Woke up this morning to find this outside my window. So I grabbed my camera and on my way to work I snapped a few pics on my block:

Last night Steam informed me that they have a new UI coming up and if I want to try it out as part of their beta program. The list of changes seemed pretty enticing, like better games management and a new browser rendering engine (WebKit instead of IE).

A few minutes later I was gazing upon the new interface. Which looks like crap. I was never a fan of oversized text-only tab headers, but hey, to each his own. The game list window has a couple of improvements, mainly you can view details about the games or see them as huge, easy-to-click buttons. The downloads section is much better now, with bandwidth graph and everything.

And there’s where I started noticing the problems. For some unknown reason, Steam decided that some of my games (Modern Warfare 2 and Company of Heroes) need to be redownloaded… At first I thought it was a patch (Steam downloads and installs patches automatically) but then I noticed the size of the downloads: 6 and 8GB! A quick search on the forums for the beta UI found a lot of people that were complaining about the same thing: games being erased from the hard drive and redownloaded. What the hell, Steam?

Oh, and one more thing: I have a Steam account, which I use to purchase and play games. Then I have a Steam Community account, where I can manage my friends, see achievements, etc. And yesterday I realized, in order to post on the forums (Steam forums that is, not some third party) I need another account??? Are you serious? Haven’t you people heard of single sign-on? Or shared user database? Argh…

Yup, it’s been a while.

Mostly because I… errr… ah, fuck it, I just didn’t feel like writing, ok? Been busy at work, busy at home – either playing games (it’s that time of the year again) or just plain relaxing with my new Netflix subscription.

But I’m all good, healthy and happy. Pictures from recent events can be found at the usual place