This has been a crazy week at work. I've started evaluating Rules engines and have been given a short list to work with and some strict feature requirements. It looks like we have narrowed the list down to one vendor that can provide what we want. I've used Drools and liked it for basic domain level validation but we need to support decision trees and backward chaining. Plus it seems JBoss got a hold of Drolls and did a total re-write on the product. I've also been on call this week and had to validate an install Wednesday night and be on an install for my audit deployment Thursday night. To say the least it's been busy.

I painted my daughter's room last weekend. It's a nice royal purple and will make my Viking relatives proud. It does look nice and I'll take some shots of it once my camera is fixed. Yet, my camera is on the fritz again. I not sure if taking those photos of my dead 360 caused my camera to die. So the flickr account won't be updated any time soon. In cause you are wondering it's a Sony camera.

I did get some good news today. My 360 is fixed and is being shipped home today! The travel time should be 2-5 days and I have a UPS tracking number to check it's progress. It has also been announced that 2 new maps are coming to Halo 2 next month and one of them is Hang'em High. That was my favorite map for the first Halo.

I've been looking at how the new consoles are doing in Japan. All the North America and Japan sales data for video game hardware and software is available at www.vgcharts.org and I've been looking at the PS3 and the Game Cube in Japan. It is very interesting because in Japan home consoles are not leading the market there. The handheld market is king now in Japan with the DS sells more software and hardware than anything else out there. By next year the DS could be the highest selling game console ever in Japan.

People comment how poorly the 360 does in Japan but people should see how poorly the PS3 is doing too. There are no great RPGs yet on the PS3 so they may bounce back but it looks like the PS3 could sell only a quarter of the number of units it sold last generation in Japan. Good thing those Europeans seem to still love Sony.

In closing I managed to eat Mexican for lunch each day this week. I hit Chipotle twice and even managed to observe lent in the process. I got a burrito fajitas no meat no beans with all the salsas, cheese and guacamole. It was dam good.