Thursday, January 31, 2008
1,500 inmates practice "Thriller"
Inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) in the Philippines. Wikipedia has some background information on the video.
Command & Conquer 3
I have had an obsession with a very special genre of video games that I like to call the "blow shit up" sub-genre. These are games that involve a certain degree of, how can I put this? Yeah, blow shit up. While tank and jet simulators are awesome, you only get to control one unit at a time. Real Time Strategy games, on the other hand, give you a commander's view and allow you to control the whole battlefield.
The earliest I can remember was probably Harpoon, which is still to date one of the hardest games I have ever played and I am happy to learn that it is still being produced.
Another gem of the genre is a trilogy of called "V is for Victory", sadly their publishers went bankrupt over a decade ago. These games were simulations of the later allied campaigns during WWII in the European theater. They were rough in terms of graphics, but the game play was engrossing.
Except for these and Mech Assault for the original Xbox, all of my favorites are in the Command & Conquer / Red Alert series. By the way, the only real difference between these two series is that the Command & Conquer universe involves the Global Defense Initiative, called GDI, against a terrorist organization called the Brotherhood of NOD.
The Red Alert universe uses alternate history to visualize a world in which Albert Einstein travels back in time and murders Hitler while he was still young. The problem was that without Hitler, the Soviets were able to invade Europe in he 1950s.
There is a second difference between the series: in the Command & Conquer universe there is a mineral called Tiberium which more or less takes a center place in the plot. It is he main mineral that is mined for resources in the game.
Why do I like those games? Easy: because it is fun as hell. The game play has barely changed since these two series started. Every couple of years we get better graphics and crazier units, plus the weapons of mass destruction get even crazier.
Now, here's the big change: this is the first time I have played this kind of game in a console instead of a Windows or Mac PC. All this means is that the game is a little bit of a pain in the ass to get used to. Once you go over that learning curve issue, and the game is basically identical to previous editions, only prettier. They also tampered with the power balance, some of the small units are just too god damn powerful.
Overall it is a good game, but I am stuck in one of the single user campaign levels. It is not the end of the world, since I prefer to play skirmish mode.
If you like the genre, and you have the $40, then it is not a bad purchase. Otherwise you can keep playing Command & Conquer Generals, which is not that different (and you can build multiple ion cannons, instead of being limited to one).
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Lost Season Premiere tomorrow
For those three of you that still hold hope that Lost will shed off the suck, the show is back for a new season starting tomorrow (1/31) at 8/7c. In the not-so-remote possibility that your mind is playing tricks on you and you have stared forgetting about the suck, you can refresh your memory, legally and for free, at ABC's HD streaming site. It even works on OS X.
Best Nagware Screen Evahr
Nagware is software that you can download and use until it is time to pay for it. While most shareware will kill the application after the trial period is over, nagware will show you messages begging you to register the application. I give you CSSEdit:
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Schadenfreude
From Wikipedia:
"[Schadenfreude] is a German word meaning 'pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune'. It has been borrowed by the English language[1] and is sometimes also used as a loanword by other languages."
The perfect example is these people cheering as a meter maid tickets a Bugatti Veyron because it is parked illegally:
Sunday, January 27, 2008
A spy satellite is plummeting down to earth, we are all doomed
I am a former military satellite communications controller. Satellites usually have two controllers:
1. one controls the bird itself, that is, where it goes to, etc. plus whatever on-board systems are needed to make this happen.
2. another one controls what goes through it, this is usually called the payload. The payload could be communications, cameras, etc.
God know how it is done now, but for bulk communications satellites the US Air Force had control of the bird itself, and the US Army controlled the payload. It gave me an interesting front row seat to see some interesting things about satellites that most people usually don't give a crap about. For example, even at 22,300 miles away, geosynchronous satellites move a little bit and trace a figure "8." Or that at certain times of the year the sun would be in a spot where its radiation would challenge the radiation emitted by the satellite.
Another cool thing we learned is that those satellites use small rockets to maneuver in space, and that here is a finite amount of fuel for these rockets. Run out of fuel? The satellite may eventually fall off the sky. Low orbit satellites will probably drop a hell of a lot faster. If the spacecraft loses electrical power it turns into a brick.
Sometime over the weekend we were told that a US spy satellite is bricked and is expected to drop. The problem? There is no way to know where it is going to crash.
My first reaction was that we would replay the Skylab panic. Then I started noticing something funny in the news:
As it got reported, the news got more and more pessimistic. Here's a small sample of the headlines:
Bad Movie Weekend: Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming
There are bad movies and there are bad movies. The true bad american movie is an art form and the entertainment choice of millions. It's what we call the "B" movie.
Then you have movies that are so bad that are shit. Like Stir of Echoes 2.
What makes this the most frustrating is that I watched both movies back to back, just to make sure that I did not miss plot points. That was a waste of time because the second movie has absolutely not a god damn thing with the first movie. Nothing.
Another frustrating thing is that the cast was just plain vanilla, there was nothing wrong with them and they should have been able to pull it off. So who to blame?
My theory is that the writer had ADHD and somewhere between his third and sixth hits of meth decided that he was writing a sequel to Jacob's Ladder instead of Stir of Echoes.
I am no even ready to blame the director, I think it was simply a really shitty script.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Worn out "A" and "S"
Further proof of the volatile way in which conversations change subject in #asp (Undernet):
3:19 PM VP|MBP interesting how worn out are my "A" and "S" keys
3:19 PM VP|MBP it's not like I write "ass" nonstop 24 x 7
3:19 PM unEZ holy shit so are mine
And here's the photographic proof:
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Annoyed
Little by little I am getting frustrated by Wordpress. There is no doubt that overall it is one hell of a system, but those little things are the ones that eventually drive one up a god damn wall.
The newest offense: it is very hard to embed things like flash movies without having WP automatically rewrite the HTML, which usually ends breaking the theme. It is lame to have to post a Youtube video as a URL because WP won't leave the damn embed code alone.
I am writing this from Ecto, a program that I used for many years without issues. Suddenly after WP 2.0.x came out, Ecto stopped working. Not cool.
Another source of irritation is that it is still a pain in the ass to update WP. Because every person runs it different, it is almost impossible to put together a safe update utility. Notice I say safe, not simple.
Here's how you update Wordpress:
1. Backup the database, in my case I have a wizard available through cpanel.
2. Backup the plugins folder.
3. Backup the themes folder.
4. Backup the wp configuration file.
5. Take a screen capture of the plugins menu, which is the easiest way to note which ones are enabled. Disable ALL plugins.
6. Backup .htaccess.
7. Delete EVERYTHING except the wp configuration file.
8. Download the new Wordpress release.
9. Copy your wp configuration file into the new release.
10. Copy your plugins and themes into the new release.
11. Copy everything to your web server.
12. Execute the update script.
13. Make sure you did not kill the site.
14. Enable your plugins.
Now imagine having to do this every time a new security hole is found and the WP folks fix it. It is a lot of work.
And what if you are running more than one WP blogs? You are screwed. Even if you use WP MU, you are screwed because they'll lag behind the main WP releases.
Well, what about using Wordpress.com?
I tried, but I noticed an undercurrent of smugness that reminded me of Live Journal. I don't want to be part of a community, I just want to write my blogs. It is almost the same argument of trying to pick between Flickr and Picasa. Flickr is obviously an online community, while Picasa is a photo dump. If you want to upload people and brag about them, compare them to others in the same subject, etc. then Flickr is for you. If all you want is to upload pictures to use them in your web site, or to share them with friends, send them to a print service, etc., then Picasa works fine.
After messing with Wordpress.com I decided I did not like having other members dictating or complaining about my content. As long as the content doesn't break US law, I should be feel to do whatever the hell I damn please within the terms of service. What these people were doing was creating artificial political systems, sort of what happens when you get a homeowners association telling you that you can't paint your fence in a specific color.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Happy Birthday to Me
Many thanks to all of my friends that sent me cards (one sent me a REAL card, first one in ages) plus the dozens of automated birthday emails from every website I have an account with.
Godwin's Law: The $70 T.O. Jersey version
Credit goes to Rambonie @ #asp for showing me this. As far as I can tell, the original movie is The Downfall.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
