First off the legs are a little short, but that was my choice with the trunks instead of the full boxer briefs. I didn’t expect it to be this short though, but it’s an easy fix.

The notable thing about Saxx is the separation between the goodies and the legs through roughly the same method as normal guy’s bathing suits (although a much softer material). That said, it still isn’t soft enough and I could feel it a bit during the day.

The waistband seems to sit a bit lower as well, almost uncomfortably so. But more importantly, the bottom of the legs are not elastic at all so there was some definite bunching and riding up during the day.

The elastic waist band holds them on, but it’s not too tight. The bottom of the legs actually seem a little too tight but I’m not sure if it’s the underwear or my thighs :( It’s a good tight though so there’s no bunching up.

It doesn’t really separate the center from the legs though, which means there’s some sticking. Chaffing is solved though because of the nature of boxer brief.

And finally that’s some damn soft material too.

So I took to researching other options and I decided on boxer briefs. It would hold my stuff in but still cover roughly the same area. But which brand? I wasn’t going to go cheap, this will probably be my underwear choice for years. But I can’t really find out without trying out. So I bought three different brands:

1. Saxx 24-Seven Trunk in Medium (32-35″)
2. Under Armour Boxerjock 6″ Boxer Briefs in Large (34-36″) (Medium is 30-32″, where’s the 33″!)
3. Lululemon Game On Boxer Brief in Medium (34″)

Over the next week or so they will be arriving and I’ll review them.

We recently redid the carpet in one of the bedrooms. The brown middle section is the old carpet and the white outsides are from extra new carpet. It was cut to three feet by one foot and there are holes about an two inches in the sides. Two rather thick pine sides bolted with a large steel rod through all of the carpet.

So far it stops arrows very nicely and it is very easy to pull arrows out of. And best of all, it won’t break up like the previous foam target.

We still have yet to figure out exactly how to put on an actual target for scoring and it needs wheels because it’s damn heavy.

The problem is exactly the same as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Here’s the ending, pick which button you want to push and we’ll roll the clip. It feels like it didn’t actually happen. There’s no actual consequences from watching a short. First thing I did after finishing DXHR was reload my save and watch the other clips. None of them feel like the ending I worked towards.

Mass Effect 2 had the same problem if it had ended then. Why do I care if the collector base is intact or destroyed when the game ends right now anyway? You only cared because there was more content in the next game . And in Mass Effect, who would care if you saved the council when it ends before that means anything.

To be fair, DXHR did it worst because it was literally pushing buttons. ME1 and ME2 at least made it conversation options. ME3 is effectively just pushing a button.

The important part: How to make it better!

Post-main quest content.

I understand this really doesn’t work with how they chose the ME3 endings, but without post-main quest content you don’t really see the aftermath of what happened.

Take the Lord of the Rings movies as an example. After the ring goes into the magma the movies don’t end. If anything the ending after that drags on a bit as they clear up all the loose ends. 9-10 hours of movie had a longer ending than the  70+ hours people put into the Mass Effect series. And for a game with so many great ending and great choices to the smaller plot lines, I expected something epic from the main plot.

Here’s someone else’s view which is a great read.

So we needed a new target. And more specifically a new design that would last more than half the summer. Something that would be able to stop high powered arrows from compound bows and fill in the holes after as to not deteriorate too quickly.

So we went with a tire with a foam front to draw on some circles for scoring. It’s also easily replaceable and won’t have chunks taken out of it like the previous foam did. (so far the holes have partially filled in given time)

Took it out for a spin and set myself up to practice. Let’s just say it didn’t go so well. Pictures will explain the aftermath, but what happened was that the arrow hit the inside edge of the tire and very rapidly changed the course of the arrow. To the point where the rest of the arrow didn’t follow exactly.

So that’s what a bent aluminum arrow looks like.

What you need is an endless supply of pillows. This also has many other uses. Examples: pillow fights, pillow forts.

And how about this. A party that is so intent on businesses proving themselves and capitalist rules yet they still want to give money to them every year. Tax breaks means giving businesses money. Spending government money on businesses. Except I thought that a business was supposed to survive if they were better than other businesses and consumers decided to spend money there, not based on government handouts. Just using the exact same political comments that conservatives use where applicable.

The idea of an out of ten scale is that 5 is the middle, which should represent average. Or at least it used to. When a book is rated 6/10 that is an above average book. But when a movie is given 6/10 that is an average or below average movie. And these days a video games has to be an 8/10 or it is not even worth playing by the general consensus. More recently I’ve been looking at guitar reviews where almost every reviewer seems to give 9/10 or more to every guitar I see reviewed.

Now these average numbers don’t matter in and of themselves, as long as you know what the average score is you can judge based on that. But as a reviewer it allows no freedom in scoring. A book that is a 7/10 is certainly worse than one that is 9/10 and there are specific reasons to point out why. But both are good books. A 9/10 video game and a 9.5/10 video game have about the same difference in score as the those two books compared to the average. The same 2 point difference has to be squished into a .5 difference now. There are no in-between points. But you can still say that the 9.5 game is better.

The problem actually comes in low scoring games. Since everything below 8/10 is seen as a failure in video games, how can you accurately score things? 6/10 and 7/10 might seem natural. These scores are just below a good game. But what exactly is the difference between 3/10, 4/10 and 5/10? These seem like they are arbitrarily given out. Any score within this 3-5/10 range can effectively be given the same score.

The other problem lies with how something is reviewed. As price is highly variable in many of today’s products, in order to compare the high end and low end products on the same spectrum you have justify the higher scores on low end products as “for the price”. This is a good camera “for the price.” The downside to this is that you cannot compare things that are not “for the price.” My newest guitar receives mostly 9/10 and 10/10 on review sites yet it is also apparently “significantly worse” to the $2000+ guitars. None of these reviews can accurately score that.

So we should stay with a very easy to use four point system. Or maybe even less than 4 points. Bad, Satisfactory, Good, Great. Just as arbitrary as what we are using now, but with less of the fluff. There are still awards given out at the end of the year anyway, and rankings could be done entirely separately to distinguish the greatest games.

Depending on who you ask, the most important part is different, but I’ve heard different people say that each part affect your sound vastly. From the strings, which are sometimes made by the same manufacturing company even for different brands to the distance where you pick the strings from the tail.

But the most important part of all of this is that there is not a ‘correct’ sound there are only different sounds. Unless you want the exact sound someone else is making, whatever sound you make (as long as it’s in tune of course) is ‘correct’, just different.

So stop worrying about the specific for a guitar and play a bunch then buy the one you like. And if you can’t play anything, buy a $50 guitar in the classified or borrow a friend’s guitar to try it out.

The invasion system is almost like the GW2 system but without much of the longer term effects. A zone is invaded with many rifts and invasion forces at once and you have to group up to complete a goal and then defeat a boss. Which is basically one of two major factors that differentiate Rift from other contemporary MMOs.

I love these invasions. The problem is that it still seems like the side part of the game. During most of the game I’m still doing lame “kill 15 squirrel quests” which is exactly the part of WoW that drives me to rush through it all and try to hit the end game.

What Guild Wars 1 did best was having a series of chained plot quests that got you through the game. There was a little gear progression after that in certain dungeons and some higher level dungeons but in general you level did not determine your progression, the plot did. It was not a matter of being a certain level to progress, it was a matter of doing certain plot missions to progress, like you do in most single player RPGs. Of course you could still run ahead and skip bits, but the natural progression was that you completed missions and did plot quests to ‘beat the game’.

Guild Wars is the still the only MMO I’ve played where I’m not looking at an experience bar but just playing the game.

We will drink almost all of something but be compelled to offer that last tiny bit to the original owner.

Lesson? Don’t share your drink.

But my problem with trying to keep up with forums these days is that sometimes they are incredibly fast paced. A topic can balloon into several pages in less than an hour and then be basically done. Or go onto several hundred pages in weeks which you can never catch up on.

So you have basically two options: mark all as read every once in a while, or start to ignore the forums. I started with the first and then moved on to the second.

Now my addiction is RSS and twitter, both of which I can more easily control the flow of. Want more? Add a follower or a feed. Want less? Drop a few. I only wish there was a way to not have duplicate RSS items about the same news story from separate sources. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Apple story reported on by 10 different feeds with no new information after the first.

The Wired magazine was useless because I’m Canadian.

The coupons are kind of nice, but the only one I would use is ThinkGeek and I buy from them maybe once a year.

The full RSS feeds and nice layout are neat as well.

But I didn’t think any of this was worth $50.

I did end up subscribing though. Because Ars Technica is awesome. I love the articles. I love the detail of the articles and I love the fact that they do some awesome features on random things. And that is worth $50 to support something like that.

So the move to a top-down action game caught me off guard to say the least. I never really thought it was going to be bad, but it was a strong move away from the previous incarnations. It was also another developer so I wasn’t sure how much of a Lara Croft-y feel it would still have to it.

However, to my delight this is probably the best Lara Croft game I’ve ever played. Only ran into a couple bugs throughout the whole game (door wouldn’t open at one point, replaying the level fixed it) and the co-op aspect really added a lot to the game. I played through my first time on local co-op with a friend in two sessions, once last month and once last Friday. The puzzles were generally pretty easy but still rewarding. Then on the weekend I played online (after it was finally released) with a friend. From what he told me by the end he was missing some particles and stuff (caused a few deaths) and he couldn’t switch guns anymore. As the host I was fine all the way through.

I did find in order to get the point rewards I had to basically take all the points I could. My second time through I ended up with the railgun this way. The final boss only took 3 hits (although he had about 6 phases to go through as well, so 18 hits) with this gun which was rather disappointing. My first time doing the boss fight was much more rewarding having to basically use everything I had to beat him.

I plan to play through the SP sometime. I think most of the puzzles will be different; everything in co-op seemed to rely on having two people. For a game released at $15 this a great deal. I wouldn’t say it’s worth more than $30, definitely not a $50 release game, but for about 6 hours for a playthrough (that’s six GOOD hours) I think I’d be interested in some DLC as well. $5 for a new mini-campaign would be great.

Note: I played on PC with the mouse and keyboard and my local friend played with a PS3 controller. Didn’t really feel like there was a disadvantage to either so pick what you’re comfortable with. There’s some assist with WASD for those not-so-8-way jumps that make it all work out.

I just hit level 30 with my first character after those 10 days. Level 30 is basically access to all content and all skills, but there are a few items with level requirements that are higher. It also allows you to play with all the other big boys in the 10v10 mercenary arena that is most of the day-to-day PvP in the game.

Anyway, I think this game, as a $15 game, is pretty decent. I would not have been happy if I had paid $50 at this game’s release. Although class selection is limited to 4, the “builds” that you can do with the skills end up being closer to 10-12 standard archetypes.

Being a skill based game, having items causes certain problems. The devs seem to have sidestepped most of that by having a small pool of items with small benefits in upgrades. For example, for the recon class there are 2 SMGs and 3 sniper rifles, each with upsides and downsides. And the modifications are things like 20% increased range, 8% increased damage. At most you can get something like 17% increased damage. Seems decently fair to me while still allowing growth.

It also has a decent amount of vanity items. 4 sets of armour per class, each with 4 advancements and a helmet to match each of those. And probably 50+ dye colours to apply to 3 different places on armours.

How is the combat? Decently fast, but without a lot of that instant lethality found in most games these days. No headshots, and at best you can kill people in 3 shots. They usually notice after the second. The jetpacks definitely give it a Tribes feel (and HiRez, the devs are making Tribes Universe next) which really speeds up the boring running around part that some of the larger maps can cause. It also adds a great layer to the combat you usually don’t get.

So I’d recommend Global Agenda, at $15, to anyone who likes Tribes, or a slower Quake/UT but in TPS form instead of FPS. It doesn’t requires friends to be fun like most MMOs, and it’s not really a grind. I haven’t had a problem with lag, although I always get a a hiccup about 5 seconds into a match it’s always during setup.

The strangest thing about Global Agenda is the resemblance to Modern Warfare 2′s server system. There is only matchmaking, you can’t host a dedicated server, there are no (visible) admins. But being marketed as an MMO and as a TPS not a FPS somehow makes this a non-issue for everyone. Weird.

Part of this was moving my old router to 192.168.4 from 192.168.1, to make sure there wasn’t a conflict.

This was bound to have a few other hiccups, and I had to reset the new modem 4 times (and it has the longest boot time I’ve ever seen for a device like that) just to be able to play a game. It was lagging horrendously and terribly unplayable. But eventually I made it into the last 15 minutes of the match to watch my team get creamed.

The next problem that arose was my dad not being able to print. His computer is hooked up to the same switch as the printer on a router upstairs. My sister is on this same router and she could print fine to the same printer.

How is it that someone farther from the printer (in terms of network devices) can print when he can’t? The problem must be with his computer!

After rebooting things a few times I remembered that we set a static IP for the printer a while back so we could print even though it was behind another router. I switched that to the new 192.168.4 address space and voila, he could print.

And my sister got her internet back.

Somehow that is connected.

WTF.

What do I mean? Sales and bundles. Look at what Valve has done with Steam. Valve does basically 4 things with products to make them sell better.

1. 10% off on pre-orders or new products. Little bit of a discount for new items let’s them stand apart from older products and gives a little incentive to buy them.
2. 4 for 3 package deals or buy 4, get 25% off. Link people together, get more sales from people who sometimes wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.
3. Multiple product bundles. Things like a discography or similar artists for a larger discount.
4. HUGE HOLIDAY SALES! Steam has holiday sales so popular people complain about buying things just because they are so cheap, even if they have no intention of playing it.

The point of all these sales? To sell people things they might not want, but in such a convincing way that they can’t help but do it. Another part of all these sales is to only do them on whole albums, selling all the filler songs that are generally lackluster.

The differences between music and games is actually better for music sales as well. People become bored of music much sooner than they become bored of games. People don’t (usually, minus one old roommate) become obsessed with music and not listen to anything else like they do with games.

Many people have vast libraries of music. Thousands of songs. You can’t expect people to pay $0.99 at a time to spend a thousands of dollars on a library of that size.

So that’s it. You now have direct control over the price of items. The cost of selling an item has gone significantly down. (transport, packaging, materials? hah!)

Use it.

What people apparently don’t like is the choice to buy items. The choice to buy non-tradable, non-craftable items. Items that are otherwise functionally the same as items you get randomly over time. For a game that is 3 years old and still patched frequently and paid $20 or less for.

I can see not wanting to buy items.

I’m not going to buy any new sets of items myself.

But how can you be angry at Valve for giving people the option to purchase things?

The drop system can be very frustrating and trading can alleviate that but if you don’t have the time or are just getting into TF2 then purchasing items is a very viable alternative.

What I fail to see is the downside to person A because person B has purchased items.

I guess I’ll keep whacking people with fish in a newspaper until I get an answer.

I went into this movie with the worst intentions. I wanted a B movie to laugh at for crappy effects, terrible acting and an even worse plot. I’ve seen many bad movies from MST3K and that’s what I wanted to experience again here, something so bad it was laughable.

But I didn’t get that. I did get a B movie. And it did have some crappy effects. And it did have some poor acting. And the plot wasn’t always the best. But I laughed with it.

Why? Because I liked it. It was a B movie for sure, but I liked the humour, I liked the characters and I liked the plot. The effects weren’t the best but they were surprisingly good at times. The plot wasn’t amazingly fantastic, but it didn’t seem in the least bit contrived in the least. Hell, everything in this movie I can related to fairly well.

So now instead of laughing at the movie and telling people how bad it is I want to find a place to buy it online (for less than $30 >.>) and show it to as many people as I can. It’s not amazing but it’s pretty damn good.

If you want to see some stuff like it check out Journey Quest.

• Take two new “collector’s edition” coke bottles ($1.50 each, way too expensive).

• Remove label, add water.

• Add 6 drops red food colouring.

• Make a second blue one for mana.

• Add backlighting to picture for neat transparency effects.

• Make various other colours, in case you get poisoned.

And the worst part is that we only use them for video decoding. No games with massive frame rates, everything turned to the max and marveling at technology. Just the same things I can do with my card anyway.

At least I’m getting some good time in watching movies as I wake up early and leave work later than a normal day. I’ve already watched the 4 Batman movies from 1989-1997 and Face/Off. I can’t say I’ll run out before this term is over with the collection we have.

The drive in also gives me a chance to listen to audio books. I’ve already “read” The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and next is The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The guys I work with are great, I felt at home within the first 3 days. It’s like I’ve been there for months already.

I bought an SSD last week which should be delivered on Tuesday. And once Friday’s paycheque comes in I’m going to get a Nexus One and say goodbye to iTunes forever.

Goal:
5.1 output from my PS3 through my computer.
Why? I don’t have any other way to output to 5.1 from it without spending money (receiver + different speakers).

What I have:
First gen PS3, HDMI and TOSLINK cables.

Monitor has HDMI -> analog stereo output
Problems: Constant low hum (monitor has bad quality output) and only 2.0 sound. This requires the monitor to be on HDMI output to passthrough audio as well.

This motherboard. It has a Realtek ALC888 chip. I also have the separate bracket for TOSLINK in.
Problems: This can do stereo but no DTS/Dolby, but it fixes the buzzing problem. It can also play when the monitor is on different output.

And a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card.
This has S/PDIF in, but I am not spending $100+ on the options they have to actually use it. Instead I am trying repin the gigabyte bracket and have it connect to this card. It does have DTS/Dolby decoding :D

So, the gigabyte manual says that the bracket has three pins.
1. red – Power
2. yellow – SPDIF_I
3. black – GND

So I switched black and yellow to match up with this pinout diagram of the creative card (top left, +5V, GRN, SPDIF0 IN)

Plugged that in and… nothing. I can hear feint popping when I switch audio output devices on the PS3, but the Creative card never shows a signal (“Unknown or invalid signal”, just like when disconnected).

Any help or insight would be appreciated, thanks.

P.S. I think I may have destroyed any input on my sound card by fooling around with this. My microphone no longer works on that sound card :(

Heavy Rain was pretty damn good and a unique kind of game I wouldn’t mind playing again. Could have used some more polish in places but it was a great foray into a new kind of game. I want more of it, just… not too many. I don’t want another age of brown WW2 shooters.

God of War 3 felt like more God of War. Which is a good thing. I got to finish my God killing quest although the ending was a built lengthy and not-so-action-game style, all I wanted was a prettier game with more killing random things for the hell of it.

Final Fantasy 13 was, as many people have already said, very linear. Takes about 20 hours to actually make a decision in where you go. I wasn’t disappointed with this though. I went for this game purely for the visuals and they don’t disappoint. The hair on every character especially. As much as it is partially overdone asian JRPG hair, it’s much better than the everyone-is-bald-or-ugly syndrome of Mass Effect. Not to mention the combat mechanics which I absolutely love. Every character can fulfill three separate roles (or all 6 later on) instead of being stuck with a healer all battle when you don’t need one. I may not be always picking my attacks (auto feature does a pretty good job) but I am constantly switching paradigms. I’m not really a fan of the lore and the universe, but it works well enough for me.

On the PC gaming side I’ve been working on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 which I picked up for $40. It has many buggy parts to it but it still ends up being a bunch of fun. I’ve already maxed out the recon class (love those long range sniper shots) and I’m working on the rest. If this game had a few bug fixes it would probably top my favourite shooters this year.

I’ve also invested a bit of time into Plain Sight which is a little nauseating but the core mechanics are inherently balanced for risk/reward. Kill people to get energy, more energy for people who have more energy, turn energy into points by blowing yourself up. More points if you had kill streaks and if you catch people in your suicide blast.

Also recently I’ve been playing League of Legends (although this has died down a bit). A DotA clone that manages to be fun although bit rage inducing at times. The problem with games like this is that the learning curve is ridiculous. A player is basically required to know everything before playing a game. There is at least a tutorial in this clone (and I’ve played other before so I was fine) but there is still way too much content to cover.

P.S. Still waiting for that SC2 beta invite Blizzard.

So I looked back at why I switched away from Chrome the last time I was using it.

• Too much RAM usage on my netbook with Windows 7
• No bookmark syncing, Xmarks wasn’t working  at the time
• Missing many add-ons I loved in Firefox

And effectively all these problems have been solved. My netbook is now running Ubuntu, Xmarks works and google has their own built in syncing with google docs and there are many more add-ons (like ad-blocker) so I’m not missing any functionality. Not to mention that Chrome feels like a faster browser and uses less vertical space by default.

So I’m back with Chrome. I might look like a google fanboy but I think of it as the same as I think of Logitech. I didn’t decide to buy a Logitech mouse (or three), keyboard, speakers and headset because I’m in love with the company. I chose it because those were the best products at the time. Google makes some really nice products, so I will embrace them.

Removal of Consumer Rights

I absolutely understand not wanting to lose this control. If I want a friend to borrow a a game all I have to do is lend them the cd, they play, give it back when they are done.

Instead, if I want someone to play my game I’d have to give them access to my entire account and I won’t be able to play these game myself at the time. Not to mention I don’t think steam would take this nicely.

However, on used game sales, I have sold maybe two PC games over the last 10 or so years I’ve been playing them for. It is not a big loss to me at all.

Publisher Are In Control

Totally in control. I have never, ever seen a sale on a Call of Duty game because Activision likes their money so much. However, I disagree that I can get games for a better deal in a local store. Left4Dead 2 has been as low as $33 USD, I bought it at $37 USD, the pre-order price was $45 USD and it is currently $50 USD. By comparison, it is $60 CAD at Futureshop and that price will never go down.

But that is a Valve made game, how about Red Faction Guerrilla which was released about 4 months ago for PC. $10 USD, on sale during the holidays, $20 USD standard, or $40 CAD at Futureshop.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game cheaper in a store than on Steam, but that might be a local issue.

The other side of this is that you don’t necessarily need a publisher apart from Steam. Osmos is done by Hemisphere Games which self-published the game. The link is then Hemisphere Games, Valve, then the customer where Valve replaces the normal publisher and retailer and the developer no doubt gets more money and easier access to the customer base.

DRM

DRM ontop of steam I find unacceptable. That would be games like Sacred 2 which list “3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™”. Absolutely unnecessary but not Steam’s fault.

One thing that is missed in the analysis is that steam is more than just DRM for games. It is an entire social network for gamers. I currently have 20 friends in-game with another 20 friends online. I want it to run in the background just like I want MSN and IRC to run in the background even if I’m not using them.

As for automatic patching, I greatly prefer this to the situation with Battlefield 1942. The game kept on being patched by DICE but several parts of the community split off at points. That means that in order to play with people X I had to have patch X and in order to play with people Y I had to have patch Y. The worst part? you can’t go down in order for patches so you have to completely uninstall and reinstall all these (hundreds of megs sometimes) patches to play with said lower version.

I do agree though that Valve shouldn’t have the problem of “we’re too popular” and servers start dying because they update something or put something on sale.

The other tiny bit in here is games that aren’t patched on Steam even though they are patched in retail. This is the fault mostly of publishers or archaic games. In the case of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Chernobyl, the publisher and developer have a terrible relationship so the publisher won’t push the patch to Steam. Developers usually aren’t hindered by publishers in this regard but Valve talks to the publisher here. Many of the unpatched games are out of date. Developers might not even be able to support it if they wanted to simply because of how old they are.

Ignorance & Inflation

Sucks, but they need to show support with their wallet. I’m pretty sure it’s a similar situation on the PS3 as well. That’s not an excuse, just another example.

No Live Support? Really?

Google is having the same problem with the Android phone. It’s terrible if you’re used to calling someone up for tech support.

Summary

The problem I have relating to many of these issues is that I haven’t had any. The worst thing I’ve had is waiting 20 minutes to play TF2 after an update. I’ve never needed support. I’ve never found a game cheaper in store than on steam (and several times have bought something in a store and then there was a steam sale the next week). I don’t frequently lend out PC games. I have never been affected by Steam DRM.

I also love steam when compared to things like Futureshop and EB Games because the primary purpose of Steam is to sell PC games whereas the primary purpose of those places is no such thing. EB Games is for used console game sales and new release console games with XYZ premium content. They have the worst PC game displays I’ve seen with tattered old boxes filing up a shelf so you can’t see anything . Futureshop sells many things and still forces PC games to the “other” section.

And it’s because of that behavior that developers and publishers like Steam.

In linguistics we have to write all of those crazy symbols they use in the dictionary to tell you how to pronounce the word. Luckily, I very quickly found how to write them through the IPA website with simple html codes.

Math, on the other hand, is a little more complex. There are a few ways to write math for browsers, however, they aren’t supported across browsers. The other option is some scripts that will take input and then it will create a images. I still have to figure out how to implement it, but I think I’m going to go with the image option.

The Idle Thumbs podcast ended last month and I’ve taken some of my spare time to listen to it from the beginning.

I’ve also picked up Bored to Death and Modern Family as two new TV shows to watch. No, I haven’t finished Buffy, get off my back!

And with a week off, steam shows what one week of vacation can do for me:

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.

From left to right:

1. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
2. Anathem – Neal Stephenson
3. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
6. The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss
7. American Gods – Neil Gaiman
8. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
9. Virtual Light – William Gibson
10. A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
11. The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch
12. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
13. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
14. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
15. The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
16. Singularity 7 – Ben Templesmith
17. The Mortal Instruments Trilogy – Cassandra Clare
    • City of Bones
    • City of Ashes
    • City of Glass
18. The Wheel of Time, first three books – Robert Jordan
    • The Eye of the World
    • The Great Hunt
    • The Dragon Reborn

I’m going to be reading these for the next few years…

I’d like to thank The Sword and Laser, Mark Miltenburg and a few other people for these fine suggestions.

But more importantly, thanks to spending over an hour on the train every day, I recently finished Neuromancer which is a much harder book to follow than any of those. It started because Gibson throws a ton of details at you all at once at the beginning in a quick rush to explain everything. A few chapters in it is apparent that this first stuff doesn’t mean all that much except to serve as a nice back story. It does come up again later though.

The hardest part of reading it was the fact that he rarely states who is speaking which becomes incredibly confusing when there are three characters talking at once. It is just assumed who is talking by what they are saying as if I know the characters well enough already. Daemon and Diablo are very explicit in who is speaking and as a graphic novel V for Vendetta can’t help but be explicit.

Apart from that I found the overall plot fairly simple, except near the end where he throws in some weird loops and I’m not quite sure what has happened. I’ve heard this is a book that grows on you with re-reading so I may just do that in the coming months.

Next up: Ender’s Game then Dune and I’m considering buying Cryptonomicon after that.

This subsequently feeds the whole silliness thing and makes the accent grow even more ridiculous.

I don’t think this is a problem but it might get me in trouble someday.

How did you get here?

This post is meant to be read from the top down.

Why has Rogers decided to charge to text for Incoming text messages?

We’ve reviewed wireless practices in other countries and in Canada and see that charging for text/sms messages is a fairly common business practice amongst major carriers.  We continue to offer our customers attractive text plans and bundles and recommend that our customers consider subscribing to one of these plans that include text messaging to save money and continue to receive unlimited incoming messages at no extra charge.

In short: we don’t need the money, but everyone else is doing it so we thought we should too.

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.

Restroom: If anyone things their resting while in there, I have to wonder what I’ve been doing wrong. I think this word is much more appropriate for a bedroom where you can get some real resting done. This really isn’t appropriate in language today.

Bathroom: Does it have a bath in it? About 50% chance in a house, no chance in a restaurant. Are you going to use it? Maybe 20-25% of the time in a given day but I usually don’t need to actually say “I’m going to the bathroom to have a bath.” when it is much simpler to say “I’m going to have a bath.” and location is implied. (Note: I don’t take baths, but I don’t want to call it a showerroom either.)

Washroom: Yes, it is part of the process. A very important part I might add. And you can just do a wash by itself. But it does NOT represent the majority of the going ons in the “washroom”. But this does seem to be the best choice to describe the room while still avoiding all the actual subject.

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.

Why do people do this? Protection. So that their gadget still looks good after a few months of use.

But what ends up happening is the case starts to look horrible. It scratches easier than what it is protecting in the first place. I’ve seen cell phones and ipods with screens you can’t even see anymore. So you end up with a terrible looking unusable device.

The only thing worse than this is leaving the plastic covers on that devices are shipped. This is most evident on HP Laptops. These are generally dirtier than the device because they’ve been through the factory. They have bubbles under them. They sometimes are half off and people still try to keep it on… Next time I see one of those I’m ripping it off.

Update Dec 2009: There are many new computers at work with that plastic film that I have been able to take off. It feels great!

I got my own name though, and that’s very nice. Favourites so far are facebook.com/Default.aspx and www.facebook.com/index.aspx. Many that I expected to be gone are still not taken, like facebook.com/Satan but I have a feeling those are disallowed somehow.

I also know a bunch of people who have yet to jump on this at all, get on that internet friends!

ARG *HEADDESK*

So I’ve decided that I’m going to stop watching The Big Bang Theory. It’s fun, I like it, I just don’t think it’s worth my time anymore. I know the premise, I like the jokes, but they all seem rather repetitive. Star trek reference, physics quip, computer pun, rinse, repeat, end with nerdy guys not getting hot girls. I get enough of that myself, thank you very much. So I won’t be seeing season 3 of TBBT.

I’ve also decided to stop watching Grey’s Anatomy. It has become stuck in a point of storyline and I don’t think they know where to go anymore. It also lacks that Dr. House/Dr. Cox character I love so much. It just not worth 44 minutes a week anymore.

Unrelatedly, Scrubs will be done after this season, which frees up another 22 minutes a week for me. Which means I won’t feel any guilt because I’m picking up Flashpoint and Castle on my daily schedule.

I also have a suspicion that Chuck will be cancelled relatively soon as will Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

And hopefully I’ll be able to use this time to do other things, like finishe reading these books that have been sitting on my shelf for 3 months now…

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.

Second chat? He started with “Electric boobs and fallopian tubes” and just went downhill from there. I won’t get into the details but I had to tell him to see a doctor… and then a vet. -1 for Omegle.

My third chat started with him saying “cyber?” and ended with me saying “notnx” rather quickly. -1 for Omegle.

And my last chat? It went absolutely nowhere, neither of us had anything to talk about. No points either way.

Should you try it out? sure, it’s worth 5 minutes. Just don’t expect to gain anything at all from it.

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.

The first season had a very nice overall plot, wrapped up at the end with a nice slightly unexpected ending. The overall arc completed and it wrapped up in the first few episodes of the next season.

The second season was a bit worse. They threw a large event in at the very beginning. And then they didn’t touch it for a while. And then they brought it up again. And then it disappeared. They used it for a few random smaller arcs within the season and then in the end it was someone who wasn’t even remotely related at the beginning. Before the end he was mostly a minor character. Not the even close to the best season of a TV show I’ve seen.

Season three? The ending was very abrupt and poorly done. They wrapped up in the last 10 minutes what should have been  done in another two or three episodes. I liked the season as a whole a bit better but the conclusion was simply terrible.

One thing that did get better throughout the show? Smart, cute, blonde girls really grow on me.

At first it was just fading out and I could compensate for it but a few hours later I was totally deaf in that ear. It was probably the biggest loss of body control I’ve ever had. And these guys on the bus were a very horrible reminder of that.

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.

1. An insignificant but arrogant and obnoxious young person.
2. A silly, insignificant, or contemptible person.
3. The hair style owned by characters such as Dennis the Menace, the Family Circus kid and Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Specifically that little bit of hair coming off the top.

I was just thinking about it recently. Every person who has ever been called a twerp has one of those. Just thought it was interesting.

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!

Nothing more to say, I just genuinely had fun with a group of people for the first time in a while.

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.

I haven’t been following politics since the election so I have no idea if this is deserved but I’ve heard and seen things related to this issue specifically. Mostly the number of facebook groups that believe this is in some way ‘unconstitutional’ or illegal in some way.

I believe a quote from this link summarizes that very nicely:

Harper himself signed a letter to then-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson in 2004, claiming the right to form a government if Paul Martin’s minority Liberals could be defeated in a confidence vote in the Commons.

His ostensible partners would have been NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe — now derided by Harper as the “socialist” and the “separatist” in Liberal Leader Stephane Dion’s coalition.

So Harper tried the exact same thing with the exact same people in 2004. He tried and failed and now someone else is trying and succeeding.

And his reaction to the whole thing is to shut down parliament for 7 weeks, because that’s a very democratic thing to do.

Today every single person failed me.

The first lady totally ignored my order the first time. She just looked at me a few seconds later like nothing had happened and I had the awkward moment of having to say my order again. After that she asked if I wanted it toasted and I said yes. And that’s all that happened. She didn’t toast it. I had to ask for it to be toasted again.

I told the second lady exactly what I wanted on my sub 4 items at a time. Lettuce, tomato, pickles and cucumbers first. She put on lettuce, pickles, tomato then reached for green peppers. I had to interject otherwise I would’ve had some nasty crunchy peppers on my sub. Then I asked for mayo, honey mustard and salt and pepper. And after honey mustard I almost got some green sauce.

And the last lady… This really isn’t her fault but when I was giving her a $20 I kind of lazily reached over and she didn’t quite grab it. I was confused for a second but then I realized she was only 5′ tall and actually couldn’t reach and farther. I had to keep moving my hand forward slowly pretending that I was going to do it all along. That one was kinda my fault.

Apart from this I had never really had bad service at a Subway this won’t stop me from going there again. I just find it very unfortunate how many times I was failed in one attempt.

What do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

And what do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room and sits on your lap? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

And what do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room, sits on your lap and tries to kiss you? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

Eventually she got fed up and left saying my favourite line of first year, “And that’s why you’re still a virgin, Mike.”

You see, I don’t do drunk chicks.

And thanks to this little incident conversation has been akward with her ever since. She keep trying to talk to me on MSN which I kind of brush off. It’s not like I have anything to be afraid of from stalkers, I’m a 6’6″ guy.

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!

Normally this is a very strange thing for someone to do but for a Waterloo mathie pink is the colour to be. From the normal pink ties that are given out ever year to the giant pink tie we hang on our math building’s wall.

So I, like a bunch of other people who do so every year, decided to die my hair pink. Partially because of peer pressure, partially because of the total awesomeness.

The first try was with a much lighter pink, roughly how light it is right now, but that washed out without leaving any colour whatsoever. Then I had to try a darker pink which I wasn’t really a fan of at first. It was more vibrant and not the bubblegum pink I wanted in the first place. On our tie which is a gradient this year it is on the very tip of the darkest end.

The pink has done about half the dye’s life cycle now and it’s still just as soft as it was before for anyone who is worried ;). It should be gone by the end of next week and then I’ll just be the 6’6″ blond guy instead of the 6’6″ guy with pink hair.

It took 2 trips to bring everything here without much squishing. My stuff fits in rather nicely and I prefer rolling out of bed onto my chair to having to walk across the room to get there. Desk and bed took a bit of time to build and fit in but now it’s nice and cozy.

We were going to go with Teksavvy for our internet, 5Mb down/200GB limit/$30 but they could only deliver 512kb here so we are going to go with Rogers, 10Mb down/95GB limit/$60.

I say going with because right now I’m stealing wireless from across the street and 4 houses down. Rogers is backed up until the 19th. So after some great router positioning skills and a lot of patience I managed to “liberate” an unsecured connection that’s rather fast and good enough for anything but gaming. 1.5-2 second ping just doesn’t seem to work when playing games.

We lost water for a few hours on the second day, didn’t have a shower curtain until the 4th day and still lack good food supplies but I’m sure it will be a great term!

I’ve been there before for little tours and things but we finally have to moving in and work there. My cubical about twice as big as what some people have to share between two people. It’s about the same size as my room in residence was. It’s way too awesome.

But I won’t be doing actual scheduled work for a while. We have to set up the lab which will probably take the greater part of the next week. It’s not a problem for me though since I love the hardware aspect of computers nearly as much as the software side. Not the really small details like circuit boards and stuff but each component as a whole. It’s what separates me from the rest of CSers.

After that move it will be a bit of work with the new co-ops coming from U of T (I don’t get to see my UW replacement), a bit of busy work, going away lunches and then I’m back to school.

And that starts with living at a friend’s house for about 4 days then moving in part way through orientation week while I’m orientating. Probably the busiest weekend of my life. It’s gonna be so much fun.

Here we go:

5. Finding panties behind my bed a few month into first term.

4. Staying up until 4 a.m. and waking up at noon – for 4 months.

3. Playing Dungeons and Dragons with 2 separate groups.

2. A girl picking me up on my way home from playing Dungeons and Dragons.

1. Having a girl leave my room saying “And that’s why you’re still a virgin, Mike!”

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)

It’s from the maker of Firefly, Joss Whedon. and has Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother among other things, Felicia Day who I know from The Guild, and Nathan Fillion from Firefly.

And no, musicals are still bad.

That said, I did have a lot of fun this weekend. I found out who my team members are. I was specifically overjoyed to find that two of my frosh leaders are part of my team this year along with at least 3 others being somewhere in orientation week.

Which is awesome because they are the reason I became a leader in the first place.

The day went like so:

• Meet other group members, make a skit and present to the rest of the leaders.
• Meet with friends from first term, eat lunch at pita palace
• Get back together with group, sign 150 or so letters
• Stand outside in the rain, get burgers

When writing my signature it went from “Apocrypha” to my name once or twice.

And then I hung around with the CSClub guys for a while and went home.

True story.

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.

First band, as my friend very appropriately put it, was viking drone metal. Deathmarch was just bleh… Boring. Almost invariable from the shitty Metallica interludes between band changes. From Hamilton. *Hamilton*! Very repetitive, very screamy, exactly what I hate about music.

The second band, 3, was better. MUCH better. 2 drummers, 2 guitarists and a bass. They brought 7 guitars in total out on stage. That’s a lot of guitars. And the music was amazing. I really need to look into these guys some more because they played a very nice show. One drummer stopped his symbols with his mouth. Repeatedly.

And Opeth… Beautiful beautiful Opeth. Mikael started off by saying “You’re all fucking retarded… so it looks like we’re in good company.” Best moment of the night. Seeing Opeth live is even better than listening to it right now. They are certainly a band that does live well. Really fucking well.

And now my calves hurt, from standing for about 9 hours. Totally worth it.

I used to have to get up at 6:30 a few summers ago for my part time job but that was about three times a week tops. Now it’s five days a week for the next four months.

And then I get home and it’s 7-8ish most of the time, a few short hours and I’m off to sleep. Those hours are usually spent watching TV, which I haven’t done too regularly (missed an episode of 30 rock already) and playing on my computer.

And it’s usually not long sessions of gaming like I’m used to. I’ll play Unreal Tournament 3 for a few hours then stop. Then wonder what to do. Then I’ll start again.

I actually did some work from work on Friday. Out of interest and out of boredom.

That said, work hasn’t been too hard at all. A bit of a learning curve but I’m familiar with half of the stuff already and have easily learned everything thrown at me so far. Tuesday was actually terribly boring because everyone except the co-ops were out of the office yet I hadn’t learned enough to actually do any work yet. So I did the one thing that I had assigned to me… multiple times. And I played some games. And I talked with the other co-ops.

Great guys at work, laid back, and the “work” I’m doing is really just playing around with systems which is the kind of thing I love to do in my spare time anyway. This is going to be a great four months.

I’m back at home now and it feels weird. It was Tuesday and I wondered why no one was around. My brother was writing and exam, my sister was at school and my mom was at work. And I get to sit and home and play video games, just like at school. But there is something exciting coming up…

My job is starting on Monday. At about 8:30 am Monday morning I’ll be walking into the Net Integration Technologies Inc. (makers of Nitix, small-medium Linux business server) building. But wait, I said I was working at IBM! Well I am. Net Integration Technologies Inc. was bought by IBM about a week before my interview. They still got to choose me as their coop student, but afterward it was really an IBM process.

So I am still technically working for IBM but I won’t actually be working there… Until partway through the summer. About halfway through the summer we’re moving to the newest IBM building in Markham from the Net Integration Technologies Inc. building. It’s just down the street but it’s a big upgrade on the inside.

And how could I possibly get a job this awesome? You have to answer questions like “Why did you go into Computer Science?” with answers like “Because I’m awesome at it.” I actually said that. I actually got the job.

<there was a day break here>

So it’s 2:30 now and I have another final tomorrow. But that one is at 12:30. I think I’ll be fine. Wake up at 9ish, couple hours of studying. Hopefully actually sleep before 5:30. And my other 2 finals at at 7:30… p.m. A good last weekend.

Then one week free and then I start working at IBM, ever CSers dream job, you know, back in 1970!

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.

For those of us really into the whole internet thing, we need our RSS feeds so we can get our information as fast as possible. You should have this blag on your RSS feed already! *shakes fist*

Let’s take a look at two big web based feed readers: Netvibes and Google Reader.

The Layout
Netvibes allows you to see the top 1-40 of any feed you have on a page at a time. As many feeds as you want on each page, pages being organized by tabs. 1-4 columns, variable width. It’s very nice to move everything around with AJAX. Click on a feed and it changes to have all the titles of that feed on the left side and as I click on them they come up.

Google Reader has all your feeds laid out on the left side, organized by category. You can then view each feed as a full page view or as a large list. It allows for as much backtracking as you need, grabbing older items the farther you scroll back.

The Customization
Netvibes allows various tweaks to each widget such as the inclusion of extra details, arrows to flip through elements, post date. Also you can change titles, keyboard shortcuts, themes, wallpapers and hide the search box. Enough stuff to make anyone satisfied.

Google Reader allows you to choose which page to start on, easy removal of the navigation pane and… well that’s about it.

The Extras
Netvibes has many extra widgets outside of the realm of RSS. From simple games to being able to check your email, gmail to hotmail to anything pop3. Facebook, myspace, notes, todo lists, embedding websites within netvibes. It also has ‘universes’ which allows any user to see whatever another user decided to make public from his/her universe.

Google Reader is inevitably tied in with everything google. Gmail, google calendar, google docs,  etc. It also has one nice button to refresh all of your feeds at once. You can share feeds with friends on google as well, easily found with google contacts.

Other Mentionables
Netvibes goes down. Recently it has done so a lot. It also sometimes marks all items of a feed unread. I usually know the last on I’ve read anyway but this can get annoying.

Google Reader is slow. You have to wait easily over a second to see the items in a feed after clicking on it. This might be acceptable except Netvibes is much faster on this.

Which one should you choose?
Play around with both. Find out what you like. One might be better for your specific needs.

I use Netvibes because I’m constantly getting updates throughout the day. The ability to see specifically what these are is very helpful for me. Take a look at my universe if you want.

I assume the setup of Google Reader allows for someone to accumulate a lot of news items and then read them all at once much faster which is better if you want to splurge feeds for a while then get back to whatever you were doing.

• Office Space
• V for Vendetta
• Wayne’s World
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Men in Black
• The Matrix (all 3, I don’t care what people say, finish the plot)
• Anchorman
• Charlie Wilson’s War
• Pulp Fiction
• Sin City
• Thank You for Smoking
• Superbad
• Back to the Future
• At least 3 Bond movies
• Happy Gilmore
• Rush Hour
• Billy Madison
• A Beautiful Mind
• Fight Club
• LotR (skip to the battle scenes)
• Memento

And there’s probably more but that should keep you busy for a few weeks. Not every movie is as totally awesome as the last one, but they are all required movies to watch.

How often has x been googled over the years? Good for at least a half hour of fun! As a CS major, part of the math department, it is amazingly entertaining to look at trends of things, especially internet memes. Want to know when lolcats started? Rickrolling? It’s right there.

You can see when large historical events happened, who is more popular in the results (Obama). Compare HD-DVD to Blu-ray searches, see how things get more (emo) and less (My Chemical Romance) popular over the years. Porn searches vs. free porn? The possibilities are endless.

It’s like googlefight but over time as well. Extra dimension means it’s infinitely better. Go spend a good half hour at least amusing yourself.

You can thank Mark Miltenburg for this blog, he made me write it.

Not that I have a Wii, or even had a Gamecube or N64. It was just the most fun game you could play at someone’s house. Quick, easy, fast to learn and faster to learn new characters. Easy to learn, hard to master, just like many great games.

But in those seven years, how much was really changed? A couple of new things were added. Final smashes are probably the most significant of them all. They have various strengths but it’s almost an instant kill against all of your enemies. A few other items have been added (dragoon parts) and brought back from the N64 version (bumper) which is also a nice touch. Another huge change would be all the new characters and maps. Gone are the days of 17 different maps with 3 floating platforms and one big one on the bottom. The new characters also bring in much more depth and variation. Less copies with the stronger/slower or weaker/faster changes and more unique move sets. Every character also has much more horizontal movement in the air which means it’s much easier to recover. The game plays a tiny bit slower than melee as well.

But that is exactly what I expect and wanted to change. More characters, more maps, some slight tweaks elsewhere. I just didn’t want it to take 7 years to do

The game also looks prettier but at the cost of load times. I’d prefer faster loads to prettiness on a game of this style. It’s all about gameplay here which is why people can still play the older games and have fun. It doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s how much fun I have when playing with you.

The rebalancing meant I lost my old main character, Falco. He was changed way too much too much for me to play him the same as I did before. So I went through a few characters that I found intriguing at first and found my new main, Zero Suit Samus.

Why Zero Suit Samus? She has the one thing every other character is lacking, medium range. Most characters have short range or really short range. Second best is Marth/Ike’s swords which take a while to attack with anyway. ZSS has stunning (literally) medium range attacks. Protection against people attacking you from the air, protection against people running at you. And it hits behind you. She has 3 jumps if you include the down+B which also acts as a decent meteor smash. The up+B is a little lacking and prone to edgehogging but the distance is more than you think it would be. The suit parts off the start are awesome for racking up a quick 30 damage against whoever you’re facing with decent knockback as well. Her final smash is also causing me to learn Samus who I wasn’t too familiar with in any of the other games. Samus is a bit slow for me in general. But again, I believe her unique range sets her apart from everyone else.

Til the next sequel!

It is this day that we must honour one of our most valuable number. It stands next to e and root(2) and hold its own.

A limerick in homage of pi: (from limerickdb)

If a pendulum’s swinging quite free
Then it’s always a marvel to me
That each tick plus each tock
Of the grandfather clock
Is 2 pi root L over g.

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.

I went out for dinner with my family to a local restaurant that my brother had previously worked at and where my dad does the odd thing to help around. They both ordered a Guinness, I was content with my Pepsi. My brother even joked about taking me out to the bars later. Why?

Last night I went to a party where much drinking was involved and I had a great time. Sober. And I’m going to remember the whole thing. Beat that ya damned teenagers. Get off my lawn!

The snow was beautiful, perfect for building large standing objects out of. And it would rain the next day, icing our beautiful shaft in place.

We decided on the nearby soccer field for our monument to manliness. Large areas of field covered in the finest packing snow I’ve ever built with. Fairly out of the way but if you go to the nearby park you will be able to see the statue.

And thus we started the behemoth which would be documented throughout its creation. Pictures of the step by step process were taken in order to demonstrate the massiveness.

And so we walked away, letting our monument stand for all we stood for, being hard and tall.

I get why repetition in movies is necessary. I get why repetition in music is necessary. I get why repetition in writing is necessary. I don’t get why you have to tell the guy sitting next to you that you should have sat on the balcony four times in less than half an hour.

He heard you the first time. He’s repeated it back to you twice. You agree already. It’s over, make a none of it and sit there next time. For the time being, you are stuck where you are so shut up! Talking about it any more does not help.

If you have nothing to talk about you should try something I like. It’s called not talking. Thanks.

The majority is dialogue is done in song. I really don’t know why this is so appealing. Not to me I mean. The people who regularly watch musicals. You can display much more precise emotion in dialogue than in song. It may be less exaggerated but in a musical it seems that everything is over exaggerated.

And the protagonist and antagonist seem to sing together. Merrily. Perhaps a bit of dramatic irony. Perhaps a bit of “Hey, let’s make them sing together because that’s what a musical is about.” You should never ever change your content to fit the medium. Change the medium to fit your content.

Less singing.

My message? Tell people that they are going to a musical before they get in the car so they can make a shitty excuse to get out of it.

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.

I’m not sure if he forgets that he’s said it or he just has run out of things to say.

Sometimes I like to play out the conversations differently to get a different reaction.  You may call this cruel but I figure, why go through the same experience twice?

And if I did do it the same way more than once then I could start off by saying “Remember when you told  me about…” and I’d remember he told me that twice, or three times.

The following horrific turn of event occurred on December 19^th, 2007.

The day before I slept from noon til 5 p.m.. It was 5 a.m. now. I made the call to take a nap before my 12:30 final. So I set my alarm for 7 just in case I went to bed longer than I wanted to and I played around on the internet for a while. Then it was 5:15 then 5:30 so I went to bed then. 5:30, after being awake for a little over 12 hours. I figure that it normally takes me an hour and a half to go to sleep normally and I don’t even feel tired so I’ll be fine. I drift off.

I wake up. I don’t hear that annoying music I set my alarm to? A frequency which seems to pick up two radio stations at the same time. I think… that can’t be good, why did I wake up then? Why do I feel so fully rested? I look outside and find my roommate cooking. I see the clock behind him, 2:30.

2:30!?!?

Half an hour left in the final? 10 minutes to get ready and walk there? No way is that happening… Roommate keeps telling me that he thought I had already left. Whatever. Not your fault. My fault.

Entirely my fault.

So I take a little more time to get ready so I don’t look like total shit. I head down there and talk to the first person I recognize who looks like he’s in charge, a person who watched over my two midterms. I ask him if I can write this final during the next time slot. He asks the guy next to him who I don’t recognize at first. That guy starts answering no, no way, not going to do it. Then I recognize him as my prof for that term, a guy who’s class I wasn’t the best student in. Not looking good at all. I ask him where I should go next because I’m obviously failing the class now. He points me to the Office for Undergrad Math Students so I go there immediately to see what they can do for me.

I head over there, finding it with little trouble. Stand in line for a while behind people with forms that say they were sick exactly on or around their exam days. They look fine now of course… Once I step up I tell the secretary that I slept in and missed my final and ask him what I can do. He tells me that unless the prof, who I just asked, lets me write it, I will fail. So I’d have to take a CS class the next term. However, only CS 125 (Java based) is available not CS 135 (Scheme based) which I was taking. So either I’m four months behind with a class I don’t want to take or a year behind taking the same course I should have passed the first time. Fuck.

I walk back to residence and think. I screwed my life by an entire year because I have a messed up sleeping pattern. I decide, because there is no hope any other way, that I should send my prof an email. Worst case I’m exactly where I am still, best case I get to pass somehow. I take about an hour or two to make sure it’s polished and send it off because I have another exam the next morning for philosophy.

My mom gets on MSN. I wanted to tell her since it happened because it’s better to get it out quickly I assume. I did the best things I could have given the circumstances I believe. So I give her the whole story and as I’m going through it she tells me to do exactly what I tell her I did next. That’s a great sign I guess. I messed up but I messed up well.

I get a reply around 9:30 that night from my prof. He explains that he doesn’t want to write another exam just for me (of course not, there are 2 days til holidays and that’s a *lot* to ask for *my* mistake). He has marking to do for everyone else. He says he’ll talk to his colleagues about it when he gets the chance. I thank him for considering the possibility at all. I tell him I’ll be in town as long as I can if some opportunity does come up.

The next day at 3 he emails me back saying that on January 14^th I will be given a chance to write another exam (either an old one or from another school I presume). My final mark after that exam will be decreased by 12.5% (so it’s worth ¾ of the normal 50% final). Then the lesser of the class mean and my mark will be taken for my final mark. Heavy strings but better than an absolute fail. Much better.

So I get a second chance. I call home, tell my dad to pick me up and I wait. I wait and I feel like shit. I was so close to fucking up my life.