More Hate

Stupid Michigan.

This is why I hate winter here. This is my car, which I hate for reasons mentioned in yesterday's rant. The white crap on it is the first snowfall of the year. We'll get more, a lot more. It looks cute and fun, until you realize that you have to shovel it out of the way so you can get the car out.

You also have to scrape your windows clear of it at 5:30AM in order to see anything. Even after that, you still have to drive carefully, since at that hour of the morning, they won't have cleared the roads yet.

You might think this wouldn't matter much to me. After all, I hardly ever go outside unless I have to, right? Well, when it's cold enough to do this, the floors are cold, even if the room is 75 degrees. The walls are cold. If you leave the door open for long, the room is cold. I used to like cold, but then I was younger.

"You're a mean one, Mister Grinch..."

Oh yeah, the weather!

I so enjoyed typing up the details of my wonderful weekend, I forgot the reason I came here in the first place.

So, I saw a job posting at SOE for a junior programmer. I shot an email to Grimwell, figuring perhaps he could poke at it and let me know if it pays enough to afford to have a small apartment with a cable modem, a refrigerator, and enough gas to get to and from work.

Here's another good reason to consider moving. Kalamazoo vs San Diego.

Cars suck II

Yep, cars still suck.

So, I had to work on Black Friday. No biggie, it actually wasn't so bad. Of course, I spent the first few hours up at the registers bagging. This was easy compared to the folks in the trenches trying to direct the mob towards their products. Even 3 hours into the day, I still had fun trying to direct people, and it was much more relaxed by then.

However, in the few minutes it took me to get from work to the credit union, where I deposit my teeny tiny checks each week, I managed to run over something and got a full wheel-on-the-pavement flat. Fantastic. Much cursing and swearing later, I got the tiny playtoy spare tire on, the big tire lumped into the back, and my ass home. I figured this was annoying, but I could still go to lunch Saturday and get my new set of tires on Monday after work.

So, today, I get up early and get out the door with an extra 10 minutes so I won't have to drive too fast on the bubble tire. I get in the car, pull out, and hear the tire "wubbing". Ok, pull back in and scream a bit while I get the compressor out and inflate the OTHER front tire. About two miles down the road, it starts sounding like it's on the pavement again, so I re-fill it at the nearest gas station and head home. Work is about 10 miles away, and there aren't 5 gas stations nicely placed between here and there, even if I could somehow not be late.

So, I guess I'll still get my new tires today, but they'll cost me a day's pay extra and I'll probably get suspended (or at least a write up) because Menard's doesn't care if God Himself strikes you down with a bolt of lightning, unless you have a doctor's note to excuse it.

EQ2 has me now.

It's been an interesting month.

I've stopped playing EVE again for a while. It's a good game, but it's one I burn out on periodically and go back to after a few months off. I predict I'll probably get back into it by spring, but for now I have another mistress. Everquest II.

One of the interesting things that happened recently (actually, late last month) was that my brain connected the guy on EQ2's web site, Grimwell, with the name of an old friend I haven't seen since my days at WMU... Craig Dalrymple. Grimwell is the name of his immortal character on WileyMUD, and he's one of the original crew that predates my own involvement. I guess I just didn't expect it to be the same Grimwell, but in an interview I saw it spelled out as Craig "Grimwell" Dalrymple, and so I sent him some email.

It's a small world. :)

Anyways, I had already been wandering back to EQ2 prior to taking a short break for the City of Heroes halloween event. So this just increased my desire to do so. It's a fun game! You can bash SOE all you want (and I do!) but they got this one right after 3 years.

I've also been tinkering with muds again. I want to get an LPMud of some kind up and build a world for it. I doubt I'll ever make one from scratch at this point, but if I can get one off the ground I can at least get some of my creative writing done and maybe have some fun with it. I wouldn't mind including the WileyMUD areas as a nostalga zone or something.. maybe even try to do a port and see if I can get it to feel like a diku. :)

I've also made a decision. Michigan sucks, and I'm not forcing myself to stay here any longer. I've started looking for jobs in southern California as well. Basically, I see no reason that I should have to remain poor AND suffer the crappy weather we have here. If I find a good job here in Kazoo, fantastic... but the economy is going to shit and shows no signs of improvement. California is doing well, and the weather there is mostly good.

So I'm giving myself this one last winter to find a job out there somewhere. The house is paid for, and I doubt my roommates will want to move, so I might just strike up a deal with them to pay the insurance and property taxes if they pay the rest of the bills and keep the place in reasonable shape. That way, I have an asset that might be worth something in a few years (if the housing market ever improves), they have a place to live, and I have a place to visit a few times a year.

We'll see. I'm not in a hurry, but it's looking like this is my best option so I'm looking into it.

Oh yes, today was Kitten Neutering Day! Red and Gold are now unics, and so far so good... they seem to have recovered and are running around like their old selves.

Part 2

That last one was getting long, so I'll break it up.

Tabula Rasa is another thing entirely. It's fun! Think of a standard MMO like Everquest or WoW... you get quests to go kill N critters, or collect X from somewhere and bring it to Y. Standard fare. You level up, get better gear, fight more stuff.

Now, think of an FPS like Unreal Tournament, Quake, or Battlefield. You aim the mouse at things, and shoot stuff. If you aim for the head, you can get headshots. The mobs all dodge around and try to keep to cover to avoid this. Now, tone it down just a notch so you don't have to be dead-on to hit, but can't just shoot randomly in the general direction and expect results.

That's Tabula Rasa. It manages to merge the two pretty smoothly, and while the RPG side isn't particularly clever, having the FPS elements keeps the adrenaline flowing. PvP would be fantastic here (the beta server is PvE, since they want folks testing content, not trigger finger skills).

I haven't been playing this all that much either.

I've been playing Everquest II. You read that right. I guess it's time to make my SOE position clear. I never got very far into Star Wars Galaxies, because when that game came out, I had a crappy machine that couldn't run it well... and I had an ISDN line which was laggy as hell too. The combination meant the game wasn't much fun for me, yet I did play for several months because it was a cool game! So, I didn't get my peepee smacked with the NGE, I'd stopped playing long before that horror.

Prior to SWG, I played the original Everquest. I played through the first two expansions and thought SOE was nerfing things a bit much for the sake of "balance" between classes. Personally, I never though much of balance since some classes just seemed better solo classes, while others were needed in groups.

In November of 2004, Everquest II launched. We all hopped on that game, because some of us had played EQ before, and WoW didn't seem like quite as big a deal yet. EQ2 was quite fun, but had some serious problems. First, you had to group... anything past level 15 was just about impossible to solo. Secondly, there wasn't much high level content... My friend is one of those power gamers, and he ran off the end of it and was disgusted that after getting to the end of the continent, you crossed over to the other side and found... the same stuff. Finally, whomever was in charge of the servers didn't test things well enough... frequent crashes and several database rollbacks spelled the end of that game for us. We moved on to WoW, and I eventually moved on to EVE and Vanguard.

Vanguard was the bomb. It was fun, it had unique ideas... diplomacy! Ship building! No instancing at all. Absolutely stunning world.. super immersive. I played for several months. However, it was buggy as all hell.... the performance was horrible, even on high end systems (and it wasn't network lag). Eventually, we all stopped playing because everyone else did... MMO's aren't that fun when there's only 5 or 10 other people on the server.

Let me say upfront that SOE did NOT botch this game. The guy in charge of Sigil screwed it up and conned SOE into paying for it. SOE might have been able to save the game, if Brad had been willing to sell it earlier, but he was hoping it would still do well at launch and held out.

Well, I got an email. SOE offered me every expansion that had come out for EQ2 plus free game time until September 15th (this was in July). Two full months of play with all the expansions? Ok, I was curious enough to load it back up and see how it had changed.

Beta, beta, terminally ill, second chance?

So, it's that time again... yes, I'm waiting for a DVD to burn and have nothing new to read, so I'm writing something here. I'd make a comment about how thrilled you are, but I'm almost certainly the only one who reads this. :)

Anyways, for posterity, I've managed to get into the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta (blah blah NDA blah). I'm also in the Tabula Rasa beta (blah blah Other NDA blah). Impression time.

If I hadn't ever played EVE-Online, I'd be pretty impressed with PotBS. Graphically, it's pretty sweet with everything cranked up. It also plods along at 10fps in that case, so I can't really play it that way. Oh yeah ----> aside.

My Dell half-died a couple weeks back. I was sure the power supply popped, and since it uses a custom sized, custom wired supply, I figured I'd be SOL trying to find another one. Doing a bit of browsing, I found a used one on ebay for about $70... cheaper than I'd feared. Note that it is used though. A new one costs about $300 *IF* you can get one from a warehouse... the newer Dell Dimension XPS models use different ones.

So, I whined at my friends and Steve was kind enough to give me his old machine (which he had to dig out of the closet). It's a nice machine (Athalon 2800, 1.5G, Raedeon 9800), and I figured it would serve as a temporary gaming machine for a month or two while I scrounged up enough for the new PS.

Two surprises. One, my Mom was nice enough to lend me $100. Two, it wasn't the power supply! I, of course, went to put my old Nvidia 6800 into the new machine, and couldn't get it to boot. After a couple runs through the cables, it dawned on me to try powering on the old machine (which I'd moved the 9800 into). Bing. Booted up! So, my nvidia fried itself somehow. So, now I spent the $100 + the $70 I'd been saving to get a new video card (Raedeon x1950) and am back online.

<-- aside.

Ok, so anyways, as I was saying... looks nice but needs expensive new hardware. Turned down so it gets 30-40fps, it looks ok, but bland. But who cares what it looks like, let's talk gameplay. I haven't spent much time on this game, so I don't know much about PvP or exploration yet. The starter area is a bit lackluster. The missions are all instanced, so you can spend your days never interacting with anyone else if you so choose.

Combat is fun, but tedius. That is, you have to pay attention and switch targets frequently, managing your angle to the wind to bring them into your broadside gun position. This could be quite fun in bad weather and choppy seas.... in the calm of newbie land, it's just tedius. EVE combat doesn't have the positional requirements, but you feel like you have more options because there are different kinds of weapons..... do I want to web them, nos them, shoot missiles or guns? Do I sick my drones on them, change ammo types for better damage? Do I orbit to stay out of their guns, or keep myself lined up for emergency warp out? Here... I shoot guns. I can choose solid, chain, or grape shot (they have different names, but that's what they are). That's it.

The PvP system *sounds* great... but I can't say anything about it yet.

Microsoft wins again

You can say whatever you want about Evil Bill and his Empire, but I've found that quite often when I decide there's some cute thing I want to do, they've already done it. Today, I was thinking it would be nice to automate the updates of my EVE-Online Alliance Maps, and that it also would be nice to see the weather radar every so often. So, I did a google search for a tool that would sit in the taskbar, using very little resources, and just change my wallpaper every so often. A search on
"windows xp desktop image rotation taskbar" yielded Winter Wallpaper Changer for Windows XP.

Now, no matter HOW much you hate microsoft, how can you complain about that? It sits in the taskbar using 10K of RAM and wakes up every 30 minutes (by default) and picks a random image file from a directory tree you specify, and blats that to your desktop wallpaper. It even allows for daily overrides by making subdirectories with names like "July_27". Pair this with a cron job on my server to fetch the radar maps every 10 minutes, and I'm done!

Conquer

Well, no news on Vanguard's server merging yet. They are merging down to 2 US servers, 1 EU server, and 1 PvP server. That's from about a dozen or so, which tells you the subscription population is probably down around 30K or less. I have an SOE game time card waiting for them to finish the move so I can return for one more month to see how things are improved (or not).

If they don't hurry, I might use it for Pirate of the Burning Sea. Yes, that's right SOE has their mitts on that game now. Unlike my friends, I don't directly blame SOE for everything, even though they could have spared Vanguard from its fate if they'd forked over some cash or just made a better offer to purchase it from Sigil before launch.

EVE is still going strong. I suck at level 4 missions, which means I suck at outfitting a raven. I may join Don's corporation in the next couple of weeks. I played City of Heroes for a month, and it was fun. I may even sign up for another month when they release their next expansion (issue 10).

I've started playing Civ 4 again, and their new expansion is due out this month. Amazing game, and it's turn based. I wish I could convince my MMO addicted friends to give it a try, but they all can't stand turn based games unless they're text mode I guess.

I'm working on the old conquer source code again. I decided to see if I could drag it into some sembelence of maintainability. I almost have a database schema done for it, and might actually rewrite it in perl. I'm debating if that would be easier than all the damn malloc() calls I have to add to wrench it out of #ifdef and hard-coded array land.

I went to see Transformers in the theatre this week. It was surprisingly good and I highly recommend it. I'll probably go see Harry Potter sometime this week, and of course the Simpsons movie at the end of the month.

Hardware, wetware, software. Blah.

Greetings humans.

My annoying health situation remains mostly unchanged. The pain is a little less, but it feels more diffuse, as in more parts of me hurt, but not as intense as before. I'm supposed to go see the doc again next week, so maybe I can convince him there really is some kind of infection/virus/parasite to treat this time. I may actually reschedule a few days later to see the guy I first saw about my gout, as the head honcho seems to have already decided.

Vanguard is merging servers! This is possibly great news, as it means there will be people to group with, and maybe a working economy. It may also be the death-knell for Vanguard. Time will tell. I've suspended my account until after that happens, since I have no desire to spend days of my life crafting things that don't sell, only to have them be sellable in the new server.

Our kittens are becoming dangers to themselves. Red got his head stuck in a milk crate yesterday and I really thought he'd suffocate before I could cut him free. He managed to squeeze himself the rest of the way in though, so I could lift if off of him. I'm amazed I didn't have a stroke, to be honest.

Conquer is up and running again! Or, it would be if Don would get off his ass and host it. I got it working and added colour support. I may make it my pet project to port this game to windows (probably C#.NET) with tile graphics.

Vanguard, ghost town of the new year...

First, my gout is now pretty much under control. It still hurts a bit, but so far the Allopurinol seems to be preventing a flareup. That's good. My gut problem is still around... a visit to the doctor a few weeks ago suggested it was a mild hernia. That's bad, since if he's right it won't ever get better without $urgery. I'm not sure I believe him though, as it seems to have moved around a bit, and I didn't think hernias did that. Still, it's mostly bearable, I just can't sit at the computer for hours on end anymore, and I also don't dare lift much of anything over 25lbs (not that I want to anyways).

With that out of the way, my report on Vanguard. I loved that game. It's incredibly immersive. The terrain graphics are phenomenal. The character models are not so great, but they're sufficient to not break the feel that you're really exploring somewhere. I've said before, Vanguard is the only fantasy game I've ever played where as I look around the world, I really have the feeling that everything I can see is somewhere I can go.

That said, it's becoming more and more empty as the months pass. Right now, as a level 20 character I see maybe a dozen other people in the 4 to 5 hours I play. A /who in the areas I'm in typically shows 20 people or so online. My roommate is level 35, and has a few more people to group with, but even so.... it feels very empty most of the time. Brad made a huge mistake by launching the game before handing control over to SOE.

Yes, you read that right. If SOE had been in charge back in January, I think they would have fired half the team (which they did) and put their own people in charge of fixing things up for a launch in April. Given the extra 3 months with a full experienced staff of developers, it might have had a successful launch, and might be maintaining a small but vibrant community, instead of the handful of stubborn folks it has now. The poor launch suckered 200K people into buying it, and 150K of them ran away screaming and won't go anywhere near it now, no matter how much it improves.

I think it is destiny that when I went to Silky Venom's site today, I saw a banner ad for EVE-Online. Pirates of the Burning Sea isn't going to be out in June, and no firm release date has been given (perhaps late July?).

Blizzard has announced Starcraft II! It looks amazing. So much so, that I pulled out my old Starcraft CD's and am trying to get the guys to play a few games over the net.

Quick URL's to my eve-files

Hey, just a quick post. EVE-Files allows one to upload EVE related files (hence the name, clever eh?). I uploaded my banner and avatar as jpegs so I could use them in various BBS's. However, once uploaded, you can't easily find the SHORT URL.

SO:

Avatar
Banner

Spore!

Greetings humans.

Well, my gout seems to have settled down a bit. The swelling is still there, although the steroids have knocked it down quite a bit. With a few pain killers, I can stomp around work and manage about 5 hours a day. I'm hoping it goes away by itself, as I really don't want to go back for another doctor visit, and once I go over a week of steroids, they have to do other stuff to keep me from becoming addicted to them.

I'd also like to start taking my gout prevention meds so I can go back to eating cows and drinking beer, but the doc said to wait for the swelling to go away entirely.

The title of this entry is Spore! This is the game I've dreamed about for the last 15 years. You start as a microbe, and evolve your way to conquring the galaxy. I'll write more some time, but check it out. It's amazing.

Also, the new Doctor Who series has started. I've managed to get EVERY episode in the original episode format now, and am burning myself a folder of backups. Yes, I'm a fanatic... but I'm mostly harmless. :)

Gout sucks

I'm still alive, I think. The last two weeks have been filled with pain, swelling, and gas. The first two in my right large toe (and sometimes surrounding foot), the latter in my guts. My doctor believes the last one is nothing to worry about and is probably from stress and change of diet. I hope so, as it rather hurts.

The first two are not going away on their own, so a second doctor visit yielded some steroids and pain killers so I can get back to work in a day or two.

Now, if these work, I can get back to leveling my character tomorrow and then back to work the next day. You see my priorities. :)

Audio compression fiddling

So, I've been listening to internet radio stations for a while now. I started with EVE-Radio (as a regular thing... I've listened to them on and off for years), and recently have noticed a large number of them using the AAC codec to stream instead of good old MP3.

I've noticed that an MP3 stream tends to start sounding "bad" when you drop below 56k. AAC streams seem to perform better down to about 32k.

This led me to wonder, might it be a good thing to encode your ripped CD's in AAC audio? It's still smaller than the lossless formats, should play in winamp (essential), and should also play on the ipod (nice, if I ever get one).

A bit of digging around, and I found the Nero audio encoder, and some settings to make it work with EAC.

So, here's the CLI options for MP3 (which I use now), and AAC (which I'll test soon).

MP3 Output:

LAME MP3 Encoder
.mp3
C:\Program Files\LAME\lame.exe
--vbr-new -b32 -B320 -V 2
192 kB/s
High Quality

Nero AAC Output:

User Defined Encoder
.m4a
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
/c C:\"Program Files"\NeroAAC\win32\neroaacenc_sse2.exe -q 0.55 -if %s -of %d && C:\"Program Files"\NeroAAC\win32\neroaactag.exe %d -meta:artist="%a" -meta:album="%g" -meta:track="%n" -meta:title="%t" -meta:genre="%m" -meta:year="%y"
192kB/s
High Quality

Away for a month eh?

So, I wander off for a month and they move blogger to the google engine... Google is yet another step closer to world domination!

Vanguard is a hell of a lot of fun. As usual, I have too many alts, and thus don't have any high level characters yet. It's even worse in this game, because diplomacy is just as much fun as adventuring or crafting, and every race's diplomacy series is unique.

It is so much fun, that I've done the unthinkable. I suspended my EVE account. Of course, I'm not stupid... I set a 24 day skill training and will reactivate it next month, but I figure since I'm not really playing, I can pay every other month and keep training skills for when I do feel like playing again.

Life, as I know it.

Well, it's been a good two months since I bothered to toss anything up here. There are a few interesting things I can mention so my senility doesn't forget them.

I paid off my mortgage.

Yeah, that's right. I had a mutual fund that my parents set up for me some years ago, and while it wasn't doing terrible... it wasn't doing that great either. It did happen to be about the right amount to pay off my mortgage though. So, now I don't make 5% interest on a decent sized (but not decent enough to avoid work) chunk of money... but I also don't lose 7% on a similar sized loan. Considering the horrid state of the economy here in Michigan, not having to pay $700 a month is probably better than having a retirement option.

I'm still working at Menard's. I get another raise next month, assuming I get off my ass and do the paperwork and take their silly test. You might recall my achillies tendon injury, which isn't 100% healed -- and may never be, but I had my first experience with gout last month. It wasn't quite as severe as I remember it being for my Dad, but it still caused me to miss 2.5 days of work. I think it's pretty much dormant again, but I'm young enough that I won't know when to expect another visit.

I missed Winter Mur this year (again!)... this time I really was eager to go, was in reasonably good health, and we had a blizzard. D'oh!

I got my brakes replaced, but still need new tires. Otherwise, the car seems to be holding up decently. Kim has a new old vehicle to use while her truck is still dead.

In gaming news, I wasted $50 on the WoW expansion. Well, it's probably not a total waste, as I will probably play it a little bit... but I won't get my full money's worth out of it. I find WoW to be too restrictive to enjoy playing in groups (everyone expects you to spec a certain way and fill their narrow vision of your role, period), and too boring to play solo.

I haven't been playing EVE as much lately, but that's because I've been playing Vanguard. I've ranted about that before, and will write up a real review at some point. Suffice it to say that even with all the bugs, it still feels fresh and addictive.