Similar to the recent Born Geek redesign, Year of the Code Monkey has now added Gravatar support for comments. I’ll be tweaking the style sheet (as always) over the coming days, so expect things to settle a bit.

I have posted a new photo album from a trip to the zoo earlier today. It’s not my best effort, but hopefully you can look past the problems. The lighting today was tough, I didn’t take my monopod, and my camera was misconfigured for part of the day. Better luck next time, I guess.

The new Spy and Sniper class updates are coming today, with the following goodies:

• A bow and arrow for the Sniper
• The Razorback shield for the Sniper
• Jars of urine for the Sniper (can you believe they actually made this a real weapon?!?)
• Two brand new watches for the Spy
• The Ambassador pistol for the Spy
• Payload Race game type and two new Arena maps
• Meet the Spy video

To top it all off, Valve is opening Team Fortress 2 to everyone for free this weekend. So download Steam, pre-load the files, and join in the fun!

Not only are we getting a Sniper class update (with a bow and arrow and the Razorback shield), but it looks like Valve is shipping the Spy class update as well (with two new watches)! Let it be known that I officially love Valve and Team Fortress 2.

Coming along with these updates is a new game play type, Payload Race, which looks super fun, and two new arena maps (which I’m not too wild about). This massive update doesn’t drop until next Thursday, so there are still some goodies to be unveiled. New hats are also going to be available in this update, which should provide some fun.

I’m really looking forward to this update, even though Spy and Sniper are my two least-played classes. Perhaps this will motivate me to spend more time in those roles.

Tonight’s season finale for The Office was pretty weak, in my opinion. To begin with, I was a little miffed that it wasn’t an hour long, but after the show was over, I was glad it hadn’t been. I’m not sure I could have stood another half hour of boredom. The only redeeming part of the episode was the tension between Michael and Holly. Here’s hoping that things get back on track next season!

What did you guys think?

An article entitled A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages offers a very humorous glimpse into the world of programming. My absolute favorite snippet from the article:

1987 – Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

It’s funny because it’s true. (Hat tip to Dustin for the pointer to this article.)

You’ve no doubt seen the commercials for the “free” triple credit score reports, or the “learn to work at home” packages on TV. In most of these cases, a URL is provided in the ad for you to visit. For the observant among us, note that the URL changes. Most often, a number appears at the end. For example, workathome.yes.you.can might become workathome58.yes.you.can and then workathome132.yes.you.can. This observation leads us to our Internet Safety Tip of the Day:

If the URL in an advertisement changes on a regular basis, you should stay away!

Especially since those “free” reports will actually cost you $30 a month.

This tip brought to you by the Internet Safety Council, the letter D, and support from viewers like you. Thank you.

The rather humorously titled Slashdot article Duke Nukem For Never, reports that 3D Realms, once among the brightest computer game developers, has closed for good. This is pretty sad for me, as I was once a major fan of the company’s games. So big a fan, in fact, that I maintained a little Map Editing FAQ for the Build game engine. In essence, that document and those games are what got me publishing on the web in the first place. It’s hard to believe that was 13 years ago.

I can’t say I’m surprised that the company has gone out of business, however. They’ve made a bunch of poor choices over the past few years, and have essentially released no new self-developed titles since 1997′s Shadow Warrior (which was a great game). It will be interesting to see what happens to whatever actually exists of Duke Nukem Forever.

I have turned on an option in Monkey Album that should help silence some of the harshest critics out there. Viewers of my photos may now click the photo itself to proceed to the next one. In the future, I’d like to implement a more elegant navigation approach, but this should suffice for now.

I have posted a new photo set from a recent trip to Old Salem. Along with this new photo set comes a number of bug fixes and improvements to Monkey Album, the software that powers my photo albums. Notable among the changes are:

• Several database improvements that should make things a little faster while browsing photos
• Image count information has been added (where necessary) to album and favorites pages, helping you to determine where you are in the given series
• The favorites page now shows favorites in the correct order
• Fixed a bug where the album and comment RSS feeds incorrectly provided listings for unpublished albums

As always, please let me know if you spot a problem. And if you have a suggestion for my photo albums, feel free to share it! Enjoy.