the same company it readily ridiculed in the past; Intel's position in this awkward situation; and how another very important player in this game, AMD, just might be able to use the situation to its advantage.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Intel

Pictures from our ski-trip to Mountain Creek, NY are now up.
It really was an awesome way to spend New Year's Eve! :)

Those of you who watched the BillG keynote from CES on Wednesday evening probably saw the Fight Night Round 3 demo, as Gates and Ballmer battled it out on the Xbox 360. If you missed it, a short, higher quality in-game video clip has also been released.

Not really my kind of game, but damn...the realism. Wow.

Technorati Tags: Xbox360, CES2006

AnandTech's Day 1 report from CES 2006 looks at some awesome new products that Dell just announced.

The first is the 30" UltraSharp 3007WFP display with a native resolution of 2560x1600. Launching at $2,199 and bound to go down soon enough ($300 less than the Apple display already), it also includes four USB 2.0 ports, a built-in card-reader, and HDCP support to view DRM-protected HD-DVD content in Windows Vista later this year.

If that wasn't impressive enough, the company is also launching the XPS 600 Renegade desktop, with a factory overclocked 4.26GHz dual-core Pentium EE 955, and two dual-GPU 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX cards, running in SLI mode, for a total of four GPUs and 2GB of video memory. Holy freakin' crap! Couple this beast with a 3007WFP (or two?), and you have the ultimate God-box. :D

Then there's the new Inspiron E1705, with a 17" widescreen display and Intel's 2.0GHz Core Duo processor. Pretty cool, but give me the Toshiba M400 any day of the week. I'm still waiting for Dell to launch its own Tablet PC. That will be the day.

Finally, there's Dell's Mobile Concept PC, which is an interesting portable desktop of sorts. It's essentially a dual core Media Center machine with the innards of a laptop and a 20" display that can be folded up and carried around. At 17 lbs, it's obviously not meant to replace laptops, but as Anand points out, the ability to transport it easily, while still having a nice 20" display, could make it quite appealing to university students. The downside is that even with the dual-core processor, it still lacks the power of a full-fledged desktop due to the integrated graphics chip and the slow, 2.5" notebook drives, so I'm not quite sure if something like this will really take off. Still, it's an interesting and very different kind of machine.

Technorati Tags: Dell, CES2006

Rumors come and go all the time on the web, but this has to be one of the most bizarre ones I have ever read. :D

Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch claims that Bill Clinton might be taking over the position of Microsoft CEO from Steve Ballmer. Check out some of the reactions and responses on tech.memeorandum and Technorati.

That's Toshiba's M400 Tablet PC, successor to the popular M200, with Intel's new dual-core "Yonah" CPU. Each core runs at 1.8GHz. Launching next month. Oh my God. Someone want to buy me a late Christmas gift?! :D

More pics at TabletPCReviewSpot. [Via Engadget]

An official patch for the WMF vulnerability has been released today, a few days before the planned release date of January 10th. Make sure you install it via Windows Update immediately.

Microsoft announced that it would release a security update to help protect customers from exploitations of a vulnerability in the Windows Meta File (WMF) area of code in the Windows operating system on Tuesday, January 2, 2006, in response to malicious and criminal attacks on computer users that were discovered last week.

Microsoft will release the update today on Thursday, January 5, 2006, earlier than planned.

Microsoft originally planned to release the update on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 as part of its regular monthly release of security bulletins, once testing for quality and application compatibility was complete. However, testing has been completed earlier than anticipated and the update is ready for release.

From the Technet Security Bulletin.

The official Windows Vista site has been redesigned completely, with a slick new look based on the Aero UI, as well as additional content.

I especially like the Features section of the site that highlights all the key features that Vista will bring to home users as well as corporate customers. This is now a great place to go to see what's coming, and to find out what makes Vista a worthwhile upgrade for Windows users. Check it out. There's a lot of interesting information and pretty images/screenshots.

Edit: There's even a link to an RSS feed at the bottom of the page to keep subscribers informed about new content. This should get the Scoble seal of approval. :)

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista, Microsoft

The 2006 International Consumer Electronics Showcase begins this evening with an opening keynote presentation by Bill Gates. A live webcast of the keynote is available, as always, and begins at 6:30PM PST tonight.

CES looks like a very interesting event this year, with keynotes by top executives from companies like Sony, Intel, Google, and Yahoo. Besides that, there's bound to be a whole bunch of slick, new gadgets from thousands of companies that are attending the show.

I would have loved to represent OSNN again, but I'll only be flying back to Cali tomorrow. The tickets for the NYC trip were booked well in advance, or I would have taken a direct flight to Vegas. No worries though - Patrick is there this time, and he's promised to keep us up-to-date with lots of pictures and info on his CES blog. I'll also be closely watching Technorati and Flickr, as well as sites like Engadget and Gizmodo over the next few days.

Technorati Tags: CES, CES2006, Microsoft, Vista

RossJ posted a link to this interesting "3D sound" clip over on Channel9.

Download it, make sure you're in a quiet room, and listen to it through a pair of headphones to experience the full effect. Very cool! :)

Curious to hear what Windows Vista will sound like when it's released later this year? Charles from the Channel9 team has a new video up that's a behind the scenes look at a recording session.

Robert Fripp was on the Microsoft campus a few weeks back. He's the famous guitarist and composter, known for his founding role in the band King Crimson.
So, what was he doing on campus? Recording the various sounds we'll all hear in Windows Vista.

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista

I've been using WinSCP as my SFTP/SCP client for a while now. One of my favorite features of this client is how closely the functionality resembles Windows Explorer or any other modern file manager. The app has been designed so that once you connect to the server, you can simply double-click any file that you want to edit and save the changes, just like you would for a file on your local drives. All the downloading and uploading automatically occurs in the background. It's a much nicer experience compared to traditional FTP clients that use the usual two-pane view.

The only thing lacking in WinSCP is support for regular FTP. Since FTP is an insecure protocol, I personally use SFTP as far as possible, but sometimes I do need to connect to servers that only support FTP. That's where I've decided to use FireFTP, a free FTP client extension for Firefox. I remember trying this a few months ago, but it wasn't really up to the mark. However, it has improved over time, and the current version is fast, lightweight and supports all the core functionality of a good FTP client. Plus, it's nice to be able to use Firefox's tabbed browsing capabilities to open up multiple FTP sessions in different tabs.

If you're a Firefox user, I suggest giving FireFTP a try. If you use SFTP/SCP (as you should be), WinSCP is definitely the way to go.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, FireFTP, WinSCP

If you've been keeping up with the news, you're probably well-aware of the unpatched Windows Metafile vulnerability, and the numerous trojans that exploit it to execute arbitrary code on infected systems. While I wouldn't normally post information about every other security issue here, this particular one has the potential to get quite ugly, especially because of its timing.

Variants have been springing up rapidly, with 73 different ones as of December 30th. The issue affects ALL versions of Windows, including the x64 editions. One of the most accurate and consolidated sources of information currently available on this topic is the WMF FAQ posted by Johannes Ullrich at the SANS ISC. Until an official patch is released, SANS and several security firms are advising users to install an unofficial patch and unregister shimgvw.dll. Download links and instructions are included on the FAQ page.

Moreover, as always, it is essential to have good antivirus and antispyware packages installed with up-to-date definitions. This eWeek article includes a list of antivirus products that were able to detect all 73 variants as of December 31st. As far as antispyware apps go, my personal recommendations include Microsoft Antispyware for realtime protection and Spybot S&D, both of which are free downloads.

All of this advise is even more important for non-techies who tend to be much more vulnerable to attacks like this one, so make sure you pass on the information to your friends and family, because this is not your everyday security issue that affects one in a million people. With the flurry of New Year greetings being passed around at this time of the year, a single malicious one is all that's needed to cause quite an ugly situation.

Update: According to Microsoft's advisory, an official fix is being targeted for release on January 10th. If you do install the unofficial patch, make sure you uninstall it before installing the official hotfix when it's out.

Update 2: Looks like the patch has been created and is now undergoing compatibility testing and localization. The estimated release date remains January 10th.

My brother, I and twelve of his friends spent New Year's Eve at the Mountain Creek Ski Resort. We left from the NYC Port Authority Bus Terminal in the morning and reached the place after about an hour and a half.

After signing up for all our equipment, we decided to go snow-tubing first. Basically, you sit in these donut-shaped tubes and go sliding down a hill covered with snow, picking up speed as you reach the bottom. And since you have no control over it, you end up rotating in almost every direction as you go down! It's crazy, and lots of fun. :D

After everyone had their fair share of snow-tubing fun, we picked up our ski boots and equipment and headed down for training. The instructors taught us all the basics for a couple of hours, after which we were free to practice and do our own thing. It was a totally awesome experience. Most of us fell a couple of times at the beginning, but we all got a hang of it and had a blast after a bit of practice.

The weather up there was perfect for skiing too. I experienced my first snowfall ever (can you believe it hasn't snowed even once in NYC since I got here on Dec 18th?!) and it was absolutely spectacular - it started off as little snowflakes with beautiful geometric shapes, which later clumped together to form big clusters of snow, and ended with a rapid, powdery snow shower.

Later at night, of course, we had a party here at my brother's place with music, countdown and the usual stuff. We have lots of pictures from the trip that I'll post up, probably sometime later this week. :)

Hope the new year brings all of you lots of joy, success, and good health. :)