The good news is that most of what i've been working on so far has been the boring but essential work that needed to get done, and I can just about get started on some features that are a bit sexier. But first I need to clean up some of the rough edges and probably do some refactoring.
The crates in the scene are from noaktree (he was briefly giving them away to readers of his journal last month). He's got some nice work, take a look at his models for sale - maybe you'll see something you like.
I've also been listening to Microsoft's Gamefest 2006 presentations. Lots of great stuff there, if you have a fast net connection and plenty of hard drive space (the downloads are huge) I highly recommend taking at look at them.
Finally, here's some advice: don't forget to switch the DirectX runtime back to retail when you want to actually play games. Today I accidently discovered that using the debug runtime consistently crashes the Half Life 2 demo shortly after trying to start a new game.