It's been a long time since my last journal, and a bit has happened . . . I got onto Xbox Live (Halo 2) after an entire summer's break from it. For some reason, I had lost every single level, while my friend (whom started several months after me) was just breaking level 20.

I've been powerleveling for the last month, and I'm now at level 20, while he's at at 23. I can't get anywhere now; on Team Skirmish, I am constantly suffering feeble teammates; at Team Slayer, I'm on a run of encountering De-Rankers on my own team. Why doesn't Bungie add "Teamkilling Behavior" as feedback? Rumble pit seems my only hope (how dramatic).

And today, I discovered, diagnosed, and repaired the Steam problem. My mother - yes, I admit it, my mother - set AOL on mature teen, but external programs cannot connect, like iTunes and Steam. Setting it on General, however, finally allowed Steam to update, but I only reached "Preparing to Play Half-Life 2" before encountering yet another dead end. It gets stuck there - which is probably attributed to my firewall or something of that nature. Unfortunately, I was not able to ascertain the problem's nature - my dear old mother switched me back to Mature Teen. I'll have to lobby for General, or get Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox to work, in order to research the said dead end.

I also just checked out the specs, pricing, and J Allard's defense of the Xbox 360. $400 may be a hefty amount - but Christmas is only . . . eh . . . five months away, and anyone who still lives with their beloved parents will probably be able to force the dough out of them and into the gift wrap. I can't really envision anyone buying the "Core Package" or whatever it is. Why get a '360 without the hard drive? Why?

Hopefully, by my next journal, I will have Half-Life 2 working (by the way, I installed another 512 MB, bringing my RAM up to 960 MB).