This story is a test so I can check out comments.

If you ever wanted to be an astronaut, check out the tweets by Astro_Soichi. He's an engineer on the International Space Station, and whenever he gets the chance to take a picture of something cool on the planet below, he posts an image via Twitter for our enjoyment. If you don't use Twitter yet, maybe this'll give you an idea why many of us do. Very cool stuff.

Wiped out this morning, thanks to a call in the wee hours about a customer emergency. Will have to see how long I last today before keeling over.

So I've been reading some stuff and talking to people about Star Trek Online. It's appealing to me in concept.

Eric Burns wrote a nice lengthy article about what Cryptic needs to do to retain the very impressive million players it gained upon release. These thoughts are in no small part based on reading his article, and on my own five years of experience with World of Warcraft, supplemented by several months in City of Heroes and EVE Online.

For a couple years, I was part of the leading PvE progression guild on Aggramar. (Yes, this is World of Warcraft stuff.) We got most of the server-first kills -- I think we were beat to only two or three in the time I was with them. Not that it was an extraordinarily competitive server, but for a casual guild with a relatively short raiding schedule, it felt like we were doing pretty well.

When Sunwell was released, I retired from raiding for a while, and eventually took a break from the game altogether. That was about two years ago.

Who knew? Well, I guess that's kind of neat, too...