So in today's EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis for the Wii competition, my partner and I eked out a 3-1 games win in the first round. Despite having not played the game before and despite facing opponents who had played before, we managed to roar out to a 2-0 lead. We then lost the next game at love before my Slacker served out the last game for the match.

There are some peculiarities in how the tourney is run. First, I believe it's first to three games for the win but I'm not certain if the match goes to a tiebreaker or if you have to win by 2. Second, even though we advanced to the next round, the next round is a round-robin format, despite the first round being an elimination round. The tournament ends today. We hope to make it to the finals.

In other completely unrelated news, did you know you can now change your Facebook username? Yes, it's true. Even though they said you had to live with your username choice for the rest of time, it appears you can change it now. Click here for all the details. Maybe this lady will get her chance to save some embarrassment once her son grows up to know what his Mom's username means.

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So I've entered this video game competition at work that's among people who work at Black Box. The organizers could have picked any game out there but they decided on EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis for the Wii. That's great because I love playing tennis but here's an interesting anecdote, I've never played the game before.

My real life doubles tennis partner asked me if I would join him in the competition. Of course, I couldn't turn him down, even though he's never played the game either. I'm not even sure if either of us own a Wii. The competition starts today, that is Thursday, and we get one practice session before we play for real. I'm hoping we get to play with the Motion Plus add-on as that adds a higher level of fidelity to the controls.

I believe the studio is going to be encouraged to watch the matches but I'm pretty certain the venue won't fit more than 20 people, especially if there's four of us madly swinging away. There's some sort of reward for winning the whole competition but I need to dig up an e-mail to figure out what that is. Oh yes, there's some sorta cup to be won.

Anyways, I'm really looking forward to playing the game. For the horde!

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So what you're seeing above are the remotes that I have to deal with in my living room. From left to right, the remotes are for: air purifier, sound system, Blu-ray player, TV, and set top cable box. As you can see, things get interesting when I need to change the TV channel, turn up the volume or adjust the picture settings. The good thing is rarely do I need to use all five remotes at the same time or even in a short amount of time. Another bonus is that the TV remote also can control the Blu-ray player through the HDMI-CEC standard.

Of course the best solution to having all these remotes is to buy a single universal remote control. The most popular universal remote appears to be the Harmony series from Logitech. The entry level remote for this series is $130! I guess that's reasonable compared to the top of the line model, which retails for $600. I bet in some cases the total number of devices controlled by that remote would actually cost less than $600 combined. I'm surprised it doesn't come with it's own remote.

Anyways, for now, I don't think the hassle of having five remotes is worth the $130. How many remotes do you have at home?

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Many times before I've written how the video game industry is a male dominated one. Yet all this time that I've been working at EA as a software engineer, I've been lucky enough to work with a female software engineer. "Lisa" as I shall call her, has been sole female SE on our team since before 2006. She just happens to have the only PhD in computer science on our team as well.

Back when I knew nothing about the PS3 (yes, I actually do know something about it now), it was Lisa who sat down with me and gave me the tour through the PS3 dev tools. Believe me, the Sony dev tools back then for PS3 weren't the best but Lisa was able to cut through all the crap to show me how to at least get the debugger running.

Over the last few years, Lisa has been patient while I asked my questions, answering so that I could go back and get unstuck from my problems. It's not a big surprise to me and other people that many would consider her one of the best PS3 programmers on the planet.

A few months ago, Lisa and her husband got the great news that a baby was on the way. It's been interesting as the pregnancy developed. In our programmers meetings, it was great to see half a dozen guys jump from their seats to offer them to Lisa as she arrived for the discussions. Two weeks ago, I had a problem and Lisa volunteered to take a look over at my computer. I felt bad that I was forcing her to walk all the way to my desk in her very developed state.

Lisa started her one year maternity today. On her last Friday, we got her cards and a small gift. We'll all miss Lisa and hope her time off will be well-spent. Don't tell anyone but I hope the little boy/girl grows up to be like their Mom, a pretty good programmer.

As Lisa said herself on Friday, our band of software engineers is now all boys. I hope our code doesn't get all stinky now.

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For some reason, I've been listening to a lot of Kelly Clarkson lately and I am quite enjoying it.

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