Because it's Raining

Windows Media Player

2010-03-12T02:55:00.003-05:00

So, another oddity with Windows 7. Older versions of windows were a bit cranky about playing non-standard video files. However, it was fairly easy to work around the issue by installing ffdshow. Windows 7 (and WMP 12) are a bit more stubborn though.... they seem to think they'd prefer to use their codecs, and are very unwilling to accept anything else.

Enter a site called shark007.net, which provides a nice codec package for both 32 and 64 bit versions that mostly gets around it. Previews of "weird" types still won't show up in the file explorer, but at least you can just double-click a FLV movie, or an MKV, and watch it.

Damn it Bill!

2010-02-24T00:45:00.002-05:00

Ok, so after spending most of the day yesterday getting Windows 7 re-installed and working, I wrote up the experience this morning and was all happy. For a while. Then, I rebooted.

Goddamnit Bill Gates. It's MY computer, let me use it!

Ok, it turns out that Rivatuner does something interesting with regards to it using a device driver, and that under a 64-bit version of Windows (Vista, 2008 server, and Windows 7), unsigned drivers are not allowed. Nor are drivers that are signed by an untrusted source.

*sigh*

In looking around for a solution, my roommate pointed me at a procedure to create your own signatures and push them into the local system's list of approved keys. That might have worked, but it's a mess.

I found another utility that would do what I needed Rivatuner for, namely to adjust my graphics card's fan speed as the temperature ramped up. This one is called MSIAfterburner, and the same guy is working on it. The good news, it works without a driver. The bad news, because it doesn't use a driver, it has to be left running. Ok, no biggie... it can sit in the taskbar and be quiet.

Ok, UAC annoyance now hits... trying to start it from the registry "Run" entry, UAC pops up a requester at login. Very annoying. More searching and I found a way around it.

To run a program as administrator (and thus avoid UAC) at login, you have to make a task entry for it using the task scheduler.

Note: This only works if you are an administrator. You cannot cause an administrative program to automatically start on a standard user's desktop.

1.Click start
2.Type: task scheduler
3.Press enter
4.Click create task in the right
5.Type a name for the task
6.Put a check next to the box that says 'run with highest privileges'
7.Click on the Trigers tab
8.Click New
9.Click on the dropdown next to "Begin the task", select At log on
10.Put a check next to 'specific user or group'
11.Click OK
12.Click the actions tab
13.Click New
14.Click browse
15.Find the program you want to run
16.Click Open
17.Click OK
18.Click OK

Wheeeee! So far so good. I'm gonna reboot once more to be sure and then make a system restore point!

Windows 7 RC to Windows 7 Retail

2010-02-23T10:52:00.014-05:00

Today's nonsense is a short writeup of yesterday's adventure with Windows 7.

Like many people out there, I've been happily using Windows 7 RC since last September. On my new hardware, it runs very fast and I've had very few issues with stability. Like Windows 2000 and NT before it, if you use "weird" stuff, like a RAID array, you need to pre-load drivers during setup so it can find where to install stuff, but unlike the dinosaurs, it's smart enough to recognize flash drives AND smart enough to let you change CD's.

So, I had things working nicely with my RAID setup. I had 4 disks split into two RAID containers. The OS was a RAID 10 striped over all 4 disks, short stroked to the first 25%. The other was a RAID 0 striped over all 4 with the majority of the space. Very fast.

One bummer... about once a month, a disk fell out of the array and caused it to rebuild. Annoying for the RAID 10 part, scary for the RAID 0 part since there IS no rebuilding there... it either lives (nothing was being written at that moment), or dies. Of the 5 or so times it's done it, only twice did I see it happen, and both times my cat was near the case. My suspicion is that the cat brushed the case and discharged his static, and that the controller doesn't deal with static well (even though things are supposed to be grounded, no?).

So, last month I backed up the monster array to DVD and reconfigured it as another RAID 10 container. I could have done RAID 5 but I figured 10 is safer and in theory slightly faster (much faster on writes). Soooo, that sets the stage.

Now, because all my games, movies, porn, etc are all on D: (the larger array container), and it still wasn't anywhere near full, the easiest way for me to install Win 7 retail was to use Microsoft's Synctoy to backup all of C:\ to a directory on D:\Backups\. A handful of files failed, but no biggie... the majority of what's there is windows/drivers crap that we won't be wanting back anyways, but I didn't want to trust myself being able to track down every place a user content file lands. Good call, it turns out.

So, I did this twice. The first time, I got drivers messed up and couldn't get something working that worked before, and I totally forgot the system restore point concept. So, being grumpy at wasting 3 hours, I reformatted and tried again.

Prior to attempt 1, I took my $15 8G USB flash drive (from Meijer's supermarket), and set it up to be a bootable Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installation device.

Plug in your flash drive.
Start/All Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt -> Run as Administrator
diskpart
list disk -- Take note of which disk is your flash drive, for me it was 3
select disk 3
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS quick
assign letter=k -- For "keychain"
exit

That makes the flash drive bootable, and we just need one more step to prep it for being a valid Windows installation device.

Insert your Win 7 DVD (or mount the image) -- I'll assume it's on R:
r:
cd r:\boot
bootsect /nt60 K:

Now, we're all set! Just copy the entire contents of the Win 7 DVD to your flash drive and then whatever other files you want/need. I added a whole directory full of drivers and another one of common utilities I use all the time, and then a backup directory with documents/keys/etc.

You still have to figure out how to make your machine boot from a USB flash drive, but that's YOUR problem since it's different for every single PC out there.

I got this to work, and it did seem to work just fine. I say seem, because it is considerably slower than installing from my SATA DVD drive, so I aborted it halfway through the initial Windows hardware discovery phase. YMMV, and I'm happy to have figured out how to make it work.

First screen you get is to pick your language/keyboard/etc. USA... woot.
Then, pick Custom Install since you want a clean install, no trying to upgrade and breaking stuff.
Now, browse to your keychain and load the RAID drivers.
Delete the partitions from your old installation. Careful! Don't wipe out your data partition!
Delete the "system reserved" one from the same disk too... again, Careful!
Now, that disk (it showed up as Disk 2 the first run, and Disk 1 the next time) should be all unallocated space.
Select it, and move on.
Windows will reboot twice before asking you stuff again.

Ok, now you're fully installed in the hard drive and just have to provide a bit more data to be done. All in all, it should have taken about half an hour. Not bad, IMHO.

User name
Machine name
Password
Again
Hint -- This is requried! I chose the helpful hint "No hint!"
Product Key -- Yeah, suck it up you filthy piwate!
Use Recommended Settings -- Seriously, you can change it later.
Time Zone
Home Network -- This is classic workgroup mode, "Business" is domain mode.

That wasn't too bad huh? Now you're at a desktop and could actually do stuff if you wanted to! Of course, much of the rest of this is stuff I consider still part of installing, but at this point you could start gaming or doing work.

First thing on my list is changing my workgroup. Start/Computer, right-click and hit properties. Now, go to the "Computer Name" tab, hit the "Change" button. Two things to change here... First, set Workgroup to your own workgroup name. I hope you're not using the default... mine is, of course, SHADOWLORD. Also, if you hit the "More" button, you can fill in your domain name, which for me is "shadowlord.org".

Next, while I have the properties screen still open (you may have rebooted when it asked, if so, reopen properties), click "Activate Key Now"! Yes, just do it and get it done. If you're a filthy piwate, you have your own problems to work around this and it's not my concern. :) Thankfully, it worked twice in a row for me... one supposed you could wait until you have everything installed right, but I just wanted to know for sure that it would work, or that I'd be playing phone tag, before investing more time.

Now, open up IE8. I don't plan to use it very often, but it will ask a couple of stupid questions the first time you launch it. I'd rather get it done and over with than have it ask 3 months from now when I have a site that refuses to work in Firefox. Choose whatever you want, I left everything default because I don't care enough about IE.

At this point, I'll mention that I've become a big fan of letting the OS detect and deal with every bit of hardware it can possibly deal with. The years have taught me that installing drivers for everything usually makes things degenerate over time as vendors don't support things well. Soooo, unless something flat-out doesn't work without a driver, I let windows deal with it. One exception, video. :)

Happily audio was detected and working out of the box. I configured my speakers as 5.1 surround with front left/right, center, subwoofer, and I chose back left/right. Another option was side left/right, and it's 50/50 in my setup which is right. I initially chose side, but after playing a game I decided back gave me better positional info and switched it. 7.1 would, of course, use both. Oh, you do this by right-clicking on the volume icon in your tray, pick "Playback Devices", then select your speakers and hit "Configure".

Also, if you hit "Properties", under the "Enhancements" tab, I like "Speaker Fill", which takes a stereo source and echoes it (with a slight delay) to the rear speakers. Makes things a bit fuller for music, IMHO.

Next, I installed the GSATA drivers. The first install, I though it was whining about the main RAID chipset, and even though I was *obviously* using it just fine, I installed the AMD chipset drivers. Ugh. Waste of time... that wasn't it. My motherboard has a second RAID controller for external drives and that needed a driver. I may never use it, but... all devices in the device manager now work properly.

Next up, my printer drivers. I have an old Samsung ML-2151N laser printer. NICE printer, duplexing, fast, 1200DPI. But, it's old. I found 64-bit drivers for it finally (ML-2150) and installing it you have to say "No, it's not connected", and then go manually setup a tcp/ip port. Once that's done, it works just fine.

I have a CyberPower UPS, so I installed the monitoring software/drivers for it. Win 7 saw the UPS just fine, and even told me it was at 100% battery and such, but the software that comes with my UPS gives me more control over things, and tells me stuff like the current load, so even though it wasn't needed, I think it's useful enough to install.

It's about this point I remembered a couple of tweaks I did to make life easier for myself, and one that I'd kindof have to do to avoid insanity. The first is to muck with the new Win 7 "Library" concept. If you open your file explorer, you'll see an entry for "Favorites" that has "Desktop", "Downloads", and "Recent Places" under it. Downloads is the one I want to move. I want my default download place to be D:\Downloads, rather than buried under my user profile. Right-click/Properties makes it easy enough to change, but I lose the spiffy blue arrow!

Oh noes! How to get it back??? Go to the download directory, right-click properties and under the "Customize" tab, pick "Change Icon". Now, browse to C:\windows\system32\imageres.dll and you'll find the folder with a big downward blue arrow a few screens off to the right. You ALSO need to change the shortcut in Favorites, and that's by right-click properties, and then "Change Icon", same deal.

Remember that, as you'll likely want to do the same for the Library stuff. Libraries is a nice idea. It lets you link multiple folders into a single "meta-folder", with a default write target. So, you can have one big "Media" library and if you mostly download movies, the default directory could be the movie one. Win 7 uses it to link your profile and system public areas. I also want to link in D:\ directories and make that the default save location.

So, Music, Pictures, and Videos all get their D:\ equivalents added. Easiest way to do this, select Music on the left. You'll see a listing on the right with some sample music. At the top, you'll see a link that says "Includes: 3 locations". Click that. Here, you can add new folders to the library, and you can also right-click to reorder them and set the default save location. So, I added my D:\ folders and made them the default. Then go fix your icons. :)

At this point, I remember that NTFS doesn't store user information by simple ID numbers or names, but by obnoxious GUID strings that are unique to each windows machine out there. That means... you have to reclaim ownership of D:\, since it's owned by your user from the old install!

The smart way is to just do it for every folder. I did that the first time. Doing all of D:\ has a few quirky side-effects that I'll have to live with for being lazy the second time, because some system folders get a bit wacked. Don't be lazy, it's hard to fix and I don't yet know if it matters. Assuming you care, to take ownership of a folder, right-click properties, go to the security tab, click Advanced, go to the Owner tab , click Edit, select the checkbox that says "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects", then select the new owner (you!), and hit apply. You may also want to remove the old GUID from the permissions list, although it might do that for you (I don't remember).

Whew! Almost done... are you tired of reading yet?

Next, Win 7 will bug you about installing a virus scanner. That's good, kids these days click anything that moves. I use Avast! Home edition. It's free, it seems to work well, it's very lightweight. I had to load up gmail in IE to find my registration key. They make you sign up for a key, you get one every year, it's still free. Might as well scan C:\ at this point too.

Just in case, I throw Spybot S&D on as well. I disable the stuff that's resident (TeaTimer and whatever the IE protection thingy is). I don't get much in the way of virii, so it's overkill. I run it once in a while, and that's good enough for me.

This is probably a good time to run Windows Update. Do all the critical stuff first until it gets them all done. Then, if you like, do the optional ones. For me, that was a video driver and ethernet driver.

Now, a few utilities. I like "Putty Tray". It's a version of Putty that has translucency for the background, meaning I can see my browser through the black while I'm doing stuff on my linux box. Yay, porn/youtube/thing-you-want-to-lookup. To make this work properly, you hopefully saved off the registry data from your old Putty. Restoring that gives you back your session data. I also had a public key pair to restore from my keychain backup.

Irfanview is my picture viewer of choice. CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWmonitor (from the CPUID guys), HD Tune, Furmark. All handy information tools, diagnostics, etc. I also installed AMD's RaidXpert, so it can log events on my RAID array.

Ok, ready for the video drivers. This took HOURS to get right! :(

Finally, I installed the newest Nvidia drivers (196.21). Then, I installed a tool called RivaTuner224c. In that, there's a section where you can tinker with the on-board FAN speed and temperature registers. See this page! Doing some math and such, I managed to get things setup so the fan runs at 35% most of the time (GPU is at or below 35C), and ramps up to 100% when the GPU gets to about 70C. It's not 100% accurate, but so far it seems to keep the temperature below 60C when playing WoW or EVE, and that's the important part. I used Furmark and GPU-Z to test tweaking the numbers.

A couple other trivial tweaks. Control Panel/User Accounts/Change account picture. Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Power Options Pick the high performance profile and then tweak so you have sleep/suspend/hibernate to NEVER, turn off hard drives to NEVER, monitor off to 30 minutes. If you use sleep mode, you might also want to go to your network card and disable letting it wake up from packets, otherwise your machine probably won't ever sleep. :)

Control Panel/Appearance/Folder Options/Show hidden folders... also don't hide file extensions. You might want to hide system files though, otherwise some things look cluttered and you can always unhide them if you really need to muck with them.

Oh yeah, important one! Computer Properties/Advanced System Settings/Advanced/Startup and Recovery... uncheck the Automatic restart in System Failure! That lets you see the BSOD so you have a clue what caused it. If that's checked (which it is by default), it just instantly reboots and you have no clue why.

Now, the last bit to restore 90% of my working desktop... Firefox. I installed WinRAR too, since some of the stuff I backed up, I rar'd for space. To transfer your profile and have Firefox back where you had it before.... do this.

Install Firefox (3.6), run it once. Close it. Browse to C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\. You'll see a stupid folder with random letters and ending in .default. Rename that by adding a .bkp to it. Go to C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\. Do the same thing.

Now, unpack your old backups into those two locations and change the folder names from whatever old random letter.default it was to your new random letter.default. That's it! Next time you start Firefox, all your stuff will be there, history, cache, extensions, porn. Yay!

Ok, I may have forgotten a couple things, but that's about where I am today. I was pleased to note that World of Warcraft, EVE-Online, Civilization IV, and Dragon Age can all be run directly from their old installation without having to reinstall or poke anything into the registry.

Maybe later I'll make a complete list of every utility and normal program I use, just to keep it in a place I can reference (IE: here). Until then, be careful out there!

Betamax vs. VHS

2010-01-03T14:15:00.005-05:00

Happy New Year!

I haven't posted anything in a bit, and I have a draft article unfinished, but that's for another moment. Right now, I wanted to rant about the ongoing technology war, which has been happening since the days of my youth, when cavemen were trying to decide between wooden clubs and bone clubs.

Those of you who have been paying attention might have noticed how the market tends to influence the development and survival of new technologies. For the most part, those who have the most money win, although occasionally the better PR campaign works, and once in a great while a genuine innovation sneaks in.

Back in the 1980's, they had these new devices called VCR's. They took cassette tapes and recorded both audio and video onto them, cost between $200 and $600, and were fast becoming the "must have" gadget of the decade. In the early 80's, there were two formats. VHS is the one you're familiar with. The other was Betamax. Beta was technically superior to VHS in several ways. The cassette design was better, meaning there was less stress placed on the tape itself, so it didn't break or get stuck in the rollers as often. The recording format was better, clearer picture, full stereo with a very good signal-to-noise ratio. By all rights, it should have won.

Why didn't it? Video stores, and specifically the porn industry! In those early years, many local video stores would have racks of both format tapes as they tried to find ways to get people to come in and rent movies instead of going out. Cable TV was also new, and if you lived in a small town, you probably didn't have it. The porn industry knew that one format or the other would have to win, and they jumped on VHS. Despite the fact that porn was (at the time -- no internet!) supposed to be a back-room, seedy thing that only perverts watched, the sale and rental of porn generated big bucks. The movie industry noticed, and they too sided with VHS.

What does that have to do with anything today gramps???

Glad you asked. Years later, that battle has replayed a few more times in the technology war. SCSI lost out to IDE in the same manner... IDE is cheaper to make, even though SCSI is more reliable and was faster until the IDE camp too over. Blueray trumped HD-DVD, mainly because it embeds a Java runtime in the player, giving you more annoying fancy menus AND easier DRM controls.

If anyone ever read this blog, they might have noticed I got a new computer a few months ago. It runs pretty well, even though I'm still cursing CrApple for crippling OS X so it has to be hacked to work on AMD chips. One thing though... I noticed a LOT of errors in my Event Viewer, scary disk errors like "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR6 during a paging operation."

Of course, setting up the new machine, I installed 4 hard drives in a RAID setup. The disks are split into the safe RAID 10 container for the OS, and the fast RAID 0 container for games/movies/porn/whatever. Doing some research, I tracked down the error and pinned it to one of my removeable firewire drives!

Now, we're not talking a single error message here. We're talking thousands of them! So, on a hunch, I tried moving that same drive from the firewire port to the USB port. Bam! No more errors.

Back when I got these externals, Firewire was about the same speed as USB 2, but was more reliable and had better sustained speed (IE: big files). Like Betamax though, the world has chosen USB, and the money isn't being put into developing or fixing Firewire anymore.

Word to the wise... stick with the money. Any time you go with the underdog, you will suffer, and you will end up having to live with it, or support it yourself.

New Computer 2009

2009-09-21T19:33:00.013-04:00

Well, despite my being poor and unemployed, I decided it was finally time to upgrade Moria, my old Dell XPS from almost 6 years ago. It's been a good machine, and it marked my first and only departure from the world of building-your-own-frankenbox that I've enjoyed ever since I gave up on my Amiga and entered the PeeCee market.

First, what I'm upgrading FROM:

In February of 2004, my Dell XPS (Gen 2) came with:

3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 (with hyper-threading)
1G (2x512M) 400MHz DDR2 memory
ATI Radeon 9800 PRO
120G SATA hard disk
8x DVD burner
12x DVD drive
3.5" Floppy
Windows XP Professional

That beast, which was almost top-of-the-line at the time, cost me $2500, but worked right out of the box and (with the exception of graphics cards), hasn't caused me much trouble over the last 5 and a half years.

Of course, I've had to replace parts that failed, and upgraded a few things. It now has 3G of RAM, a Radeon x1950 (It had an Nvidia 6800, but that died), a new 500G SATA2 drive, and a new 16x dual layer DVD burner.

Since I'm poor, I couldn't afford the level of performance I wanted from a pre-built this time, and after begging and borrowing and cashing in on holiday/birthday money and a few other things, I came up with a budget of $1000 to spend on a new machine. Part of my justification for it is the idea that I might be able to write iPhone apps, if I had a new CPU (OSX won't run on my old P4). I also justified it by realizing that I spend even MORE time sitting in front of it now than I did when I was properly employed. If I'm going to debters prison, I may as well enjoy my freedom as much as I can first, eh?

So, here's the new beastie:

Not a bleeding edge system, but it should be respectable for a few years. The whole thing clocks in around $1200. Probably closer to $1300 by the time you add in shipping and some extra fans I got to fill in the empty fan slots in the case. Slightly over budget, but then you'll notice I added a UPS, which my old system didn't come with.

Those of you actually reading this far may have noticed I have four (4) hard drives listed. That's not a typo! I originally intended to get 3 drives and set them up in a RAID 5 array, but after doing some research, I decided a RAID 10 setup of slightly smaller drives would be better. I was right!

After doing some MORE research, I discovered the best setup I could hope for. The 4 drives are configured as 2 logical disks by the onboard RAID controller. The first 160G of each drive is sliced off as a RAID 10 array, yielding very good performance and full safety in case a single drive fails. This first container yields 320G of space, and should prove more than adequate for the operating system, normal applicatons, and "My Documents".

The remaineder of the drives is configured as a RAID 0 container, which yields a whopping 1.8T of space, striped over 4 disks which also yields some fairly impressive transfer rates. Yes, if a disk fails, that whole stripe is toast, but the majority of stuff on it will end up being games or media, which is easily replaced by redownloading it, or which can be re-ripped from the original media source (or restored from backup if it WAS downloaded).

The CPU overclocks quite nicely to 3.2GHz on the stock cooler, and that's where I plan to run it. If it starts feeling slow next year when GTA5 or EQ3 or whatever comes out, I can always buy a good aftermarket cooler and clock it to 3.5GHz, or even (assuming I'm employed or otherwise making money) buy a new CPU.

I will probably buy another 4G of RAM when I get the chance. I expect 4G to be enough for now, but I know by next year I'll want to have more. If I start programming in .NET, I might want it sooner. :)

Also, for the first time *EVER*, I plan to pay real money for a Microsoft OS.

...

I want that to sink in, since people who know me will be checking to see if I'm really me at this point. Windows 7 will be the first OS I buy from Redmond, and that's because it's the first one I've felt confident about. Having run the RC version for a few months, it feels fast and stable, much like XP after 3 service packs, and it seems to make sense. Things are laid out more logically than XP, and much more sensibly than Vista. DX11 will be required in a few years, and there are already several games that look meh under DX9, but quite amazing under DX10.

I'll try to provide some pictures in the not too distant future. It's been sitting on my test bench for a week, and now it's time to clean off my desk and tweak the wiring a bit, so I can get it hooked up and ready for action. I shall be installing Windows 7 RC, 64-bit on it, and just enough to get my gaming/browsing going, since I'll be needing to redo it again in a month or so when the full version becomes available... unless someone wants to buy me a technet subscription?

WAR!!!!!

2009-09-05T17:40:00.002-04:00

I have no idea who, if anyone, ever reads this. However, if you're here, there's a good chance you are a gamer, and a pretty good chance you play one ore more of the MMO's I play. Either that, or you're stalking me. 8O

So, if you play MMO's, you know that there are some which are pure carebear, some that dabble in PvP in safe, consensual, nothing lost, and some that encourage you to rape and pillage, knowing full well that when you loot their dead and bloated corpse, you aren't just gaining stuff... you're depriving THEM of stuff!

EVE-Online is one of those games.

Oh, it has a carebear section, and it's cleverly disguised so that many players live out their entire virtual careers without ever risking ship or implant against the evil gankstas of the galaxy. But, as the devs like to remind the carebears, there is no 100% safe place in EVE.

My corp was reminded of this last week. I've played a couple of games with The Old Timers Guild, and they're a good bunch of people. They have a solid presence in EVE, with two corps. OTG, which is the PvP wing, carving out a bit of 0.0 space for themselves and making friends and allies (and enemies!) out there. OTGi is the carebear industrial side of our presence. The majority of folks here are miners, mission runners, people who don't care for PvP, but would rather accumulate wealth.

Last week, we got war decc'd. I've been told this happens about once a year, and generally when it does everyone turtles up until the aggressor gets bored and lets the dec drop. It costs ISK to keep a war going, so unless there's a reason, most people won't do it. Those who want to PvP will often switch to our PvP chapter, those who don't will either sit it out, or drop to an NPC corp until it's over.

In this case though, it looks like our aggressors declared war, not out of boredom, or to see if we'd fight back, but because they had a beef with the OTG chapter in another MMO that we both played, Age of Conan.

Personally, I don't mind that much. I will be dropping my corp badge if the war continues another week, and will probably join the PvP branch just to get my feet wet. I'd considered it anyways, but now's as good a time as any.

It does beg the question though... is this harassment? Should players who bring a grudge based on their treatment in another game be allowed to carry that into a new game? Should it be something you can petition?

*I* don't think so. I think this is part of what makes the game fun. But, what do *you* think?

My undead video card!

2009-08-12T15:20:00.005-04:00

Hey, I'm back!

Yeah, so what eh? Well, about 6 weeks ago my video card died. It wasn't a fantastic video card, but it got the job done for the most part. Like 90% of the video card failures, this was due to the cheap-ass stock fan that came with it. I bitched and moaned about it, pulled out my old reliable crap card (no fan!), and played EVE-Online since it was the only game I could get more than 10fps on without having the pixels be so large that they scared the cats.

Now, before you guys start thinking I'm an ATI fan, let me say I've owned far more Nvidia cards, and ALWAYS been happier with them. Unfortunately, my old 6800XT died (fan failure) and in that case it also nuked some of the chips as well... the x1950 was on sale for dirt-cheap at the time.

Well, I have been shopping for a new computer on my super-limited budget for a few months now, and have actually picked up a case, power supply, shiny new video card, and a bunch of fans. I'm hoping to get the motherboard/cpu/memory this week, and if my credit card will handle it, and some hard drives next month. A thanks goes out to Mr. Rand, who gave me his old motherboard/cpu/memory... unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work... even with the new video card (which better work! I have no PCI-express machine to test it in), but if it had worked I'd be up and running with it now.

In the meantime, I found this gem! Yes, it's a BIG fan, and it was a pain to get that sucker installed... You have to first install heat sinks on each RAM chip and let them sit for a day so the heat-transfer tape cures. THEN slap some arctic silver on the monster heat sink/fan thing, assemble it with a whole cadre of nipples, screws, springs, washers, and slowly tighten the four post screws so you don't crack the chip. But... it seems to have worked! I have no way to measure the actual temperature because ATI sucks and didn't include a thermal sensor on my card, but running FurMark for 10 minutes didn't show any artifacts and the air coming out of the back was nice and warm.

Thus, I can now play other games again. It's still an older card, so until I can afford to finish my new machine, it's still gonna be a bit choppy in Dalaran, and no Crysis for me... but EVE looks stunning with everything turned up, and all my other games work again.

If anyone DOES have a spare PCI-express (version 1!) card they were going to throw away, I would continue trying to get Rand's old motherboard working... the fans spin up and I get no post codes so it MIGHT be trying to boot... just no video so I can't tell.

In any case... time to go blow things up. :)

MUD world design, Part 3

2009-08-06T03:17:00.007-04:00

So, it was a long dinner...

Yeah, still trying to get back to writing every day, even if most of it's crap. Any good writer will tell you that's the key.. write a LOT of crap, because every once in a while, some of it sticks and isn't too smelly.

So, we left off with the idea of wanting to build a gigantic MUD world, having a map drawn out of the Big Picture, and maybe having a few slaves...errr.. builders to help make things come to life. The problem is, when Joe comes up with a brilliant story idea for an ice cave, and we HAVE a perfect spot for an ice cave up in the mountains, nobody has yet written the chunk of the world between the mountains and the newbie village. So, either Joe has to shelve the idea for a while, or bang out a bunch of rooms to get to the area he really wants to work on. As you might guess, those "filler" rooms won't be very stellar quality, and there might be a whole lot of them!

That sucks.

How can we get around this? There are a couple of ways, and it really depends on how much control you want to have over your world vs. how much work you want to do. The easiest way (from the builder/admin's point of view, not from the coder's!) is to use something like Perlin Noise. The advantage of this kind of system over fractals is that it can be evaluated at a point without having to build the entire structure in memory. So, you come up with an algorithm that models terrain based on a noise-generated height map + another generated map for foliage + another map for climate + another map for types of mobs maybe, stir well, and voila! You have a self-generated world of infinite size!

Of course, if you want to go that route, you will also want to make a graphical viewer that you can use to generate maps with various seed values until you find one you like, and then zoom in and scroll around to find the perfect place to center your world. Once that's done, you hook up your game's room code so that if no hand-coded room exists for the coordinate in question, it generates one based on those map values. Since such a room is temporary, it won't take any space and will go away after nobody's been there for a while. But, since the noise functions aren't random, it will be regenerated exactly as before next time you go to those coordinates.

If you aren't willing to surrender that much control, there is also the tried-and-true method of drawing maps in a paint program and having your code read them in. The downside is that you DO have to store the image in memory so it can be referenced without disk I/O. You also have to chunk your world up into square segments.... AND if you do allow multiple maps, the edges have to line up. If you choose the idea above of using multiple maps for terrain/climate/etc, you may have some work getting all the overlapping to mesh cleanly (photoshop to the rescue?).

Whichever method you choose, the end result is the same. You now have to have coordinates for your outdoor rooms such that your mechanism for moving knows what to expect when you type "north". That's not to say you have to have coordinates for every room... you could omit them for hand-edited things... but you may wish to be careful how you link between custom sectons and generated ones.

Many MUDs use a kludgy version called an "overland" map, which works a bit like the old Ultima IV game. You walk around the "overland" and then "enter" places of interest. Thus, movement on the overland is always by coordinates, and movement in the zones is always NOT. I prefer a more seamless approach, where the exit can either point to a room (vnum, path, depends on your type of MUD), or a coordinate (which might map to an already existing room, or which might cause a new room to be generated). That makes the distinction between hand-edited rooms and "filler" less obvious. In fact, if you use coordinates everywhere AND you write a reasonably good description generator, you can just skip over the small handfuls of rooms you used to have to write into your areas as filler spaces (IE: the 4 grasslands on either side of a road, etc).

I could write more here, but this has been a draft long enough.. let it be live!

MUD world design, Part 2

2009-08-02T15:52:00.003-04:00

So, last time I droned on about how worlds work, and how they evolve from a plan (or a lack thereof). I promised to show you how to make a big huge world and still be able to grow bits of it that aren't right next to each other, but first... we need to get a few things straight.

Most MUDs use the concept of a room, as I mentioned before. But what IS a room? What functions does it serve in the game? Do we *have* to use rooms?

We don't need rooms, but they make life simpler in a lot of ways. Most of those ways are good, but a few are lazy. The firs thing rooms do is provide containment. Put simply, players only see what is in the room they are in, they only see people (and NPC's) enter and leave that same room. Combat is limited to the participants in the room. Speech is typically also limited to the room boundaries.

From a coder's point of view, this means a whole lot of checks that we'd have to perform for every action the player or NPC attempts can be simplified down to "am I in the same room as my target?" That's a LOT easier than handling range, line of sight, cover, and all the other things a coordinate based game has to deal with.

It also makes life easier on the builder. When designing an area, the builder doesn't have to measure and count, they just write the descriptions appropriately for the number of rooms they want the player to traverse from point to point. Want the journey from the city gate to the goblin cave to be 20 moves? Easy! Build your road out 18 rooms from the gate, describing the countryside in chunks large enough to fit the distance... put the enterance to your cave there. Now build out a few rooms from the road for people that wander. Done.

Of course, explorer types like me will laugh, since your world has edges you didn't account for. You'd need to put forests that are too thick to get through, or mountains too steep to climb, or swamps... you get the idea. The "edge" rooms have to make you believe you can't go that way, so you won't try... else it breaks the immersion.

Still, you'll notice I never said how far (in distance) the cave actually were from the city. That's because it doesn't matter. Rooms can be any size, and most games treat them as no size at all. Gamers talk about distances in terms of how many rooms away things are, and even games that drain endurance as you walk, treat all rooms as the same size.

If that sounds kindof cheesy to you, you're in my camp. I like maps! I like things to make sense unless there's a good reason for them NOT to. I like to be able to head out across country and find my own way, rather than following roads and directions. To do this, one either has to be in a coordinate system, or a room system that is fully fleshed out so it works like a coordinate system.

That is the show stopper. If you want to keep rooms, AND you want a fully fleshed out world, most people sigh, roll up their sleeves, and build on a grid. The grid will have thousands of "filler" rooms, whose description is mostly cut-and-pasted, and which have nothing of interest other than random wandering monsters.

You are standing on a grassy plain. Tall grass waves gently in the breeze, and stretches out as far as you can see in every direction. You think there is a smudge of a mountain range far to the north, and a forest lies below you, miles to the west.

Yeah. You can cut and paste that into about 200 rooms, then change the description of the forest and fill in another 50-100 on the west side. Yawn. Your players will "thank" you for your effort by flipping to brief mode and typing "/repeat 100 w".

But what's the alternative? You don't want the sheep-rail guided system. You don't want the complexity of a full coordinate system (and the major rewrites to the entire combat and communication system it involves). What else can we do?

More to come... after dinner. :)

New Look

2009-08-02T15:40:00.002-04:00

Well, I decided to update my template, and even though I lost a bit of my custom HTML hackery, this looks cleaner and is simpler to change and maintain. Yay for lazy consumers!

MUD world design

2009-07-30T13:59:00.002-04:00

I was thinking about game world design, in particular how MUDs have done things over the years, and thought I'd share. :)

MUDs have all kinds of worlds, and some of them are extremely detailed and cohesive, others are comical mishmashes of themes, and still others seem disjointed. So, in my quest to build a new game world for myself, I figured I'd take a moment to ponder how and why things happen the way they do.

Most MUDs are room based, and I'll stick to that as a design paradigm, because it's simple. Text based MUDs can be done with coordinates only, but one has to develop ways to "hang" descriptions over swaths of terrain, and then have LOS rules and such... too much to deal with for this discussion. Further, most MUDs don't have any real concept of distance. In a traditional MUD, rooms are connected to each other via exits in the cardinal directions, and the only sense of scale you have is what the description offers your imagination.

So, how does one go about building a world? I think tradition gives us two common paths... Top Down, or Bottom Up. I would suggest that more MUDs use Bottom Up design, as it requires less planning and structure.

You've wandered out of Old Midgaard, down the road and entered... Smurf Village??? WTF??? You've just met Bottom Up design! In this kind of system, the game admins generally come up with an idea for a starting village of sorts, so they build it, and then they build a few things around it, and they open the game up to players and encourage people to become builders as quickly as possible. Those builders will come up with random ideas for "cool" zones, and then the admins will decide where to link them in, building a room or three as an enterance, and adding a few signs or other hints so people can find the new content. The world grows out from a central point, and quite often there isn't much cohesive design.

That said, some games DO enforce theme, and DO try to place zones logically, so the ice tundra isn't 3 rooms away from the desert. But, as years go by, people get lazy and soon things just don't quite mesh up anymore. Since there is generally no hand-drawn map of the world, it's also difficult to visualize where 100+ zones actually fit in relation to each other.

The other side of the coin is the Top Down method. In this case, the admins think up an idea for a whole world, and sketch it out on paper until they get a level of detail that they're happy with. Usually, you also write out some back-story and history to populate the world with various nations and creatures. At this point, you select a starting area and start building.

Since the world is already designed, builders are encourages to select types of creatures/civilizations to work on, or areas on the map that interest them. It's generally best if they choose adjacent zones to ones that already exist, otherwise some form of portal or other transit must be provided until the connecting zones are fleshed out.

Adding random new ideas to these worlds is often tricky, since it requires the admins find a place on the map it can fit AND have it make some sense with respect to the surrounding populations. That can often be solved by having the game developed on one continent and adding totally new things to "discovered" islands, or in the "uncharted regions".

Next time, I'll show how you can have your cake and eat it too... that is, you can have a giant world map, develop parts of it that are not adjacent, and still let people wander back and forth without hokey magic spells or riding "Da Bus".

Poor Kitty

2009-07-29T22:49:00.005-04:00

Well, I promised to post about my cat last time. Unfortunately, the good news is followed by bad news, so I'll just take a deep breath and tell the whole tale of Titch.

Titch came to us about 9 years ago, as a stray who was living out in the country near a friend and being beaten up by other cats around the area. Our friend was afraid that he'd get really seriously hurt or killed, and asked if we'd take him in as an outdoor cat in our neighborhood. We're suckers, so we agreed, and for the summer and fall, he lived outdoors and was happy to come up and get attention whenever anyone went outside, always came up for food, and slept on the porch, under the bushes, or wherever else he felt safe.

During that winter, we took pity on him and started letting him indoors, and while he always spent as much time outside as in, he took to sleeping indoors, and taking shelter whenever the weather was bad. Over the years, he became as much a part of the family as our other cats. He defended us from the fearsome "invader cats" that roamed the neighborhood, and I'm sure he even got in a fight or two with the fat old raccoons around here.

Of course, he had some health issues. He was a male black-and-white cat, prone to urinary tract infections (cha-ching for the vet), and he also occasionally had seizures. They lasted a couple of minutes, were obviously painful, but afterwards he seemed to be dazed for a few minutes, and then he'd recover and go eat, and sleep. These happened a few times a year, or after a trauma like being stepped on (sorry, Titch!), or getting into the neighbor's lawn after they put down weed and feed. The vet didn't find anything that seemed likely to be the cause, and since they were infrequent, we didn't worry too much.

So, while he did rack up some vet bills with his UT infections and special foods, he lived a pretty happy life up until this June. Sometime in late May, early June, we noticed a few bumps on him that seemed peculiar. They didn't seem to bother him, but keeping an eye on them they started to grow and more of them showed up. He still didn't seem bothered by them, other than scratching a bit, but they got pretty large and cracked open. Normally, we'd have taken him to the vet, but with money being tight, we figured it might be some pox or something that would run its course over a few weeks.

In the last week of June, he stopped eating and started getting congested and stuffed up. We tried to keep him inside and gave him some decongestants and forced him to eat and drink for a few more days, but he eventually got nauseous and we had to let him be. I should point out that he never seemed to not WANT to eat, he just would get to the bowl and then (apparently) feel naseuous and wander off. At this point, a friend of ours told us about a country vet they knew that was reasonably priced and we decided to take him out there the next day. This was July 2nd.

For the last few days, we'd been letting him go out on the back porch since it seemed to help his congestion a little, and he seemd to enjoy sleeping back there in the fresh air and sunlight. On the morning of the 3rd, we let him out as usual, with the intent of bring him back in when Kim got him from work to take him out to the vet. Wandering outside, we discovered that he'd left. A good hour's calling and looking in all his usual spots didn't turn him up, and after another hour, we'd missed the office hours and had to give up for the day.

We searched for him, called him, and did everything we could to no avail for the rest of the week. After another week went by with no sign, we assumed he'd gone off to die as cats often do when they're sick enough. We gradually stopped looking for him and hoped that he hadn't sufferd too much more.

On Tuesday, July 21st, I woke up at 1am and wandered out to get a drink and go back to bed. I looked out the side door, intending to close it, and saw this shadow slink up from under the bench and stand in front of the door. It took me a few seconds to realize that Titch had come back! After 18 days, our poor sick cat returned to us, weak and frail, but alive and happy to be home again.

I was at a loss for words, and overjoyed that such a miracle could happen. We took him to that vet the next day, had a few tests run, got some vitamins shot into him, and started feeding him raw meat to help him recover. Each day, he looked a little better, and even though he still had his bumps, he started getting a little strength back and looking more like a cat again, instead of a sack of bones with fur.

This is the point at which I wanted to tell you all this last week, but was just too tired to put it all down. I wish I could stop the story here, but there's more.

For 4 days, our happy little cat showed improvement and seemed content to eat, sleep, and get attention from whomever wandered by. He tried going down the stairs, and I had to rescue him since he wasn't strong enough to make it back up. He even played a little bit.

On Friday night, he started sniffling, and on Saturday he had gotten the same kind of head congestion that had eventually made him stop eating before. Since he only weighed 4 pounds (as opposed to his healty weight of 12 pounds), we knew he couldn't go very long without eating now. On Monday, we carted him off to the vet again, he got some more vitamins and a strong antiobiotic, with the hopes that we could kill whatever was causing his problems, rather than trying to treat the symptoms forever. The vet also said that his system was so weakened, that trying to give him multiple drugs would probably be too much for him.

That night, he seemed a bit better but still wouldn't eat. On Tuesday, he was snuffling a bit, but still not as bad as before. He at a very tiny bit of tuna, and drank some water, and I took that to be a good sign. This morning, he seemed about the same... not interested in food or water, wanting to be left alone for the most part.

Around 1pm, he had a seizure while I was checking on him. Having seen this before over the years, I wasn't overly worried, but knew it would drain him since he was already weak. So, I held him down to keep him from hurting himself (as I did whenever I was nearby when he had one). The first thing I noticed was that his urine was slightly pink. Not good, but still not really worrisome yet. That meant he probably had another UT infection, but since he'd just gone on antibiotics, there wasn't much ELSE we could do... I hoped it was just an existing infection that would be cleared up by the antibiotics.

A few minutes after his seizure, he did something he'd never done before. He had another one.

This continued for a good two hours, some seizures being severe, others seeming fairly mild. Sometimes only a few minutes of rest, other times having 15 minutes or more. After 3pm, I called the vet, and their office hours for today were between 6pm and 7:30pm. I also noticed, at this point, that he was trying to stand up but his back legs weren't responding.

Poking his foot pads confirmed my fear, his back half was numb and unresponsive, muscles only reacting to involuntary seizures. At that point, Ian and I made the hard decision to drive him up the vet at 6pm and have him euthanized.

Perhaps in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps because the God who usually likes to toy with us and watch us suffer was satisfied, after 4pm he didn't have any further seizures. When we bundled him up and took him out to the car, he cried a bit, but after we started driving, he sat quietly in Ian's lap and really seemed to enjoy the ride.

The sun was out, it was 73 degrees and NOT humid, the windows were open so we had a nice breeze, and he would look out the front window at the world going by, look over at me, look up at Ian, and seemed to be happy and content. I'm really grateful for that.

Once we pulled into the parking lot and stopped, he cried a little as we got out of the car, and wanted a bit of reassurance. The vet (a very nice older guy) made sure we knew the options, but didn't try to talk us out of it. He suggested it was probably a brain tumor that had finally gotten large enough to become fatal. Once we agreed to do it, he injected Titch with a sedative which made him throw up a tiny bit, but otherwise didnt' bother him. He slipped a tournaquet around his leg, and as we said goodbye he injected him with something. A few seconds later he released the tournaquet and Titch died within 2 seconds.... the time it took to rush from his leg to his heart.

It seemed quite painless.

I'm crying a bit more as I type this and remember it all. But I think it's for the best. He had a nice ride with people he loved and then got to sleep. We should all be so lucky in the end.

Goodbye old friend!

Yawn, how long have I been asleep?

2009-07-21T15:12:00.004-04:00

Heh, two years since I last posted on this thing eh? Yeah, figures.

So, what news? Well, I quit Menard's a while ago for health reasons.... old people like me shouldn't be lifting the kinds of crap they had us lifting with no protection, no safety harnesses, and no help. After hurting myself a few too many times and having my doctor (whom I don't visit very often because I lack health insurance) tell me I probably have a "pre-hernia", which will turn into a full blown one someday... sooner if I don't change jobs... well, enough is enough.

So, does that mean I have a real job now? Alas, not yet. It seems the economy imploded, along with the auto industry, the banking industry, the housing market, and pretty much everything except the oil companies. Michigan has an over 15% official unemployment rate, which means the real numbers are closer to 30%! Fortunately, my house is paid off, and I'm not too far behind on taxes or other bills... for now.

I'm giving serious thought to moving out to San Diego, CA. I need to get a job before I can actually do this, but I'd kindof like to not spend another winter here. I like Michigan, but I hate the weather for 9 months of the year. If SOE doesn't want to hire me, I need to find someone else who can train me to be a good corporate drone.

Later, I'll post some good news about my cat. :)

More Hate

2007-11-27T17:44:00.001-05:00

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!

2007-11-26T08:57:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-26T08:40:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-11-17T19:21:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-18T11:11:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-08-18T10:47:00.000-04:00

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

2007-07-27T14:12:00.000-04:00

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

2007-07-11T14:49:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-06-10T13:43:00.000-04:00

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...

2007-05-27T09:43:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-18T12:16:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-04-03T12:16:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-27T00:16:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-13T13:48:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-03-06T11:28:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-02-07T17:11:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-19T17:47:00.000-05:00

This is just an image for a Vanguard beta contest entry.... have to have it as a link.

2006-12-10T14:49:00.000-05:00

Nothing special here, just hack and slashed my banner for an avatar picture to use in some forums.

2006-11-17T19:07:00.000-05:00

This is a higher quality version.

2006-11-17T18:58:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah, I played around with photoshop the other day and finally made a signature. Look ok?

Half a Beeeeelleon!

2006-11-17T09:16:00.000-05:00

November 17th will be known for several things. Sony's rich-kid-only PS3 was launched, I don't know if anyone noticed. Another new Bond hit the screen, hopefully he'll do better than the last couple who played that part (although Pierce Brosnan did quite well in the Die Another Day, IMHO).

On a far smaller stage, Kim Chee broke the half-a billion ISK cap today, and can no longer be considered a poor citizen of EVE-Online. While 500M ISK is a drop in the bucket to many players in the game, it's not chump change, and it's actually not a bad accomplishment for a solo player in an MMO that offers huge alliances.

I'd also like to point folks at another MMO. It's one I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it looks stunning and sounds like it's what the original EverQuest would have been, had Brad McQuaid had both the creative control and the experience to make it. This isn't surprising, since McQuaid is at the helm, and this is what he left SOE to do after they took control away from him. On the minus side, SOE is involved again. This time, they're supposedly limited to providing the servers, account maintenance, and marketing. I'd love to believe that, as the game itself sounds remarkable.

I'm talking about Vanguard, of course. As you'd expect, I tossed a few screenshots up for you. The level of detail is very impressive, although it makes me think my poor old computer won't actually let me see THAT while playing. Vanguard seems to be striving for a balance between the photo-realisitic and they stylized comic-book. EQ2 tried to go to one extreme, and ended up with a dead world. WoW went the other way, and made a fun world that looks horrible close up. Looking at the 1600x1200 screenshots, the detail is phenomenal, but it still looks alive.

Vanguard is still in Beta 3. They plan to have 5 stages of Beta before a release in Q1 of 2007. Considering the WoW expansion is out in January, I'd expect them to be aiming for March to capitalize on people who have finished WoW (again) and are looking for something new.

Games, work, games, work.

2006-10-04T23:20:00.000-04:00

Long time, no write.

Not that much to add in here. I've been working at Menard's for a while now... not a bad job, although it doesn't pay enough and 4 hours a day makes me as tired as 8 hours of programming. On the plus side, I apparently have been losing some weight, as a couple people I haven't seen in a while mentioned I looked lighter.

My WoW character is up to 55, and should hit 60 before the expansion comes out at the end of November. I play every couple of days, but I still can't bring myself to do the whole scheduled 4 hour raid thing. It just feels too much like work I guess. :)

Tonight's South Park episode was all about WoW, and was funny as hell!

I still play EVE too. Don still plays, and seems to enjoy it even if he is AFK most of the time. The others have all dropped out because they're WoW addicts and can't devote the time to even log in to change their skills.

Time to go feed my starving cats and go sleep.

EVE is still cool

2006-06-22T23:26:00.000-04:00

So, not much to post in the last month or so. I've been working as a shelf stocker at Menard's for a while now, and need to sleep a half hour ago to get up at 4:30am. EVE still occupies my thoughts and takes a good chunk of my time.

I've been losing money in the game of late, mostly due to me spending more time buying things and less time mining. I also haven't won any competitions in EVE-Radio lately. Still, I'm not poor yet, and my skill plan will have me ready to tackle level 3 missions soon, as well as perhaps trying an assault frigate.

I tried ninja-mining in 0.4 space a little bit. Fun, exciting, but not too profitable. I suppose if I spent a whole day doing it, I'd get enough Zyd to make it worthwhile... or if I dragged out my Osprey instead of using the throw-away Bantam I used. We'll have to see. A bantam costs 75K to outfit for this purpose (maybe less), so even an hour of mining covers it. An Osprey is around 5M so it hurts a little more if I lose it.

Oh yes, welcome to Don, who at least downloaded the client this past weekend, and was asking what race we were. I haven't seen him in-game yet, so I don't know if he actually started his 14-day trial.

More later, sleep now.

2006-05-17T16:27:00.000-04:00

So, I've been playing EVE for a while now, and listening to EVE Radio too. I've spent a fair amount of ISK on their contests, and won more than I've spent. It really helped me get started and keep up with my skill training, since I could afford to buy or build the ships I was ready for.

Yesterday, I won a decent amount. I entered DJ Stone's lottery 4 minutes before he closed it, one ticket for 1 million ISK... won the top prize of 150 million ISK! W00t! Later that evening, I entered another lottery for 1 million ISK and split third prize for another 6 million ISK. Not bad eh?

2006-05-17T16:03:00.000-04:00

This post is primarily to put a few pictures up online so I can email the links to people.

EVE Offline

2006-05-11T15:03:00.000-04:00

It figures.... the last couple of weeks my day off has been Wedensday, so when CCP announced that they were doing (another!) hardware upgrade this Wedensday, I was quite happy about it. I figured I'd get out of work, go take a nap for a few hours, and then play on the new faster uberware for the rest of the evening.

Well, unfortunately, my schedule shifted so my day off was Thursday. Normally, that'd be even better since I'd have the whole day to play.... but so did their schedule. So, it's Thursday and EVE is down, and I'm not. *sigh*

While we're waiting, here are a few screenshots from the Kali expansion....

On the plus side, I did watch last week's Doctor Who, and it was a pretty good one. David Tennant is shaping up to be quite a good Doctor. I just hope he sticks around for more than one season. I liked Eccelston as well, but it takes a couple of years for the writing and the actor to really sync in any good show.

On hour and forty-five minutes left until Tranquility is supposed to be back up. :)

Jury dodging and a new victim!

2006-05-02T23:23:00.000-04:00

I dodged a bullet today. I got the dreaded Jury Summons notice a while back, and called in today to find that they didn't need me. Hooray! Normally, I wouldn't care too much... but the day I was supposed to go in was my day off.

Also, I'd like to welcome Kevin to EVE-Online. He's the newest victim I've convinced to join me , and will hopefully be asking me questions about how things work soon. I'm kindof hoping he'll enjoy the game for an hour or so a day, since it's free-form. You don't HAVE to spend six hours a day playing to get anywhere, although I do because it's MY addiction. :)

Begging Button

2006-04-29T23:04:00.000-04:00

I'm poor. As I mentioned, I recently got a job stocking shelves. It's not a bad job, and gets me some exercise (which I desperately need), but the pay is what you'd expect from a job stocking shelves. So, I thought "Self! You have a paypal account.... why not put one of those donation buttons on there? Maybe someone has too much money and you can help them out!" So, I agreed and put a button on there. It looks like it should work, although I can't really test it since giving myself money doesn't make sense. I'm sure it will be very dusty, but hey.... if you really want you CAN give me money now.

I also have a battleship in EVE now. :)

It may be a little while before I have the skills and equipment to make it into the terrifying fighting vessel it can be, but at least I have one and it looks cool.

Job, Teeth, EVE...

2006-04-27T17:33:00.000-04:00

For anyone who missed it, I finally broke down and got a part-time job stocking shelves at Menard's. No biggie, but it does illustrate how poor the IT industry here in Michigan is, mostly thanks to the warmongering of a certain fellow in the whitehouse. By that, I mean that if the, roughly, 100 BILLION dollars that were spent in the first phase of the Iraq "war" had been used to stablize the economy and shore things up after the dot-com implosion, we'd be well on the road to recovery now. Instead, many parts of the country are still flailing about trying to find ways to continue to enjoy the services of the technology field, without having to pay for it.

I might have also mentioned how much I hate teeth. About two weeks ago, I woke up with a toothache. Upon investigation, I discovered a swelling along the gumline, over the place where my lower right wisdom tooth was, many years ago. After a few days, I assumed it was some weird infection and decided if it didn't go away soon I'd have to go to the dentist to get antibiotics. Last week, I went and was told it was just some irritation caused by something I ate (perhaps), and that a sharp spot on my upper molar was scraping against it, keeping it swollen and tender. No inflamation of the tissue was present, so that rules out an infection (and keeps me from getting drugs, damnit!).

I will say that after my upper tooth was filed a bit, it has gotten better.... but it's STILL tender and is still occasionally bothered by something. My current working theory is Mountain Dew: Code Red. I was doing fine this morning, didn't bother me much at all at work, and as long as I didn't try chewing on that side at lunch, no problem. I finished my Coke and refilled with MDCR, and now it hurts again. Coincidence? Just a fact of using a straw? Or new ebil in the chemical soup that is MDCR.....

EVE-Online continues to amaze me. I discovered the joys of the Buy Order last night. Most people who play EVE know about the market, and most also know about the Sell Order. That's where you have something you want to get rid of, and nobody is offering a good enough price, so you put the item up for sale, specifying the price and how long you'll leave it up for. MOST of the time when you buy something, you are buying off other people's Sell Orders. A Buy Order is the opposite.... you don't want to pay what other people are asking in their Sell Orders, so you specify a price you WILL pay, and how many you want, and how far you're willing to travel to get it. Then, when other people sell things, it fills your Buy Order.

So, instead of paying the local price of 370 ISK for the 12,000 units of Nocxium I need, or paying the 345 ISK price I can get if I'm willing to travel 6 jumps, I set up a Buy Order offering 325 ISK and saying I'd be willing to go up to 10 jumps. In addition, I set the minimum purchase amount to 1000 units, so nobody can sell me 3 units 10 jumps away, and 4 more 8 jumps the other way. In a little over an hour last night, I watched 9,000 units appear, and I suspect the rest are there by now.

Hooray! I'm a more advanced trader now. :)

EVE Rocks!

2006-04-07T19:41:00.000-04:00

Finally, a few others have seen the light. I've been quietly (and not so quietly) preaching about how cool EVE-Online is for half a year now, and a couple of my friends have finally given in and taken a look at it.

One is hooked, another is almost hooked, and a third would be hooked if he was willing to play more than one MMO at a time.

Over a month!

2006-03-13T17:14:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been over a month since my last rant. Not like anyone cares, but it's worth commenting just because it's a reflection of the American culture I'm a part of. Like exercise, or eating food that's good for you, or most things.... you have to keep doing it all the time for it to work. Writing is no different. It's easy to write when you have ideas, but forcing yourself to write when there's nothing interesting to write about is much harder. I'm a fat lazy American. 'Nuff said. :)

Still no job. My roommate's job also dried up, in much the same way as mine did a year and a half ago... the investors pulled the funding and the company closed. In my case, it took a little bit longer. So money is non-existant and stress levels are a bit high. I keep sending out applications to real companies and hearing nothing back. I keep saying I'm going to work at walmart or subway... yet for months I didn't bother to apply there in the hopes I'd yet make use of this albatross of a CS degree.

*sigh*

No such luck. This week, I'm going to have to make the rounds again and visit all the local office supply stores (office max, etc...). I think I'll need to call a temp agency too. April is down to the wire time, and if we don't get some income soon, bad things will start happening.

On the more comforting side of things, I did fork out the cash for Dungeons & Dragons Online. I will play for one month and might even hit level 10. Steve is level 7 and will definately hit the top this week I expect. My group of friends is not organized well enough to get everyone on at once, but I've played with most of them at least a few times.

I'm approaching the 100 million ISK mark in EVE-Online. This game still rocks, and I haven't even joined a corp yet. My goals are to get a mining barge, to get a heavy industrial transport, and to get a battleship. I then want to have the skills needed to fly a freighter. I probably wont' ever be able to afford one, but if I can fly one, I might find a job with a corp as a hauler.

Two of my friends are almost talked into playing EVE... but they're afraid of it. The more I describe it, the more they realize it's the kind of game that can suck up every available minute of your days and nights. World of Warcraft was addictive, but it's a simple game. Once you hit the top, it's just boring grinding until you have all the items you want. Then, you roll a new character until they raise the level cap. EVE has no levels, no caps, no magical "uber" equipment that makes you unbeatable. It has enough skills to keep you training for 20 years, so it's all about making the right decisions for what you want to do. Equipment helps, but skills are more important, and player skill is (as always) King. It's a deep game.

The only other game I'm looking forward to is Vangard, and it still doesn't have a release date. Dark and Light is supposed to be out in a month, but the last time I logged into the SoG prequel game, it still sucked and I was almost the only person on. Even the die-hard fanboi's have abandoned that sinking ship.

I hate teeth

2006-02-06T15:17:00.000-05:00

Hmmm, missed Mur this winter. I blame my dentist. I've never liked dentistry, and have always held onto the conspiracy theory that dental work is bad for you. Why? Well, first of all.... every time you go to the dentist, they scrape away the patena of decay and expose fresh new enamel to the destructive elements of your daily diet. Anyone who's cleaned copper knows that removing the patena is the fastest way to destroy the artifact, unless you can somehow keep it in a vacuum so it's protected.

Secondly, my teeth didn't bother me much UNTIL I went to the dentist. I get to have three nice new fillings installed when I go back next week (or the week after, have to check). One of them hurt when they poked it (with their ebil metal pickaxe), the others I have to take their word for. In any case... now my teeth hurt all day.

I've been getting weird headaches on the top of my head, which I had though were due to it being cold or some freakish thing. I now suspect they might really be from the nerve endings of the tooth that's hurting... since I'm getting them more since having my teeth poked and proded.

Long story short, I wanted to go to Mur Friday, ended up doing things too late in the day, was ready to go Saturday except for waking up to a headache/toothache that would have prevented me and anyone around me from having much fun. *sigh* Jeff will probably assume I hate him since I've missed quite a few in recent years.

Gmail

2006-02-01T13:12:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm revisiting the gmail upload problem again. My programming skills are just about gone, so don't expect much.

The problem: I have quite a bit of mail sitting on my linux server as mbox files.

The desire: To move all that mail to my gmail account so I can access it from anywhere.

The catch: Gmail only shows the date the mail landed on their servers, so to keep things in any semblence of order, it has to be sent in the right order, with a time delay so things stay in the right order. Gmail also doesn't allow attatchments larger than 10M, so a few messages might have to be altered.

That shelf stocking job at Sam's Club is looking more promising every day:

Learning Chinese

2006-01-24T13:07:00.000-05:00

I learned a new phrase today on EVE Online, the eve-radio channel.

[18:03:36] st0ra > Splutty - would you do a translation for me please?
[18:03:38] Bobway > hey Splutty did you hear that Diaego's I-DOG Peed on the server ?
[18:03:44] Splutty Eriminov > Having a cold again, so getting really annoyed with it :(
[18:04:02] Splutty Eriminov > What's that Stora?
[18:04:05] st0ra > I need to know how to say: Was there a thank you in there somewhere?
[18:04:51] Splutty Eriminov > Hmm.
[18:05:05] Splutty Eriminov > Zat daar een verborgen bedankje in?
[18:05:11] Splutty Eriminov > Not quite it, though...
[18:05:15] CommandCom > diplomacy for beginners
[18:05:15] Splutty Eriminov > We don't really use that in dutch.
[18:05:29] st0ra > a lot of English won't translate
[18:05:37] st0ra > not with the same undertones, anyway
[18:05:42] Bradshaw Kingsman > o/
[18:05:44] BrerLapin > hehe
[18:05:46] BrerLapin > true
[18:05:59] Splutty Eriminov > No. Diplomacy for beginners would be: Gun a shi long fu, qu qiang jian long mao a
[18:06:10] CommandCom > stora taking dutch lessons ? :-)
[18:06:14] st0ra > eh?
[18:06:19] st0ra > yes Com
[18:06:23] BrerLapin > Or i have a hammer & Im not afraid to use it on your toes
[18:06:27] Splutty Eriminov > (Drop dead farmer, go fuck a panda) is what that translates to roughly :)
[18:06:37] st0ra > ouchies!

So, from now on... when you see a farmer cranking away in your favourite MMO, smile and say 'Gun a shi long fu, qu qiang jian long mao a'

DDO

2006-01-18T19:18:00.000-05:00

Ok, so it's been a while since I wrote anything. I'm lazy. Sue me (take my debt!).

Not a lot to report, really. It snowed, it melted, it's snowing again. The job market still sucks, although at least this week's classifieds is more than one sheet of newsprint. I'm pretty much giving up on trying to find anything in my field... so I'm collecting all the temp agency names around here to mass mail my resume to and see if I can get a data entry or filing job.

I've been playing EVE Online as pretty much my only real MMO these days. It's still fun, although the macro miners are spreading. So far, none of them have messed with me, but I know it's just a matter of time. We'll see, I may have to turn pirate if they steal my cans more than once.

Dungeon and Dragons Online is having a stress test tomorrow. This might be the game that we can finally get the band together with. In fact, I still have to call Rand and force him to speak, since he doesn't ever respond to email or ICQ. In any case, I hope it doesn't suck too badly. If the preview isn't fairly smooth, it will scare at least a few of us away.

Holiday Madness

2006-01-03T03:20:00.000-05:00

Well, I've been both busy and lazy, hence no updates at the end of the year.

It's now 2006. Unemployment is a mixed bag of candy. On the one hand, the not having to work part has been really nice. I feel like the guy from Office Space. Having spend over a year without a job, I haven't really accomplished much of anything productive. This tells me that the natural profession that I would excel at is being a nobleman. On the other hand, not having any money also sucks.

I've been holding out on taking just any old job in the hopes that I could find something in my field without having to pick up and move. Either there just aren't many jobs here, or my lack of Microsoft certificates puts me at the bottom of the heap, or I've been blacklisted. In any case, I'm out of choices and will have to broaden my search again.

Hope everyone else is having a good start to the new year. :)

Cars suck

2005-12-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

Ok, so back when I had an overpaid dot.com job, I decided I wanted a new car. Normally, nobody buys a "new" car, you guy a 1 or 2 year old car for half the money. Silly me though, I figured I was making $52,000 a year and would likely get more at my next job, so I got a $30,000 eclipse.

That was four years ago. It's been, on the whole, a pretty reliable car. Very fast and responsive, looks nice (even though I never wash it), and even after four winters out in the snow, it's held up pretty well. Minor complaints, like the tires losing pressure every so often, or the sunroof not working as smoothly as it should.

Today, that changed. I drove off to lunch this morning, as I do almost every Saturday. My roommate has been using my car since it's reliable, and she drove to and from work this morning. After lunch, I headed to Best Buy and looked at stuff, then I drove down to the pet store to get cat food. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

15 minutes later, I put the cat food in the car, get in, and it won't start. The door light is flashing and beeping at me. My first though is, "Oh great. The stupid anti-theft thing in the store must have zapped my key somehow." After a little while, the dash lights come on dimly, but no engine turnover. Grrrrr...

I call my roommate and haver her (using her Mom's car) come rescue me. The car jump starts just fine, but all is not well. I notice the transmission slipping a bit when upshifting (it's an automatic), and as it's getting dark I flip the lights on. Bunches of dash lights come on, and the panel lighs dim and flicker. The brakes hiss (power breaks no longer power?), and I'm sure the car is about to die. I flick the lights back off and get the rest of the way home.

A friend suggested the battery might have a dead cell, which would account for it not turning over... but the other stuff is just too weird. I'm calling the dealer Monday (thankfully, I got the 5 year extended warrenty), but that is NOT how I wanted to spend the weekend before Christmas.

Oh yes, advent stuff.... todays' is yet to do, but

Yesterday: Coffee!
The 16th: Hot pink kiddie dough (smells a little more like play dough than the orange stuff)

Wheeeeeee

2005-12-14T17:44:00.000-05:00

Advent Calendar for today: assorted hard candies, woot!

SoG is still down.... they still have no ETA.

Some bastards claim they've gotten to play, a few even for more than an hour! I choose to disbelieve them and assume they're being paid by NPCube to say there is a working product.

It's a shame, really. DnL sounded like the dream game, even knowing the graphics might be a bit dated. Well, the dream is turning into a nightmare of downtime, annoyed pre-order people, and worst of all -- an almost total lack of communication between the developers and the public. I think I've been spoiled by the detailed information CCP gives us about the status of EVE, and exactly what they're working on. NPCube follows mushroom management, and just says "We're workin' on it."

EVE is down today. The long awaited and planned expansion pack, Red Moon Rising, is being installed as I type. They expect a full 24 hours of downtime, and unlike the jokers at DnL, I fully expect them to either have it working by then... or post a reason for the delay and a new time estimate. I wonder if CCP is hiring junior programmers or content people.... I could move to Iceland to work with a company that cool.

DnL sadness, EVE gladness

2005-12-13T15:37:00.000-05:00

Well, SoG (the DnL prequel) is still struggling to get off the ground. I downloaded the client and was able to connect to the patcher yesterday and slowly upgrade to the current build. Today, I was able to verify that my account exists -- but the servers are crashing constantly so that nobody can actually play. I somehow think they may have tested the game with a dozen people in the office, and then let 50 beta testers on to verify that it would work. Thus, since it worked for around 100 people on their desktop machine, they assumed the big iron would just handle 20,000 users. Dunno... talking out of my ass here... but they seem totally unprepared and appear to be madly scrambling to find a way to get things working.

Note to self: When planning MMOG, write bots for clients and actually test the real hardware at full capacity BEFORE announcing to the public, and BEFORE giving out 20,000 keys.

On the other side of the world (literally), I played EVE-Online last night and it reminded me that I actually do like the game. It's a strange little game, in that there are large parts of it you can't really get into until you have the skills -- and those take real time to train. But, there are other parts that work just fine. In my case, I spent a few hours mining into secure cans with my little destroyer and punking the occasional rat that appeared. It should have been very boring, but was actually quite relaxing. Listening to EVE-Radio (or watching TV I suppose) helps quite a bit though.

Yesterdays' Advent Calendar item was..... SOAP!
Let's see what today's is!

Today's item is Latte mix! That is, you add it to coffee and it makes it taste like latte.

Heh, ok.

2005-12-11T13:31:00.000-05:00

Well, to follow up on the SoG phenomenon... I finally did get my verification email. I was one of the lucky 10,000 who snagged a free key during the 80 second giveaway on the 8th. After much pain and confusion, I also managed to get the client downloaded on the 9th. Supposedly, it's installed and ready to go -- although I can't know for sure until the servers come up on the 12th. I get to play on the 13th, but hopefully the update servers will let me patch early anyways.

I missed a couple days, so let me fill in the advent calander entries:

Dec 9th was small bits of chocolate day.
Dec 10th was Arabian coffee day.
Dec 11th was Kiddie Dough day.

I have to expand on the Kiddie Dough thing. It comes in a small tub, about the size of a double shot glass. The outside says it's made in China and packaged in Hong Kong. It also says it's NON-TOXIC. That's good. The ingredients list is simply 56g of modeling clay. It's also good that this clarification is there.

I would eat this stuff.

When you open the container, you find a blob of dark orange goo, that's about the colour of overcooked carrots, or perhaps pumpkin pie filling. The texture is about as soft as overcooked carrots, but spongy so it can be molded and hold the shape you give it for a while. It's a little softer than the kind of clay I'm used to, and perhaps a tiny bit softer than Play Dough.

The second thing you notice though, is the smell. It smells like a mounds bar. Mostly coconut, I suspect coconut oil is the main ingredient besides dirt (or whatever they use for the clay part). It's not a machine smell, nor the kind of pseudo-rubber smell that I remember Play Dough having. This stuff really does smell tasty.

I'm imagining there will be very confused pre-school and kindergarden kids in Hong Kong, if this stuff is used widely. As a teacher, you'd give this to your kids and tell them to play with it, but not eat it. But it smells very good, and trying to keep them from eating it will probably be difficult. Later, you'd give them food that might well look and smell similar, and have to tell them to eat it but not play with it. Confusion seems unavoidable.

On the WoW front, My druid is level 16 and I've moved him to the undead n00b area to run though all the low level quests. No experience (worth mentioning), but I want my standings with them improved at least to friendly so I don't accidentally kill myself.

SoG day

2005-12-08T13:45:00.000-05:00

Advent Item of the Day: A spiffy blue pen to go with the pink one!

Settlers of Ganareth... the prequel to Dark and Light.

Today, the 10,000 free keys were given out. I *think* I got one, at least I have a printout of a web page that says I did. They were all given out in 1 minute and 20 seconds! Supposedly, I'll get an email in the next few hours if I did indeed get one.

Advent Calendar

2005-12-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

As promised, here's the list (to date) of what's in the Advent Calendar of DOOM.

Vegemite
Canister with vegetable oil soap inside
decaf coffee
handkerchiefs
hot-pink gel pen
popcorn
columbian coffee

Future entries will get added in as the days pass. Additional encourgement to write something every day, right?

Who's a lazy bitch?

2005-12-07T10:24:00.000-05:00

Yeah, that'd be me.... as you can tell by the fact that I haven't posted anything in almost a week.

I could always fall back on the "nothing interesting happened" excuse, but that hardly matters. Half the point of these online diaries is to write about trival crap nobody cares about, just to excercise the brain and keep using that stupid language centre. So, let's try again, shall we?

First of all, there's the Package of Mysterious DOOM that's finally arrived. Friday, the postman apparently tried to deliver a package and failed. Our regular postman knows perfectly well that we're all deaf and never answer the door, so he leaves stuff for us. I can only assume he was on holiday, so on Saturday, we found a note telling us to tromp down to the post office, or fill out a form and they'd re-deliver it. Of course, since the post is closed on Sunday, that means we had to wait until Monday for the form to get picked up, and yesterday (Tuesday) to actually get the scary box.

I knew it was trouble, as it came from Ohio... and only scary things come from Ohio. Sure enough, it was a package from my friend James and his new (but not blushing) bride, Rachel. In keeping with a tradition of her family, it was an advent calander. That is, it's a box full of tiny packages with numbers on them. You open each package on the day of December that it's numbered for. Very amusing! Knowning how he thinks, I had Kim write down each day's package as we opened them.... James says there's no hidden pattern. But I'll still look for one.

Also of note, I'm trying to get him to toss that dusty old hotmail account he uses and switch to gmail. Google will rule the world, and I want all my friends on the right side of the revolution when it finally happens. Besides, it's way cooler and how can you argue with 1.5G of disk space for free? To help that along, I figured out how to export and import all my contacts from thunderbird to gmail. Once I finally get all my normal mail uploaded, I'll probably just use gmail from then on.

Heh, I wish I lived in England. BBC America is showing the programme Bargain Hunt. They have cool TV shows, and all kinds of different things. We have one cool show and then all the other networks have to copy it. Hence the flood of "reality" shows and "cop" shows for the last five years. Oh well.

Tomorrow is Dark and Light day. They're giving out their 10,000 free SoG keys. I think DnL has a lot of promise, but I'm broke. So I'm not willing to spend $60 for a pre-order of a game that won't officially launch until April. I am willing to sit in front of my web browser at 6pm GMT and try to get a free key to the prequel though. :)

I actually have more to write.... but this is long enough for the moment.

Silly Tests

2005-12-01T04:52:00.000-05:00

Heh, I love these stupid things... My roommate just found a site that has a bunch of those dumb multiple choice personality tests on it. OK Cupid. I did ok on a few of them.

King Edward I
You scored 77 Wisdom, 77 Tactics, 58 Guts, and 54 Ruthlessness!

Thundercats!
You scored 60 Aggression and 50 Silliness!

Agnostic
Holy Crap! You're taking -53 souls with you to hell!

Woodstock
Wishy-Washy: 40%, Mental: 62%, Physical: 25%

End of the month

2005-11-30T22:14:00.000-05:00

It's almost December.

I'm pretty much addicted to EVE-Radio now. They don't always play stuff I like, but they play lots of different things. Among many other things, they played this scary thing. I'm hoping that my computer is willing to remain stable with multiple processes accessing the sound device. Creative Labs' sound drivers are pretty pathetic.

Speaking of computers.... I installed Windowblinds today. Nice to have the same level of theme support I had for free in Windows 98. It was a pretty sweet deal for Stardock... help Microsoft develop the new skinning interface so it works well, AND ensure that Microsoft doesn't include any real theme support. Thus, Stardock makes more money than they would otherwise, and Microsoft doesn't have to waste time developing and maintaining tools for their GUI.

Well, time to continue my druid's progress in WoW. I might even load up my mastermind in CoV before it expires... I need a job so I can play more of these games. :)

Remember, DnL chance is in a week!

[EDIT]
There's also a video of that thing... *shiver*

WoW again

2005-11-28T18:30:00.000-05:00

Well, not too much to rattle on about... but I did make a stab at returning to World of Warcraft this morning. I decided that while flexbar is a nice thing, when it breaks, it totally prevents me from playing the game -- at all. So, rather than spending half my time trying to fix things I didn't break, I figured I'd try to learn how to play using the standard interface again.

One of the weird things about WoW is that once you start using add-ons, it becomes very hard to stop using them. I logged in with nothing, and simply couldn't find a way to arrange my warrior's buttons that worked well. So, I though maybe I should make a new character and thus learn how to work things as I level up. That works better... MUCH better.

Still, there are some add-ons that are just too useful to do without. Little things. Being able to scroll the chat window with the mousewheel. Having the loot window appear under your cursor when you loot. Being able to move the damn bag windows when they get in the way. So, even with a clear start, I've got about 20 mods loaded again. Most of them are working fine, although auctioneer whines a bit.

Oh, I also dug up an IRC client. Somehow, I've managed to go all these years as a computer geek and stay clear of IRC. Well, I had to go dig one up for one single purpose. I listen to EVE Radio quite a bit, and if I'm not playing EVE, the only way to make requests or insult the DJ for the crap he's playing is to use IRC. :)

I fear this week will see me visiting the local FedEx terminal to apply for an exciting career in box management. Loading the boxes onto the truck, unloading the boxes off the truck... sorting the boxes even! Well, I blame Gee Dubya for letting the economy get this bad. Oh well, can't move to Europe yet.

WoW, work, blah...

2005-11-27T01:10:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to remember how to play WoW again. I have a level 23 druid which I loaded up last night, along with my level 42 hunter. It was fun, but I felt like I couldn't remember what any of the buttons did. Still, it's a fun game. I have about 6 weeks to play it before it costs me more money. Since I'm still unemployed, I think that's about how long I have to find a job of some sort too.

Unemployment in America is stupid. When my parents were kids, you could walk into almost any place and ask for a job. Many would turn you away, or require qualifications you didn't have, but that was the way it worked. When *I* was a kid, you could still do that for "normal" jobs. However, we were told that if you went to college you wouldn't have to look... employers would contact you and offer work. With a Computer Science degree, I should be able to get a job and they'd train me in the details since the degree meant I knew how to learn.

Well... they lied. In 2005, lots of people need jobs. As a result, you don't get training anymore. You don't get offers. You have to beg. It really feels that way. Unless you happen to know someone who works somewhere that's hiring, you have only random chance to help you stumble into a job that you can do. I've seen lots of jobs flow through the classifieds in the last year, and I've applied for the tiny handful that I know how to do. Employers are now picky enough that if you don't already know how to do the job on day 1, they'll pass and wait for someone who does.

I really regret bothering to get a degree today. Had I dropped out of college in 1991 and helped form a local ISP, I might well be a millionare today. Had I never bothered to go to college at all, I might have a solid pension by now. Instead, I got 5 years of good paychecks, and now that cash is gone. I'm thinking I'll be very lucky if I can get an office job somewhere... typing reports, filing, hell... I'd be happy stocking shelves at this point.

Oh well. On the plus side... I did beat Civ IV earlier. I had to use the spaceship victory, although I might have won on score too. In the end, I was well ahead of everyone but Rome used spies to suck technology from me and also started to build the ship. A few well placed nukes slowed them down and ensured my victory though. /spit. Nobody beats the Russian Empire.

Dark and Light pre-orders

2005-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

Well, the guys who make Dark and Light are doing something interesting. They're making a six month prequel game to both reward the faithful who've followed the game for years, and probably act as a beta-test of the economy and advancement system. Of course, they don't call it that... but while they evolve and beta-test the code in their closed beta, they can use a stable build to "test" the development of player dynamics while calling it a prequel.

They apparently have 8881 pre-order slots (at $60USD a pop) which sold out in two days time. There are an additional 10,000 free slots that will be first-come first-serve on December 8th. That is just shy of $54,000USD... which is not very much when you think about it. When I was an overpaid dot-com employee, I made that much in a year. I'm sure the dev team pays better (being on the coast, not in the midwest), and employs more people.

That tells me that it's a legitimate offer, not a way to suck money for a game that won't ever materialize. Why? Well, if they knew they weren't going live, they'd try to get as many pre-orders as possible.

I'll just have to try and get my browser in there on the 8th to see if I can try the game.

Black Friday

2005-11-25T18:01:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again... time for the commercial Christmas engines to rev up and roll over anything and everything. The warm-up has been underway since Halloween, of course... but the day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the Super-Bowl of sales.

My friend Zar is a perfect example of this. For the last few years now, he's stood in line at Best Buy for their after-turkey turkey sale. He always has an impressive list of items he's purchased, and been happy to gloat over how much money he's saved by standing in line, waiting for the store to open on Friday. This year, he got in line around midnight. The store opens at 6AM.

I live in southwest Michigan, USA. The weather in November varies from year to year, but it's generally cold (around 25-35 degrees -- which is about -3C to 2C), and quite often has the unique phenomenon known as Lake Effect snow. This year, we got about 5 inches last night.

What comes to mind each year, for me, is just what would *I* be willing to stand outdoors, in freezing weather, for six hours, to get? There are a small number of things that come to mind. A million dollars would work. This year, I think a good secure job that I could expect to keep for ten years... that would be worth it. A blowjob? No, I wouldn't be able to feel it anyways. Perhaps an entire weekend of sexual antics would be enough, although with my luck I'd end up with a flu and have to postpone it a month.

Seriously though, down to brass tacks. At a normal job in my field (assuming I could get one), I'd be earning about $15/hour ($30k/year, 40 hr/week). I'd be sitting at a desk, in a warm office, with a bathroom not too far away, and a coffee maker nearby. I could leave my desk to stretch, or wander about every so often without penalty. So, six hours of work would be about $90. If you want me to endure six hours of freezing weather, no bathroom, no beverages, and not much to do but watch the cars drive by.... I'd want at least double, probably triple that much. $270. Call it $300 just to keep things simple.

So, if I had been planning to spend around $2000, going to Black Friday would probably save me around $300-$400. Unfortunately, with that whole unemployment thing... I wouldn't want to spend $200. I'm thinking the $50 I probably would spend would only get me about $15 off... I'd stand in line for 20 minutes then.

But hey, that's me. Other people enjoy the thrill of the hunt. So, game on folks!

Harry Potter and the Jingle of Coinage

2005-11-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

So, Miss Billionare Rowling got another $6 from me yesterday, and I don't begrudger her a bit. The Goblet of Fire was a very long book, and they had to leave out quite a bit to make a movie that wouldn't require an intermission. Still, 157 minutes was enough to present an action-packed movie that kept your interest and made you wish you hadn't gotten the large soda.

I was surprised that the movie didn't feel all that "dark" to me though. I mean, pretty much every reviewer was muttering about how scary a movie it was, and how you'd not want to take your kids to see it. I found a great deal of humor, and only a small amount of scary stuff. I did wish Emma Watson had gotten a little more screen time.... her character was much more important in the book, and it's a shame they couldn't find a few more moments for her to shine.

While it's going to be almost impossible for ANY of the Harry Potter movies to come close to the amazing presentation of the first one, none of them have been bad movies... and I'd have to say this is one of the few sequal franchises that has held up beyond the first few installments.

Go see it, you'll be happy you spend a couple hours watching it instead of just killing more critters in WoW.

City of Mall Cops

2005-11-17T12:13:00.000-05:00

I'm annoyed.

Not just with one particular game, but with most of the MMO games out there. I'm not annoyed at the constant downward spiral of your character's effectiveness that happens as the devs pile up more and more nerfs to slow the advancement rate of their player base. I'm not annoyed at the inevitable bugs that cause things to not work right, or let other people leapfrog ahead of you because they find (and abuse) and exploit before you ever hear of it. I'm not even annoyed at the hours of grinding that every one of these games requires to become something more than a Level 1 Toilet Scrubber.

I'm annoyed at the forced grouping mindset.

I'm not a hardcore anti-social bigot who'd rather cut off me own hand than deign to group with people kind of player... but neither am I the log in and look for a group after 5 seconds kind. I group with friends (if they're on when I am), and I sometimes feel like grouping just to be different.

I RESENT the game designers who promise that their game will be playable solo, and then proceed to adjust the level of everything to assume you're in a group. Oh yes, you *might* be able to solo things in City of Heroes/Villians... if you're willing to leave your mission difficulty set at the easiest level, and thus spend weeks grinding through things.

I wouldn't be so upset if it had always been like this. But when I started playing CoH, you really could solo. Yes, people who grouped would level quicker than you did... but you never hit the brick wall of needing a group to get through a few missions. Each set of patches has made it progressivly harder to solo, to the point that once you find that particular kind of foe that slaughters you with ease... you have to group, or avoid any content that might include those mobs. Ever.

At least Blizzard came out and said, right at the start, that if you wanted to do the higher end dungones, you'd need to group. They didn't mention that to PvP effectively, you'd also have to group, since you can't get the high-end gear any other way... but that's ok. You could always join a PvE server and avoid that too.

It just feels like those old "role playing" games where you died, over and over and over, until you found the one right word, or the right object to give the NPC, and then it'd let you pass as if you were best buddies. I don't mind being overpowered, but I hate the feeling that if I had just chosen one power differently, or carried the right item, I would have won easily.

*sigh*

Snow!

2005-11-17T09:20:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like the weather droid lied again. It was supposed to snow briefly yesterday, and then get colder today but be clear with no chance of precipitation. No chance, mind you.

Come here... look out the window... see that? That looks like more than a slight chance of snow to me. I'd have to say that it looks a bit more like a bunch of snow sitting on the ground, than clear skies and sunshine. Of course, I'm not an expert on these things.

That's what it looks like out the screen door on the side of my house. You can see the amount of snow on the edge of the fence, and my car.

My cat is not overly thrilled with this development either.

Well, at least I did get some of the garage itself cleaned out and rearranged. There's still more to do, and Kim's truck needs to be relocated... but I don't think much is gonna get done today.

Today seems like a good day to play Civ 4, poke at my java code a little, and perhaps see if the fireplace still works.

/me shuts the door and wanders back inside with a pair of slippers.

Garage Day

2005-11-16T07:20:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again.

Time to put on the warm clothing and wander out into the big meat-space and try to clean out the garage so I can park my car in it this winter. Last winter, we had a houseguest's possessions taking up the space my car would normally have occupied, and so some disorganization still remains to be cleaned up.

I hate cleaning... in fact, I'm not overly fond of most aspects of meat-space, but some things just have be done. I'm hoping for a call about a job today, so I'll probably use that as an excuse to avoid venturing out -- at least until it warms up a little bit more.

If that stupid lottery would cooperate, I could avoid all this unpleasantness. A small win of a few million dollars would let me avoid cleaning AND jobs, as long as I invested it wisely. With no house payments, I could live off as little as 10K USD a year, and I'm sure I could get 5% interest on a million dollars without too much hassle.

Oh well... I'm sure some employed person in California won it, and so my garage will have to be cleaned by me, personally.

[edit]
10:00AM -- It's SNOWING!
[edit]
12:32PM -- It's DAMN COLD out there!
[edit]
Just a note to the spammers.... piss off, eh?

Dark and Light

2005-11-15T09:38:00.000-05:00

A few of you might have heard about this game. It's been in the works now for... five years? Not sure, but I know it was supposed to be out last year, and was at E3 back in 2003, and is still stuck in beta testing. In any case, they have a new tactic.

They're releasing a prequel, supposedly this month (which gives them 15 more days). It will use the same game engine the "real" game does, but be free to play for six months. In April, the real "Dark and Light" is supposed to go live, set 1,000 years after this prequel game.

It's an interesting game, looks like a Shadowbane style with more of an original (pre-SOE) Everquest feel and a very in-depth crafting system. I really wonder about the six month trial though.

If you got to play a game for six months, and were then asked to pay to play the sequal... would you? There have only been a couple of MMO's that have held my interest for more than six months, ever... so I have my doubts.

Still... check out their website and decide for yourself.

No, no... over there!

2005-11-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

For now, I'm redirecting the top level page of my own web site to this wonderful blog of joy.

Why? Well... I'm lazy. My homepage is in pretty sad shape, and has been for some time. I've had ideas on how to rewrite it a few times, but each time I did a little work on it and then decided killing elves, or blowing up spaceships, or conquering the world was more interesting.

So, until I get ambitious and find a way to make it work the way I want it to work, I figure it may as well point to something other than Amy the cat.

HTML sucks

2005-11-13T10:07:00.000-05:00

I hate HTML. Once upon a time, HTML was a way to format page content, so it would be readable and have the same general formatting on any kind of output device. You could read an HTML man page on your snazzy Sun 3/60 running sunview and using Mosaic, or sitting on your VT220 terminal using lynx. Simple.

Then the internet went commercial in 1992. Netscape and Microsoft began beating their chests over whose browser did more. Advertisers appeared. Pointy haired bosses knew they wanted to be on that interweb thing, and who cared how readable things were, those buttons needed to be blue!

Now, I want something simple. I want a nav bar on the left, and content on the right. I want them both to fill the page, and if I put too much crap in the nav bar, I want it to scroll. To be even pickier, I want a graphic at the top of the nav bar that doesn't scroll, but sits up at the top left and stares at you. I don't want to use FRAMES!

Is that so hard? Apparently so. Lots of things that work in one browser, or one version of another browser... nothing so far that works correctly everywhere.

I hate HTML.

WoW

2005-11-13T06:23:00.000-05:00

Just so you didn't think I was biased towards a single game, I also picked up a game time card for my World of Warcraft subscription yesterday. I haven't quite decided when to plug it in though. For those who don't know, game time cards are used with online games as an alternative to using a credit card for monthly billing. They were originally developed for young kids who could buy the game (Everquest probably), but didn't have a credit card and couldn't convince the parents to let them use theirs. I've discovered they're a great way to avoid paying for games you don't play anymore though. With a recurring bill, you get tagged $15 each month for your game subscription, regardless of your usage. The rub comes when you have almost stopped playing the game, but haven't remembered (or are too lazy/reluctant) to cancel your subscription. Using game cards, you buy two months at a time, and then it stops unless you plug in another one.

World of Warcraft is a fun game, but I got tired of it a few months ago. On PvP servers, it's all about ganking or playing in a group to avoid being ganked. As a level 47 warrior who got 99% of those 47 levels solo, I was starting to be the target of roaming gank squads, and I didn't care to be forced to run instances with others. So I moved on. Now, with a new expansion coming, I feel like being around for that, at least for a month or two. Buying a game card now means I can have a two month fix of the game whenever I feel like it, which might be today, or might not be until the expansion actually gets released.

EVE Online

2005-11-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

Just a note to those who are looking for a good MMORPG to try. EVE Online has been around since 2003, and I'm ashamed to admit that I wasn't impressed enough with the beta to jump in back then. Things have changed.

EVE isn't for everyone. It's got a very STEEP learning curve, and it's not a twitch-fest like most MMO's are. Instead, there are skills to learn, an extremely complex economy to wander through, and total freedom of action. It's probably a polar opposite to games like World of Warcraft, which tend to hold your hand and lead you from one quest to the next, enforcing the idea of Alliance vs. Horde by disallowing communication or trading between the two sides. In EVE, you can stick to pure research and never leave space dock, you can mine ore for a living, you can buy low and sell high by shipping goods across the galaxy, and you can fight -- mobs or other players, as a good guy or a pirate, alone or in a corporation. No handholding, and not much guidance.

Still, I like it. It lets me play at my own pace, and even though I'm 2 and a half years behind the people who started at the beginning, I don't feel hopelessly behind. Even knowing I'm a total n00b, I feel like I can accomplish something. That's a nice change.

Words...

2005-11-11T23:07:00.000-05:00

A blog. Yippie.

Well, I'm hoping this will both give me a place to rant and plan my domination of the world, and be a way to force myself to write *something* every so often.

We'll see...