(Nicked this picture from Stevecla – looks like an advert for Cyberdyne Systems. I’m going to put a chain lock on the TV stand just in case..)

I’m back at work tomorrow after a few days off recharging batteries/dumping the kids with the grandparents. This afternoon I managed to get a couple of hours to continue tinkering with the tech set-up at home.

Mainly this involved downloading the new blades for the XBox (looks very metro-y now) in preparation for the arrival of the Kinect(which means my kids will be able to do video calls to the Grandparents really easily too!) and hooking up the new laptop to the Windows Home Server via the Zune software and Windows Live Photo Gallery in preparation for the arrival of my Windows Phone 7.

Man, I think I just geek bloated on all of the upgraded stuff that’s happening. It’s nice, not least because it means I can ditch iTunes and all things “i*”, but also because it feels just a bit “meh” now.

Oh – also squeezed in an order for a Kindle. I know, I just had to have that second slice of pie. Burp.

If your triple-shot skinny orange Frappucino hasn’t done the business and woken you up this morning, then perhaps a quick blast on this IK remake will help (sadly not IK+ with its Blue player and backflips…).

Same pumping 8-bit tunes too.

Great partnership from Bing and Wowhead.com to create a visual search of the hottest loot available in the game. Not that I play WoW all that much. My own real avatar needs around 30 hours a day at the moment, so I'm destined never to ding higher than a level 20. After that it all gets a bit too complicated, so I'll be forever destined to wield the "somewhat less than rare" Sword of the Mangy Donkey (I'm not sure that's a real weapon by the way fact fans).

On an RPG/Gaming tip though: like @mikeormond I'm enjoying getting my head around XNA a tiny bit (I've flirted with it in the past) and I've just wading through RPG Programming Using XNA Game Studio 3.0 which (as the title hints at) is based on XNA Studio 3.0, but should provide a lot of inspiration for a Windows Phone 7 RPG architecture, and - looking at the code - a lot of it is likely to be conceptually transferable to Silverlight too (just minus all the pipelines and so on that XNA uses).

Oh, and have a look at these gaming rigs.

I’ve no idea how to squeeze in play time these days (I’m struggling on the second bit of Lego Harry Potter…), which is a shame as there are so many great games available like Settlers of Catan on the XBox (I’ve always wanted to beat Martin Fowler at it…) or even on Surface.

Last time I played Age of Empires 2 (not the most recent version, but the best I reckon) was in the early days of broadband with the little blue Alcatel squid thing as an ADSL router which would tend to drop connection frequently (typically when my laptop decided to power down the USB port randomly).

This being strategy, it was no surprise that my strategically minded colleague, Gareth, who was ‘Head of Strategy’ (I think) thus proving those credentials tended to be victorious. My main recollection is building a fantastic city, smart, flexible army, and then being stomped all over the park by War Elephants.

Anyway, this announcement that AoE is going all MMORPG-y means I’ll dust off the “battle mouse” one more time…