Hello all. Time yet again for another news update…

Not much to report so far as things happening here in Iraq, at least in my neck of the woods. This month was a busy one, but aside from a few skirmishes, pipeline fires, shellings and IED’s, was pretty much status quo. Kinda fucked up when you consider things like a few shellings, IED’s, etc as ‘normal’ right? HEH :-) No casualties in the past couple weeks, so that’s a good thing. Starting to get a bit cooler around here (the high’s are down to the low 100’s now, hah ;-) ) and the sand flies are starting to decline as the seasons slowly change. Rumor has it that we’re due to set foot in Hawai’i sometime in mid-to-late January. Nothing official yet of course… did hear though that we’re primed to roll out-of-country on my birthday :-P Now that would be an excellent bday gift, eh?

EDIT – I swear this happens every damn time I say ‘oh things have been slow…’ – one of our elements out on patrol felt the brunt of an IED attack a few hours ago, had four injured but everyone should be OK, no one was killed, and none of the injuries were life-threatening. That’s all I can say about that. So much for things being ‘status quo’.

I know… STILL no picture updates. It’s coming, just bear with me. After about a month I have finally stumbled onto a bit more free time so I will try to get my backlog of pics uploaded as soon as I can. I’m just as anxious to post ’em as some of you are to see ’em.

Now, about CS: Source – that’s coming around quite nicely. All four beta servers are seeing regular use, and we’re starting to build a regular playbase again. Many thanks to all the benefactors and admins who have helped me out making sure things run smoothly and seeing that problems get resolved. A release candidate has been made, and pending approval, we should see an announcement for HL2/CS: Source to go gold very soon. Things already in the works in anticipation – website updates (info/rules page, admin submittal form), a web-based MOTD, looks real sharp. Also making plans to bring up one if not two private/reservable match servers, and last but not least, game stats. Turns out the latest version of Psychostats can read and parse the logs from CS: Source. It can’t process all of the data, but it handles enough of it that it’s worth using, and appears to be accurate with many variables. Kudos to Valve for preserving their log output. Right now I am testing stats out on HF 1, and getting the layout fixed so it matches our site here. Gonna be slow going since I can’t be online a lot, but it’s getting there. Expect to see a new link pointing to game stats for all four CS: Source ports soon.

That’s all for now gang. See ya around.