The Discovery Channel has Shark Week. That's all well and good -- sharks are equal parts terrifying and fascinating -- but why limit yourself to one species? This summer Nuketown is launching Monster Week -- one full week dedicated to the best in cinematic horror. We're going to have movie reviews, soundtrack reviews, blog and game posts inspired by said movies, and -- if I can swing it -- feature length audio commentary for a film.

The big question is ... what movies? I plan on featuring seven monster flicks, focusing on post-Jaws era. They don't need to be straight up horror movies -- in fact, I'm just as happy to review later day creature features. I'm also looking to come up with at least one monster per major environment (e.g. space, desert, arctic) so as to avoid overlap. The key is that they need to be realistic monsters; I'm not looking for supernatural horrors like Freddie and Jason.

Nuketown's been upgraded to Drupal 6, which is the latest stable version of the open source content management system. So far, things seem to have made it through the upgrade intact, though I discovered that the Image Assist module now only wants to display images that have been "published".

I think that my test instance (aka The Testing Range) may also have accidentally spammed those with user accounts by sending them an email with links to a bunch of published comments. If so, I apologizes for that -- I'm not exactly sure what why those messages had queued up.

It's possible that there's still some stuff that needs to be cleaned-up post-upgrade, so if you see anything that looks weird (or is outright broken) please post a comment to this thread or email me at nuketown@gmail.com.

It's been awfully quiet around here the last week or so, and I thought I'd post a note before folks wonder if I'd crawled off to a cave for information detox.

If only.

I work at a college as a web applications developer. And the thing about working in higher education (or hell, any form of education) is you tend to move through life somewhat perpendicular to the real world. My year starts in July, and ends in June, because that's how our academic calendar rolls. My life gets crazy in late August and late January, because that's when the Fall and Spring semesters begin.

The pace hits an even more frantic note in January and July/August because that's when the faculty and students aren't on campus (or most of them aren't at least) so we conduct this biannual mad dash to get all of our critical upgrades and new programs in place so things will be nice and shiny when everyone hits campus.

The lulls (and yes, there are lulls) come about two weeks into the semester and last until about two weeks after it ends. Which isn't to say we're sitting around playing cards all day, but it is a more relaxed, less frantic state of being.

But now is not that time. Now is the crazy time, and thus, the profound lack of posts around here.

Given the dearth of posts around Nuketown last week, I thought I'd borrow a page from Uncle Bear's Sunday Brunch and give an update on the ol'thermonuclear burg. The day job has settled back down to its normal routine, but as Doc Brown once said "It's your kids ... something has got to be done about your kids!"

The few weeks in late September/early October where everyone was sick have given rise to some serious sleep problems around our house. The kids are sleeping through the night about two nights out of every seven ... if we're lucky. 

And we're not very lucky.

Bad dreams, hacking coughs, wet diapers -- every night there's some new wrinkle that has one or both kids up, crying and wanting us. We've been battling back, trying to get them to sleep in their own beds, taking steps (like giving them less to drink before bed time) to cut down on bathroom trips and wet diapers, doing our best to rock them back to sleep, but sometimes you just have to give up and bring them to bed.

Coupled with a bumper crop of freelance game reviews to do, and my wife's month-long run up to a holiday craft show in November, and an Xbox 360 that decided to up and die in the middle of it all, well  I've just been too tired to think.

Thus, no blogging.