From around the 20th of this month till around the 3rd is the busiest time for me at work. It's end of year, I have to do upgrades on the HR and Payroll systems for the new years tax tables, there is the year end saves and all kinds of other fun stuff. This year is compacted with the merger which just adds bonus work like data pulls for the new corp, etc.

I'm still finding some time to work on game dev related stuff though.. Back at the end of July I bought a new laptop so I could work on stuff when I was away from the house, it's pretty nice, has a GeForce 7300 Go in it, 2.4 ghz dual core.

So I've been playing with the XNA dev kit since a day or so after it was released and I have to say it's really nice. Microsoft did an excellent job with it. I ended up going and picking up a wired XBox controller because all mine are wireless and I wanted to be able to test with the actual controller. I haven't really messed around that much with C#, but I have been programming in C++ for over 15 years so it's not that far of a stretch.

I started in working on an engine for a game idea I have. I think its going to work pretty well but I want to get the engine fleshed out some before I really lay out the game. Right now between what I've gleamed from several tutorials plus ideas from other engines I've put together I've gotten some groundwork laid. A basic object framework that is working, a scenegraph, and I started on basic cameras before it got too late last night. I'll start on that again tonight after work.