Amazing how long it can take to make the important decisions regarding a mod, but time and time again it's been shown that a little planning beforehand can prevent a lot of pain later on. Now that we're approaching air-tight plans on nearly everything conceivable, we can move ahead without worrying about possibly changing our minds at a future date.

Models, skins, maps, sounds, code... these are the major components for any serious game conversion. But trying to work on them before you have a concrete game plan is just a bad idea. Fortunately, that first step is basically over.

By the way, I've played Infiltration for UT and I'm sorry, I'm just not that impressed. Most of the models are okay, but the skins are substandard. The weapon models don't sit well with the player models, but I'm not sure how easy Unreal Tournament makes fixing that. My suggestion to the UT community (and Epic) is to stop drooling over the first mod available for the game. Have some standards, for crying out loud.

On my current gun wish list:

• Stainless Steel Ruger Vaquero (cowboy revolver) chambered for .45 Colt with a 4 inch barrel
• A .357 snubbie revolver (2 inch barrel), probably a S&W, Taurus, or EAA
• 1911 in .45 ACP, maybe a Para-Ordnance for a matching set
• Sharps 1874 replica in .45-70
• Double-barrel coachgun (with or without external hammers)

Whoops. My news program here was suffering from a Y2K problem of sorts. Each entry is an individual file where the name is the date and time it was written (year first). Unfortunately, I wrote the script to look for files starting with a "1", and now that we're in 2000, new files start with a "2". Now I have to go and repair the several incarnations of this script that have spread around the web.

Well, Y2K has come and gone with little effect. Must be awful for folks like Gary North who made their reputations by predicting disasterous results. I admit I was a little taken in by the hysteria over a year ago. I forsaw disturbances in big cities that apparently didn't happen. Well, no big deal for me. The end result is I don't have to buy ammo next time I go to the shooting range and I've got some bottled water. But I never said "I maintain that the y2k problem is systemic. It cannot be fixed. The interconnections are too many." Gary's got to be pretty embarassed to be so sure about his forecast and yet so very wrong. I guess that's what happens when you ask an historian about the effect of a computer bug.

I was really looking forward to that total collapse of civilization thing though. A real shame!