Just one little problem
Aug 20, 2008 | Filed under Misc., Rants
The search for an excellent hotel room is a hard one for the weary road-warrior. I thought I had found one, too. Clean, modern, well decorated. None of that cheesy grandma furniture. 32″ LCD HDTV…although everything is stretch-o-vision, I can tolerate that…for one night, anyway. Large work desk, comfy chair…twenty foot ceiling for crying out loud! Stone tile in the bathroom…marble counter-top…king size pillow-top bed. Most importantly, it’s within my company-mandated budget!
There’s just one teeny, tiny problem.
An internet connection that feels like dial-up. It’s painful. I can’t even watch this week’s Zero Punctuation. My phone’s EDGE connection is faster than this, and I’d be using it right now if 1) I was in an EDGE service area, and 2) I had remembered to bring a USB cable, or at least my phone’s wall charger. Makes me wonder…if given a choice of where to stay for one night, would it be the gorgeous decked-out three star hotel (seriously…company budget, people) with a rickety telegraph machine for an internet connection; or a musty, worn-out husk of a burnout motel with a 20mbps fiber line? It’s a tough question, isn’t it?
The New Hotness
Aug 16, 2008 | Filed under Misc.
After much labor and love, the new site design is live. The old theme I was using was nice, but the css was a rats nest of code and it didn’t always display properly in every browser. This theme is my own heavily modified version of a theme from the wonderful folks at ThemeLab (home of some very slick themes, you should check them out). In addition to being hella cool looking, the website now supports Gravatars for comments, and social bookmarking links at the bottom of every post, including a handy “email” and “print” button. As it turns out, the theme still doesn’t render quite correctly in IE 7, but the accidental result is actually kinda cool, so I’m not worried about it. If anyone sees any other glitches or strangeness that I should know about, please let me know in the comments below.
Braid: Over-Blown
Aug 14, 2008 | Filed under Games
Over the past two weeks, the gaming press has assaulted me with stories about a downloadable Xbox Live game called Braid. Joystiq and Penny Arcade in particular have been blaring the “OMG BEST GAME EVAR!!1!” trumpets (to paraphrase), but apparently they aren’t alone. The game is a Super Mario Brothers-styled platformer with time-controlling elements similar to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, with a unique narrative and hand-painted backdrops and design that’s unlike anything that I’ve ever seen in a game before. Despite the originality of the game, I just don’t get the hype.
Portal this ain't.
Part of the problem is that I’m sick of hearing about the game’s designer, Jonathan Blow. There are very few rock stars in the video game development community because of the massive amount of work that gets put into most games. The few designers who actually become household names — video game-playing households, anyway — earned their prestige through innovation or a singular creative vision that they imprint on all their games. Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, Tim Schafer, that Metal Gear Solid guy — those guys are “names” because they each put a unique stamp on their creations (question: if those guys are “rock stars”, does that make John Romero the “Brett Michaels” of video games?).
From the beginning, any mention of Braid in the gaming press was “Jonathan Blow’s Braid,” which confuses me since this is his first game, and I’d never heard of him before. Since he doesn’t have a studio (like, say, Tim Schafer’s Doublefine), this sort of makes sense, but he gets a lot of press. He may be exceptionally good at self-promotion (he apparently has a habit of turning up in forums where his game is discussed), or it may be that the game press is giving him an extra push because he used to be one of their own, according to Wikipedia.
The other, much more important problem I have with the Braid hype, is that the game isn’t fun.
What do you mean? A politician LIED?!?
Aug 11, 2008 | Filed under Misc., Rants
Despite my general policy of steering clear of politics on this site, I think it’s pretty safe to say that John Edwards’ political career is pretty much finished. In case you live under a rock, or haven’t taken your eyes away from 14 year-old Chinese gymnasts pretending to be 16, former senator Edwards ‘fessed-up to having an affair with a campaign staffer who apparently gets around. A lot. While cheating on your cancer-ridden wife falls somewhere between “intentionally making babies cry” and “kitten-rape” on the Miserable Bastard Scale, it’s not my place to judge. After all, it’s a private matter, and I actually feel bad for his family having to re-open old wounds in public. That is not my concern.
Cheating on your wife doesn't count if you're in a different area code or she has incurable cancer. I'm sorry, what? Neither of those are true? Oh...shit.
My concern is the public’s reaction to this news. Why are people “shocked” and “angered” when they find out that someone lied about having an affair? He wasn’t cheating on you. He’s not even in office anymore, and unless you live in North Carolina, he never even represented you. Why do you care? Someone you don’t know and have nothing to do with cheated on his wife, whom you also don’t know. And when someone asked him about it, he lied. What do you expect him to do?
It was the same thing with Bill Clinton, back in the day. If you were married and someone asked you if you got a mouth hug from a chub scout while you were at work, you would say no! That’s the sort of thing you would expect people to lie about if asked. Especially if you were in front of a group of reporters. And especially if your wife would find out. That’s generally not the sort of information that people go around volunteering. Not only for his sake, but his wife and family, too. Why would anyone expect him to do otherwise?
“But,” you say, my argumentative straw friend, “his hypocrisy and deception speak ill of his character! He has betrayed us!” Again, he didn’t buy you a ring and make you a promise, so stop taking this personally. This is his mess and his family has to deal with it, and you should have a little compassion for these people. Secondly, character in public office is overrated. Public officeholders are basically hired to do a job by the people. Let’s say you ran an accounting firm, and one of your star accountants, I dunno, trolled for man sex in airport bathrooms. As long as what he was doing was legal, didn’t affect his work, and didn’t hurt anybody, you wouldn’t care. You wouldn’t know, either, and there are policies and laws in place that keep you from even asking about it. So why do we treat politicians any differently?
Here’s another example: Richard Nixon was so evil, he probably should have just grown one of those old-timey villain moustaches and tied women to train tracks, cackling gleefully until those pesky Woodward and Bernstein kids foiled him again. But the Olympics in China this week are a direct result of his opening trade with them — without his presidency, we might even be involved in a second Cold War. So when an election comes to a choice between a morally-upstanding moron and a highly-qualified kitten-rapist…I’m thinking those kittens may have had it coming.
Thoughts on big breasted women with swords and the importance of data backups
Jul 30, 2008 | Filed under Gadgets, Games, Misc.
Warning: incomprehensible nerdish ahead. Translation follows after the next two paragraphs.
This seems an impractical choice of attire for a swordfight.
While browsing Digg just the other day, my monitor started to display all sorts of strange artifacts. Being the sensible, computer-literate type, I decided to reboot to attempt to fix the problem. Not only was I greeted with more strange dots and artifacts upon boot (never a good sign), Windows failed to boot and mumbled something about video driver issues and memory dump while exposing me to a bright blue screen. The next time I powered the computer on, every bit of text on both the video card boot sequence and the POST were garbled. Yes, my Leadtek GeForce 6800, which has served me so well over the last five years, finally crapped-out.
Since my board is an AGP board and I can’t afford to build an entirely new rig right now, pickins were slim, as most card manufacturers have abandoned the AGP format for the newer and more efficient PCI-e platform. Being an nVidia guy for I can’t remember how long (and a 3Dfx guy before that), I was quite suprised to find that there are ATI DirectX 10 cards for AGP bus systems! After some poking around, I settled on an ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 512 MB video ram (double what my old card had) made by Visiontek. This will hopefully breathe new life into my poor aging rig, and since it has HDCP copy-protection and HDMI compatibility, this means that I can convert that computer into an HTPC when I’m ready to upgrade! The card should arrive before the end of the week, but in the meantime, my primary computer is down and with it, all of my important information. This is why Windows Home Server seems like such a good idea…you know, if you forget about it eating your files.
If you didn’t understand a single word of the previous paragraphs, remember, you were warned. Here’s a brief translation for people who aren’t necessarily computer-literate — this is best read aloud as Garrett Morris yelling for the hearing-impaired on Weekend Update: MY COMPUTER WAS BROKEN. I NEEDED A NEW PART. I THOUGHT I WOULD HAVE TROUBLE FINDING A PART SINCE MY COMPUTER IS OLDER, BUT I FOUND A BETTER PART TO REPLACE THE BROKEN PART. THIS MAKES ME HAPPY.
Whilst I wait for my new video card to arrive, I’ve acquired Soul Calibur IV for the 360. It’s great so far, save for the difficulty in finding online matches. Instead of a Dead or Alive-style Virtual Arcade, you’re just matched up with one person at a time. The in-game match browser makes this harder than it should be, since people get matched-up quickly, but the match browser doesn’t refresh fast enough. Still, the fighting mechanics are great, and it’s really fun so far. Also, boobs.
The Geek Trifecta
Jul 25, 2008 | Filed under Movies, TV
Caution: nerdiness levels approaching critical
A recent trip to Blockbuster resulted in my obtaining the above pictured DVDs: Serenity, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score, and Battlestar Galactica: Razor. If there were a Geiger-counter-like device that could detect levels of geektitude, the table where I took this photo would break the needle.
I’ve actually seen Serenity a few times before — even more than once when it was in theaters. I am quite sad to admit, however, that I hadn’t seen Firefly, the TV show upon which it was based, at the time. When the show originally aired on Fox, the previews made it look interesting, but they kept advertising it as “From the creator of Buffy and Angel,” and since Vampires were never really my thing, that wasn’t exactly a selling point. I’m just making excuses now, probably out of nerd shame. Firefly is assuredly one of the best pieces of fiction ever created for TV, and I’m sad that it took me so long to figure that out. My Darling and I recently finished watching Universal HD’s run of the show, the first time either of us had been able to watch the whole series in order and in its entirety. Serenity is a perfect coda to the closing of the series. so the timing was right to watch it again. Since you’re on the internet, chances are high that you already own the box set on DVD and are eagerly anticipating the re-release to Blu-Ray. If you haven’t seen either the show or the movie yet, though, rent/buy/queue-up Firefly first. The movie was made to stand on its own, but it’s a much richer experience to watch the show first. Meantime: lesson learned — I will most definitely be watching Dollhouse this fall.
Stable release my ass
Jul 23, 2008 | Filed under Misc.
Just upgraded to WordPress 2.6, only to find out that it killed my permalinks. If you’re having problems reading any of the posts here, that’s why. I’m working to get it fixed, although I may be at the mercy of the next WP release. Ugh.