Is EOL the holy grail?

Milagros has announced he will finish EOL this weekend, after which we'll have a two week testing period with more testers and it will be released. So that means EOL out in mid March if things goes well.

It's been, what? three years? in the making with continuously pushed release dates by mila. I believe he at one point said spring '08? Anyway during this period it has been hyped, forgotten, rehyped and sometimes talked of like the holy grail. But is it all it's cracked up to be?

Being beta tester and designer of the webpage I have been close to the development for the past 1½ years. There has been really A LOT of smaller and bigger updates and features added, more than mila or any tester can remember I'm sure. Big ones are things like cooperative multiplayer, but some of the smaller ones are important aswell, things that will make the daily use more pleasant. This is things like being able to download any level ever played ingame and TCP mode for port forwarding noobs.

However the most important thing maybe is the site, that hopefully will bring people together about more than just the current battle and the last five chat lines. This is what I believe will be what makes or breaks the great succes of EOL, the people. If people doesn't play online all the time and get their stats recorded, if people doesn't use the site to see stats for the levels they play and if people doesn't use the potential of the extensive stats it will just be belma with a couple of new battle modes. On the other hand if people do do all these things and really come together around it, this is not just a new version of belma but more than we ever could have hoped for in Elasto Mania 2.

So it really is up to the people and, well me, and what I make of the site. The holy grail is there, we just have to grab it ;-)

Acer Aspire Timeline 1810tz

My old laptop, a Zepto Znote, broke during the christmas holiday. The graphics card was suddenly totally fucked up, causing the screen to viewed twice on the monitor, on top of each other, and the colors totally fucked up. At first I thought it was the memory as it was also giving some BSOD screens with memery error and taking out one of the ram blocks fixed it. But it turned out it was just random when it happened and eventually it happened again and more and more frequently, untill it was like 95% of the times I turned it on.
It had still waranty but Zepto has recently went bankrupt so not much help in that. Eventhough it's not an onboard graphics card I found out it's integreted in the motherboard, which means it will be quite expensive to get fixed. And seeing as the motherboard had just been replaced a couple of months earlier, for different issue though (that time on warranty as it was before they went bankrupt) I didn't want to spend a lot of money fixing it, if it would just brake again. So I decided to get a new one. Also because I wanted a bit smaller one, and was tired of the old ones noise.

After some research I pretty quickly find the Acer Timeline 1810tz/3810tz to fit my needs perfectly, and at a nice price. This time I went for a much cheaper one, as I don't really need to good hardware I had in the old one, as I mostly use it for uni and when I'm at my parents place. There is an 11.7'' and a 13,3'' version of it, after seeing both of them in local stores I decided on the smaller one, and bought it at wupti.com for 510€.

After recieving it I was immediately reassured I had choosen the right size, it just felt really nice to work with. Today I could debut it at the semester's first lecture.