Uberless

Well, I got home soon after the Diablo 2 ladder reset yesterday, played for the rest of the evening, and managed to complete Act 1 and reach level 16. Not too shabby.

Then I looked at the top of the ladder, and the highest person so far was already level 69. I didn’t even appear in the top 1000, with the very bottom of the list being level 24.

And I thought I was obsessed with D2…

Are You Psycho Enough?

Yesterday I finished off Psychonauts, which has been out for a few months and was getting good word-of-mouth, but I hadn’t had time for until recently.

It was worth the wait though. Its mechanics as a platformer are fairly standard, but it really shines in the art direction (some people consider it ‘ugly’, but it’s certainly distinctive), surreal and varied level design (the Milkman Conspiracy level is like a slice of idyllic suburbia warped by paranoia and has to be played to get the full effect), characters and dialogue, and the just overall quirky feel to it.

The only downsides are that it may be a bit too easy up until the last level, and then it becomes insanely difficult. There was one part that I must have had to retry at least 30-40 times before finally passing it, almost building to controller-smashing levels of frustration. You also need to collect an awful lot of items scattered around to gain levels, which may or may not be your thing.

In the end though, it was definitely worth the $30 I paid for the PC version. I’d be a bit more hesitant about the much-more-expensive console versions, so you might be better off renting it and finishing it over a weekend on those, or waiting for it to drop a bit. (It’s far better-looking and smoother on the PC anyways.)

Unfortunately, it looks like Psychonauts hasn’t sold very well so far, despite the excellent word-of-mouth going around, and the publisher is in trouble over it. It looks like some of the problems may be distribution-related, as it’s been somewhat difficult to find; the Future Shop I usually check hasn’t had any PC copies for quite a while and only occasionally has any PS2 copies. I had to go to EB Games, and even then, only one of three locations had any PC copies. It would be a shame to see it fail, as people often lament the lack of creativity in modern games and the emphasis on sequels in franchises…

Habit

You know you’ve been using the PVR too much when, after finishing a show, you keep hitting the Menu button and wondering why it’s not working until you suddenly realize that you were watching it live for once…

The Value of Cash

Wheee, tonight I got to be That Guy holding up the line at the supermarket, taking forever just to pay.

I was low on cash and forgot to stop at the ATM on the way out of the office, and didn’t realize it until I’d arrived at the local Safeway to pick up dinner. No problem, I can just whip out the debit card, right?

Well it seems that its position in my wallet has formed a bit of a bend in the card. The ATMs accept the card without any problems, but the crummy little readers they use at the store just wouldn’t read it, even after repeated swipes. I noticed that my old card was still in the wallet too (I probably held on to it just in case its replacement didn’t work), and the scanner accepted it. Except that after the “Processing…” delay after entering everything, the transaction was rejected. Of course, the old card was deactivated after the new one was used…

My last hope was the credit card, and fortunately it worked and the line could start moving again, but it’s still embarassing going through the public frustration of having trouble paying for something while everyone’s eyes are on you.

That’s why, despite the convenience of debit cards, I still prefer to carry a bit of spare cash.

Get Thee Behind Me, Blizzard

Blizzard surprised everyone this last week with the sudden announcement of a new Diablo 2 patch and its release shortly thereafter yesterday. Nothing too earthshattering, though the mechanics behind the new boss fights are at least intriguing. Still, it’s surprising that they’re doing anything new with it at all this late after its release.

So, will I succumb to the old addiction and slip back into D2’s icy clutches? Not…yet. The one thing they didn’t do with this patch was reset the ladder, as many people were expecting. The date of the next reset thus remains unknown, so I’m still a bit hesitant to start new ladder characters this late into the current season and risk not getting to play them for long before the next reset occurs.

But, eventually… Maybe they’re just letting the patch have a ‘shake-down’ period before resetting the ladder, and then there will be no escape. Diablo always seems to win out in the end…

Nifty

Got an exercise route? Need to work one out? Use this little tool based on Google maps to calculate the actual distance of a route and calories burned walking it.

Apparently my two usual routes are 2.13 miles starting from home, and 3.21 miles starting from the office.

Misrouted

I’m starting to get a little sick of this Linksys router (a BEFWS11). Functionally, it has pretty much all of the features I need; the problem is that it’s horribly unstable in certain cases.

The main source of trouble seems to be the wireless support. If I enable the wireless interface, it’s only a matter of time (anywhere from a few hours to a week or so) before the router just freezes up and has to be power cycled. It’s annoying to have to manually enable it whenever I want to take the iBook away from the desk and have to remember to disable it again afterwards.

It also seems to fall apart under heavy data streaming. I went to a site to watch some streaming music videos, and as soon as each one ended, the router would go dead and have to be rebooted.

The latest firmware updates seem to have reduced the frequency of the problems, but it still happens more often than I like. I can live with it for now, but the next time I buy one I suspect it won’t be the same brand…

I’ve Seen Better

So Longhorn finally has an official name, and…I’m finding it difficult to care. What’s supposed to be so great about it?

– A new OS interface. Whoop-dee-do. I spend most of the time within some game’s own interface anyways.

– The WinFS filesystem and its better organizational structure. Oh wait, they pulled that one out…

– The WinFX APIs. This really only affects us at the office, but since we want maximum compatibility and Win32 isn’t going away, we won’t be switching over to these anytime soon.

– More DRM ‘features.’ Oh yeah, I always wanted more restrictions placed on how I can use my computer…

XP was decent because it was the first NT-based Windows that was officially supported as a gaming platform, and it’s actually been fairly stable. Vista seems like a fairly minor bump and just doesn’t offer me anything interesting enough to make it worth upgrading.

This Will Be The End Of Me Some Day

I’m horrible about seeing doctors.

Last night I couldn’t sleep because of some abdominal pain that started in the mid-evening, peaked around 3am, and finally subsided around 4am. This isn’t the first time though, and I usually write it off as indigestion or acid reflux or such, as it never gets too serious and seems to correlate with overeating (I had some sunflower seeds late in the day).

After finally getting to sleep last night though, I woke up and was once again struck with abdominal pain around 5:30am. It felt slightly different and I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I started considering calling in sick and hoofing it down to a nearby clinic. But, as usual, I managed to plague myself with all sorts of doubts and concerns (Is it really serious enough? Would I just be another hypochondriac clogging the system? Would they resent some fat weirdo just wandering in and whining?) and convinced myself not to go.

Fortunately, after a nice, hot shower it has subsided again, and on the theory that something really serious doesn’t just go away, I think I’ll be fine. But if it flares up again today, I’ll hopefully be able to convince myself… :-P

Crappy Technology

The last thing to be completed in the floor construction after our company moved in was the washrooms, apparently due to some kind of difficulty tracking down bowls with the correct mounting points or something.

Unfortunately, they’re low-flow toilets, and true to the cliche, they often require two or three flushes where the high-powered ones on the other floors only require one. And, as an added bonus, they’ve got the automatic sensors on them, which will often go off and invoke unnecessary flushes as you’re just entering or after you’ve already left.

But at least it’s, like, high-tech ‘n stuff.

Bad!

aipbot, you are a *bad robot*. Not only do you fetch the same URL multiple times unnecessarily, but you ignore robots.txt, and continue to repeatedly fetch URLs even after being 403ed.

Not that they’re draining all of my bandwidth or anything like that, but it’s annoying to see this kind of behaviour filling my logs on a very low-traffic site like this.

Bad robot! Go sit in the corner…

Durrr…

I just had a brainfart and completely forgot one character in my password, and am now locked out of my own work account. I’m still logged in on one other machine, but I’ll lose that as soon as the screen saver lock kicks in.

I think it’s time to go home…

Anybody Home?

I haven’t played Asheron’s Call much lately, just logging in to refresh my house once a month.

As an older game, it’s natural for its playerbase to dwindle over time. It’s not a fresh, new, good-looking game, so it doesn’t attract many new players, and old players eventually stop and move on to other games. I had no idea just how much AC’s population had fallen until during this month’s refresh, when I stopped and took a brief look around at the housing market.

The most common type of house in AC is the cottage, and most of them are organized into communities of eight houses. There’s a finite number of cottages, and all of them were snapped up very quickly after the housing feature was activated and they remained in high demand for a very long time thereafter. It was feared that the only way you’d be able to get a cottage was to trade one on eBay from someone who got lucky and wanted to turn a real-life profit.

It was thus quite a surprise when I logged in yesterday and saw that within the community my cottage is in, there were only two others that were occupied, and the other five were abandoned and up for sale. I did a ‘@house available’ command, which gives you a list of how many houses of each type are available and where they’re located. Nearly every other time in the past it had simply said ‘Cottages: 0 available/ Villas: 0 available / Mansions: 0 available’, but this time it gave me a list of coordinates so long that I couldn’t even see the start of the list. I had to capture it to a file in order to see the ‘Cottages: 805 available’ at the start.

If so many cottages are abandoned now, there’ve got to be damn few people left playing…

I Got The Power

Woohoo, I finally got around to getting a replacement power supply for my XP box, and things are finally back to normal — I no longer have to underclock the CPU by 25% and I can take the GeForce 2 out and put the Radeon 9700 Pro back in.

Those two factors alone had been making quite a difference. After the power supply started deteriorating, I had to cut the resolution of a lot of games down to 800×600 and had to go from having every advanced graphics option in World of Warcraft turned on, to turning almost all of them off just to make it playable. I installed GTR while it was crippled and was getting 15-25 FPS, but after restoring it, it shot up to 90-100+ FPS, enabling me to turn on higher levels of detail.

I keep getting tempted to put together a nice, new Athlon 64 / PCI-Express system, but now that I’ve got this one fixed up again, I think it’ll last me at least another year or two.

Thanks, eBay

No, seriously, I’m not being sarcastic for once. I was browsing through the server logs and noticed a sudden increase in hits on the picture of my iBook, with referers pointing back to an eBay auction. Great, another image leecher.

However, a few hours later in the log, the hits suddenly stopped. The referer of the final one looked slightly different, and looking up its IP address revealed that it was from within eBay itself. I tried to visit the eBay URL in the referers, but was informed that the item had been removed from auction.

A few hours later I started getting more hits from a different auction. Since I caught it sooner this time, I was able to visit eBay and catch the auction in action, and it was indeed largely composed of images taken from other sites (one from mine and a lot from a laptop review site). My anti-leeching protection was making my image show up as a ‘broken image’ icon at least, but it was lunchtime and I was feeling mischevous, so I started working on a script and rules to redirect leeching attempts to a random image instead. Nothing offensive, but pictures that would be confusing out of context.

Except before I could apply it, eBay apparently yanked this auction as well. Apparently they take image leeching quite seriously already…

Space

My first computer was an Atari 8-bit that could hold 90KB on a floppy disk. Enough for a handful of small games, or one larger game. Since space was so limited, shuffling files around from disk to disk was often needed in order to free up that kilobyte or two here or there for a new file.

The next computer I had was a really old IBM PC, with two 360KB floppy drives and a 10 MB hard drive. It felt like an enormous amount of space at the time and no longer required constant shuffling. As the joke goes though, “the steady state of disks is full,” and eventually the hard drive would get filled after binges of BBS downloading and it would be time to clean up. Since there was more wiggle room to work with, all I would do is walk the directory tree every once in a while, deciding which files I should keep on the drive, which ones I could copy off to floppies, and which I could do without and delete.

As time went on, things remained much the same. Drives got bigger and I could keep more files on the hard drive at a time, but the occasional pruning was still necessary. In order to manage the ever-increasing number of files, I had to organize them more efficiently too, so it was easier to archive or purge whole categories, detect duplicates, etc. WAV files over here, pictures over there, subdivide them into ‘kittens’ and ‘comics’ and so on…

Now, I have 240 gigs of disk space, and things are still much the same. Most of that is video recordings, and I have to be wary of running out of space and so every once in a while I go through and figure out which recordings I can keep, which I can delete, which I can burn to DVD or compress further…

But, I have other types of files, too. The MP3 collection, images, text files, smaller video clips, sounds, etc. The problem is that I don’t find myself going back and sorting and pruning these types of files like I used to. Why not? Well, the main difference between them is that these files are so much smaller than the video files that they’re no longer what drives me to clean up my data. I’m forced to manage the video files because if I don’t, I’ll run out of space fairly quickly and then the PVR schedules fall apart and I have no working space left, so dealing with them is mandatory. If I need disk space, I could sit down and browse through my picture directories for a few hours and free up maybe 20 megs of space, but why bother when I could push three buttons on the remote control and free up 5 gigs of disk space by watching and deleting a few TV episodes instead.

Now the only motivation left for sorting my files is to do it just for organization’s sake, in case I need to find something easily. It’s a habit I’m not used to though and, being lazy, one I probably won’t develop anytime soon. And so, much of my files remain in a rather disorganized state and it continues to get worse as I add new files.

But my collection of Star Trek episodes is immaculate.