1. Steam offers me many, many deals, especially on older but still relevant games.
2. Steam offers large packs of games at discounted prices.

I began using steam back in 2004 when they were throwing around Half-Life 2 with every video card, but before it came out you could play the older games. And a $10 upgrade got me Day of Defeat: Source and I could keep the back catalog. $10 for Half-Life and all associated mods PLUS a new game that I was waiting for? Sign me up.

From there I bought a few more retail games, some were older collector’s editions on the cheap, that could be activated in steam. Almost every game since then has been a game on sale in one way or another. The last time I bought a game in a store was last January for Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout 3 Collector’s Edition and a few others. And then Bioshock went on sale on steam the next week for $5… d’oh!

Last week steam had some very nice sales (25-90% off various games) and I ended up with 7 games for just under $50. Even if a store was having the same sales I would have had to go to the store 5 days in a row to see them. That is never going to happen.

So I love steam, and pretty much everything comes out on it anyway. Except for collector’s editions that’s where I am buying all my games for the next LONG while.

Why does this matter? Well if you don’t want to run automatic updates you can make a note of the second Tuesday of every and just run Windows Update then instead of always having a background process.

Looks wonderful, I can’t wait until this comes out. Finally an MMO where taking on more than one NPC is normal and won’t get your ass handed to you.

ARG *HEADDESK*

It’s just as humourous as when I was a kid except now you know if someone was being a jerk and randomly changing things. And then you report them and they get banned. Oh, and you can play like 15 games at a time. Definitely going to keep playing around with it until I get bored.

I also brought my server into my room and have started using it for TV and such. I realized that it was being used almost exclusively for storage and since it had a lot more power than that I wanted to use it for something else. That combined with my problem with a few games not liking dual-monitors made me recommission it as a Debian box which is sitting in my room now. Whenever I’m playing games or other things on my desktop I use that box for TV. Apart from that it still serves the exact same purpose as before, but it’s also easier to maintain with Debian.

But because I only had one cable coming into my room my desktop had get connectivity through my server. This was a real pain in the ass because it meant that nothing on the rest of the network (wireless, which means my laptop) could connect to my desktop anymore and I had to move everything through the server if I needed it. I also needed to have the server on if I wanted a connection on my desktop. This really wasn’t working for me so I dropped some cash earlier this week for a nice gigabit 8 port switch, couple of cat6 and I hooked everything up faster than before.

I hit 75 last Sunday night and that felt good because now I finally have the shadowpriest ability that allows me to do massive AoE damage while still in shadowform. Since 65 I’ve increased my haste and SP considerably but I’ve dropped about 10% in crit chance. Now I get more consistent damage which is nice. Here is my Apocryphai’s stats if you want to check them out, I’m a Blood Elf Shadowpriest on Mug’Thol.

The game feels like a repition of the same sorts of quests for the most part, they’ve thrown a few cool ones in there but everything else I could mindlessly solo. It does feel like I’m making progress though, so I’m happy with that. I keep reminding myself that the real content begins at 80 and I’ll just have to hold out til then. For a game that I’ve already put $120 and almost 200 hours into it had better pay out!

Apart from that I’ve been trying to start FEAR2 but I keep getting sidetracked by WoW or by generally being busy. I’m about 2 hours into it but I’m not feeling the pull that I had with the original FEAR. I’m still going to finish it but there are a few things about it that I don’t quite like but can’t pinpoint yet.

And I’ve been reading. Or attempting to read. Between all that WoW and the other things I’ve been up to I have barely had a chance to start my books. Currently on my to do list is: Diablo: The Sin War trilogy, Ender’s Game, V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Diablo is just some trash fantasy that was supposed to get me back into reading when I picked out a few other books but it’s just been piling up while I try to get to 80. Once I get there I’ll be able to give it more time and burn through them in a few days so I can hit the real books.

So what do I do in a normal day now that orientation is over?

Usually I get a bunch of emails telling me to moves files from one place to another. Renew a few domain names once a week. Renew some SSL certificates as well.

And when there is nothing like that to do? I get to mess around with ASP.NET and try and make a nice WAN map for our company network. With the power of SQL and a whole lot of googling I’ve gotten decently far. I still wouldn’t say that I know much about it but it’s better than just sitting on IRC all day. Which I might be doing anyway…

Oh, and it’s an all Windows environment which makes me a little bit frustrated at times. It’s nice in relation to how things work very nicely across the network when they work. It’s not so nice when things don’t work and you have no idea what is going wrong.

It was strange though, the clerk thought it was a gift for someone else (I bought it on the 23rd of December). So either I don’t look like the kind of guy who would buy WoW or I look like the kind of guy who already has WoW.

And so I’ve been playing with a friend for the past few weeks, on and off, mostly off so far. Triple experience bonus is nice so I hit level 57 tonight. Only 23 more until I get to play the real game!

Apart from that I’ve played and beat Mirror’s Edge now that it finally came out for PC. 6 hours was all it took and although it was fun, not worth $50. Unless you’re going to be doing speed runs or waiting for some fantastic DLC ($10 at the end of this month) I would not buy it.

In the past two nights I’ve also gone to a bit of Counter Strike: Source to sharpen up on my headshot skills. I seem to have lost it with all of these MMORPGs and tactics based FPSs that don’t check for headshots. And if I lose my ability to shoot people in the head in games on my computer, what am I then?

See you at level 80!

Oh no I got my CD-Keys banned? Diablo 2 is the kind of game where a large number of users have, at least at one point in time, use some sort of maphack at the very least. In most games a maphack would be useless but Diablo 2 had randomly generated maps every time you join or made a new game in multiplayer. There were discernible patterns that I picked up on after playing for a long time but that is not nearly as sweet as pressing 1 on the numpad and teleporting to the next level faster than humanly possibly.

So how much did I get out of Diablo 2?

I spent $50 each for the original and expansion, and $20 the second time. So ($50+$50+$20+$20)*1.15=$160 total.

At $10 a book that would be 16 books that were each about (3500/16)~=216 hours long. I’ve never read a book that long.

The standard campaign for most non-RPGs is about 10 hours long. So with (3500/10)=350 of these games I’d be in the same place. Of course that would cost me over twice as much at $1 a game.

That’s also about ((25000/24)/30)~=4.5 months of my life. Time well spent.

Walking speed is about 5 km/h (especially for us taller people) so I could have walked (3500*5)=17500 km. That is almost half the circumference of the earth. I don’t like walking that much.

That’s lots of wasted time. And think, I’ve almost hit 3000 hours in Guild Wars.

The video card is a vast improvement on my current video card, an Asus Radeon X1950 Pro. First, it supports DirectX 10 which means I can use all sorts of cool new effect in games to make it look just a tiny bit more realistic. Secondly, there have been great architecture improvements in the past 3 generations of video cards. The main one I can think of is the change from separate vertex/pixel shaders to one unified shader model. The X1950 had 36 pixel pipes and 8 vertex shaders which means at best it can use 44. The 4850 has 800 which it can split any way it needs to.

There are some problems attached to the 4850 though. With the stock cooling they have reached temperatures of over 90 degrees Celsius. While this is very hot, and the card is meant to handle it, I opted for HIS’s revision with their ICEQ4 cooler which is a dual slot cooler. This means the heat is moved entirely outside of my case and it’s a much larger fan. The extra overclocking freedom might come in handy and it will probably preserve the life of my card.

After I bought those I started looking at monitors a few days later. I wasn’t going to buy one at first but at just over $400 for a 24″ monitor with what I wanted, great dark levels and 1920×1200, I couldn’t not buy the V2400W. I was going to go for widescreen with my current monitor but at the time I didn’t want to lose backwards compatibility with some older games. Now that I’ve gone for 64bit Vista, a DX10 video card and 4GB of RAM (impossible for 32bit normally) I think widescreen will be the least of my worries. Besides, it handles 1:1 pixel mapping of standard resolutions anyway.

So with the new hardware on its way you can expect that I will be much more productive and be able to use my time much better.

Yeah right, time to replay some games with higher resolution and better textures and effects!

Other good bookmarklets I’ve come across are:

• BugMeNot for getting past registration quickly on large sites.
• is.gd for making urls smaller, similar to tinyurl except an even smaller url.
• You can also download videos from youtube and other places with this link (not a bookmarklet)

for x in $(ls -1 .); do
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/;
cp -r temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;

Which did the job but was horribly messing on doing it more than once with tons of errors and stuff.

When I came home I decided to make it much better. I even included how long it takes to do the whole process, which was harder than the process itself.

So right now it looks like:

before=$(date +%s);
mkdir temp/;#tempdir
for x in $(ls -1 ./*.iso); do
echo Currently unpacking $x | sed -e ‘s/.\///; s/.iso//’; #remove extra output
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/; #mounts iso
cp -ru temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;
rmdir temp/; #cleanup
after=$(date +%s);
elapsed=$(expr $after – $before); #time calculations
((hour=$elapsed/60/60));
((min=$elapsed/60-hour*60));
((sec=$elapsed-hour*60*60-$min*60));
echo “Elapsed time: “`printf “%02d” $hour`”:”`printf “%02d” $min`”:”`printf “%02d” $sec`;

Which does everything I want it too, even the pain in the ass zero-padding of the times. Remember to chmod +x <filename> if you want to use it .

Edit: Well, I messed up a few things, I only tested in under one minute times and the shell on that server only contains sh and ash. Here is the revised edition:

#! /bin/sh
before=$(date +%s);
mkdir temp/;#tempdir
for x in $(ls -1 ./*.iso); do
echo Currently unpacking $x | sed -e ‘s/.\///; s/.iso//’; #remove extra output
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/; #mounts iso
cp -ru temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;
rmdir temp/; #cleanup
after=$(date +%s);
elapsed=$(expr $after – $before); #time calculations
hour=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘/’ ’60′ ‘/’ ’60′)”
min=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘/’ ’60′ ‘-’ ‘$hour’ ‘*’ ’60′)”
sec=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘-’ ‘$hour’ ‘*’ ’60′ ‘*’ ’60′ ‘-’ ‘$min’ ‘*’ ’60′)”
echo “Elapsed time: “`printf “%02d” $hour`”:”`printf “%02d” $min`”:”`printf “%02d” $sec`;

And now I know that sh is *really* annoying to do math in.

It was just after 10 when class finished and I headed back to the Mac labs. All the guys were still there but some girl had taken the seat where I was 3 hours earlier so I sat a bit farther down. She looked rather tall, she had nice full brown hair slowing over her shoulders and was obviously doing the same math assignment as we were.

After about 20 minutes she asked us for some help. She needed to transfer some files from her laptop to a computer in the lab so she could print it. She tried emailing it to herself but I had a better solution. I had a solution that was so simple most people would never think of it.

I gave her buttsex.

I didn’t even think about what I was doing while I was doing it. Most people could never accept a solution like that but she took it.  She took it with pride. Afterward she sat down at her computer for a bit then left the room.

She was obviously still thinking of buttsex. It’s like she took it with her when she left the room. All the guys laughed about it. They couldn’t believe that I had just given her buttsex right then and there. Shortly after she reentered and printed off her lab. She came back after that and did something that everyone had expected.

She gave me buttsex right back. And thanked me while doing it!

She left without another word. I barely saw her face. She barely spoke. I will probably never see her again. I don’t even know her name. But that is the most memorable moment in the labs I’ve ever had.

Buttsex is the name of my USB flash drive.

Seven years old and it was still kicking til the end. As much as a 2Ghz, gig of RAM, 128mb video card might seem nice, that old mac was perfectly fine for what it needed to do, and it ran very smoothly on linux.

I tell everyone who’s not using their computer for gaming, get the cheapest thing you can, because that’s all people have “needed” for years now. Vista does require a decent video card and probably 2 gigs of RAM and a dual core processor to run with all the features turned up but then again, no one needs Vista either. Windows 2000 is FINE for your business and XP is all your home users needs.

The unexpected death has left me without a mobile computer though, which means back to pen and paper for my notes. That’s not so much fun but I barely take notes anyway.

So if anyone has a 4 year old laptop, I’d gladly take it off of your hands.

It was the morning of the… 14th? of January. And like an idiot I stayed up late the night before AGAIN. I guess I’ll never learn. Woke up around 8:20, grabbed a bottle of coke on the way over to wake me up, and I started writing the easiest final I’ve had yet.

Not that the final itself was easy so much as I have no trouble at all with Comp sci. I barely studied at all. It was more of a quick few minutes before I went to bed. I had about half an hour to spare which I spent looking at the art in the room. It was a conference room in one of the newer buildings in the school and I bet no one else had looked at that art as long as I had.

So I waited and waited, and a few weeks later I found my final mark in CS was a 70. Which is roughly what I was told the average would be before going in. Which means I probably got higher than that and they had to round down. Good. Crisis averted.

Except there is something different about my mac. It can’t watch those videos. It’s too damned slow. It’s a 7 year old ibook running a G3. It can’t watch youtube video. It has troubles with word processing at times. Which is why I’m only using TextEdit.

Single core, PowerPC, 500MHz. 320MB of RAM, 10 gig hard drive running 10.3. Slowly. At best. But it runs. And it was cheap. And it’s a laptop.

In CS 136 today the prof was looking for someone with a PPC mac and I was the only person to have one. At all. And I know like 4 people with macs myself.

It takes over a minute, and it has been timed, to load the app we do our programming in. That’s quite the commitment just to try out a simple line of code. The temptation would be to keep it running at all times but if I keep it open all the time everything else will be even slower. Even the app to see how much memory and CPU I’m using takes more CPU time than it’s worth. 20-40% just monitoring itself.

At least I won’t get viruses right? right? Well since after typing in some programs and looking at the screen I can see the rest of my sentence come out well after I’m finished I’m tempted to say it has infected itself.

And it does crash, no matter what the commercials tell you. Programs randomly crash, the OS itself has frozen on me several times saying “an error has occurred, please restart your computer to fix it.” Better or worse than a BSOD? I like to be able to debug my problems.

I think I’ll stop the mac rant right there. It’s pretty but it doesn’t live up to the ‘perfect’ machine that everyone expects. Maybe better than windows, but not perfect.

I wrote this on my mac.