2 days ago the "random days" update went live. People didn't complain much, and some of them really liked it. Today there was the "Day of no drops" random day, which means that when you die you don't lose any item. Nor do the animals and monsters.
This has prompted a lot of people to get their best weapons and armors and go to the main PK map and fight like crazy :)
And they loved it.

In the last few days we released 2 client 'release candidate' for the main update in January. The first release candidate was pretty buggy but the second one works great. Our newest developer (who is with us since September) did some crazy optimizations and now the FPS is between 100 to 200 faster. He is really really skilled, and he works a lot, just as much as I used to work in the beginning. So far, there are just a few crashes with this newest test version, crashes that will hopefully be fixed by the time we update the game. And even if they won't be fixed by then, they are still pretty rare (for example it never crashed on me) so we can just update the game and fix them later on.

Today I got the Finnish magazine Enter, which has Eternal Lands on their cover CD and a review of the game. Unfortunately for us, the review is in Finnish so we have to get someone to translate it for us. I asked for their permission to scan that page and post it on our forums, and if we get their permission we will post it. In January, Eternal Lands should be on the cover CD of an UK Linux magazine. So we are getting some press coverage, which is always good.

The hard drives these days are amazing. I have an external (USB) 80 GB HDD. In the beginning it worked pretty nice, then a week ago it started makign some reaaaaly bad noises (just like it was tearing itself apart, and the noise was continous). I was thinking it is going to die, but didn't take any measure because I have nothing important on it (just some media files that I ripped from my CDs and some movies). Yesterday I had enough of it's noise and turned it off. Today I wanted to listen to an ogg file that was there, so I had to turn it on. Now it is almost quiet (makes just the normal HDD noise).
So I wonder wtf was wrong with it. I have a laptop HDD that did the same thing, and now it works fine. Maybe there were some bad sectors that the HDD finally relocated somewhere else? No idea, but what matters is that it works. There is, however, a 'hot smell' comming from the USB enclosure when I have it on for a while, but the enclosure is just warm, not hot. Strange...