Updates, Updates, Three Bags Full

I've been getting a little overboard with my writing hours lately and it caused me to bonk on Sunday at the job that actually pays me money after I forgot to eat lunch. This explains the off day I took yesterday.

Let's see if I can avoid being so monumentally stupid in the future.

Today, there's a little bit of updating we need to do. First, Duke Nukem Forever ships today. A delay (what else?) forced it to today from the May 3 date reported here back in January. Review copies are in, scores have been given.

How is it? Bad. Really bad. Screamingly bad. Intestine-twistingly bad. Maybe-it-would-have-been-better-to-remain-a-joke bad.

Sorry, fellow Penny Arcader slash000. (That pre-order is dated 2001, just in case the text is too small for you.)

Secondly, a second sustained protest has emerged in Madison; I attended the earlier one back in February. This is a little tent village set up across the street from Capitol Square, albeit a somewhat disorganized one, as Russ Feingold found out when he dropped by for a visit on Sunday. The AV Club- the Onion's non-satire branch with local coverage of Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Austin and Philadelphia- has further current updates in the linked article on Wisconsin's ongoing partisan battle to the death. (Battle does not actually entail death.) Things are moving rather quickly now as the recall election ballots get scheduled and confirm their various challengers, and also as Republicans gear up to pass the budget that started the whole mess in the first place for a second time; the first attempt has been mired in a legal battle over the procedure used. This second run is sounding the alarm enough on the Democratic side that we may have a much larger protest once again.

Finally, back on March 5, I passed along Microsoft's request for you to stop using it. Microsoft's goal is to get worldwide IE6 usage down below 1% so providers can save themselves the hassle of supporting it.

As of then, worldwide usage was 12%. Norway and Finland were under the 1% threshold. As of now, the percentage is 10.9% still on IE6, with Sweden and Denmark now also under 1%. About half of the people still using it are from China, which still shows 33.9% usage of IE6. South Korea shows 22.3% usage, Vietnam 11.6%, India 11.5%, and Taiwan at 8.6% rounds out the bottom 5. The United States currently sits at 2.3%, with Canada and the UK both at 2.7%.

Also, sometime in the past month, someone rolled into here using Netscape. What's up with that?