Went out in my car for the first time today, just into town and to the shops and suchlike. It's going to take some getting used to - the throttle is much, much more sensitive than my instructor's car, and conversely the brake seems slow to respond. It's a pretty smooth drive though. My little trip was going well until I tried to leave Bicester; we'd parked behind someone and I thought I had enough room to pull out, and, well... I didn't quite, and ended up bumping him. He was loading stuff into his car at the time and as such witnessed it and was not best pleased. Fortunately I was going slowly enough that no damage was inflicted, so he calmed down and just made damn sure to watch me as I reversed and tried again [smile]

I've also bought a new strap for my guitar. I had one when I first got it, but I think some bugger half-inched it years ago and I never sorted out another one. Well, now I have a nice black leather strap to go with my nice shiny guitar. I'm going to try and get a stand for it next week, and then all I need is some nice shiny playing skills to complete the set. I can play the intro to Stairway to Heaven, and I can fingerpick most of something like House of the Rising Sun... spent some time last night trying to learn a sequence from Machinae Supremacy's Multiball, which is awesome. I could really do with someone to accompany me on bass though.

Dev-wise, we're crunching at work so I'm not getting much done at home. Today I've sent a couple of emails and done some more work on GDNet - we're going to be moving the dev team over to a new bug tracker which I'm getting installed at the moment. Oh, and my contact at NVidia finally got back to me with the details I needed to get them into the prize pool, so we have a grand prize for 4E5 at last - two GeForce 7900GTXes!

I know more or less what I want to do with prizes for 4E5, it's just a question of balancing it, and deciding exactly how many places I'm going to be awarding prizes to. The basic concept is that all the prizes are up for grabs to start with, and then people take it in turns to select one thing, and we repeat until the pool is empty. So, chances are high that one of those 7900GTXes would go to the first-place overall winner, but if he's already got one, then he might choose something else - better that than give him a card that he can't use (and would just have to sell or something). It increases the chances that people will win things that they actually want, without killing any of the motivation people have to try and come in the top places - landing 1st gives you more 'picks' earlier on in the list than landing 5th.

The difficulty is in figuring out the picking order. At the moment I'm considering awarding prizes to the top three contestants in each of 'Overall,' 'Technical,' 'Production' and 'Gameplay,' for a total of 12 potential winners, though of course your game could place highly in more than one category, allowing you to fill the slots named for "2nd Overall" and "1st Technical" or something. I'm not sure whether I want to do that, or whether I'd be better off sticking it all on the Overall ranking but letting it up to 5 places instead of just 3 or something. What do you guys think?