Just another useless personal blog
On Tuesday I woke up to find that my carpet was a bit squishier than usual. It turned out that the water feed to the neighbour’s toilet had broken, and the water was leaking into my place as well. Fortunately it only reached half the bedroom, the bathroom, and one hallway, so the damage wasn’t that great. Just a bunch of cardboard boxes with wrecked bottoms, and I’ve got more boxes than I need anyway.
Cleaning up however, is taking a bit of effort. Continue reading “Carpet Fever”
I’ve been saving up a list of books that have been recommended by people I know from various places on the net. So, tonight I went down to the fairly large Chapters store at Chinook to buy some of them, and I could not find a single one of the titles.
It’s not like they’re obscure, out-of-print books either; I jumped on amazon.ca and found every one of them available new, and that’s where I’ll be getting them from. No, in most cases their major fault was simply being more than five or ten years old, or being earlier in a series. That last one in particular baffles me; they’ll stock the latest and greatest book in a long-running series or world, but not the early ones that someone new to it might like to start off at?
I also took a look at the technical books, and although there were a couple interesting ones, the standard prices are still a lot higher than what I can get online.
Instead, I just picked up a few popular classics that I’d been meaning to get around to eventually, but still left without a single one of the books I’d intended to get there. Amazon, here I come (again).
…thanks to having to haul a heavier-than-expected box home from the far too inconveniently located Purolator depot. It was worth it though, as the box contained my new toy:
Not enough time to set it up properly tonight, though.
Thanks, Jenn.
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…
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…
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…
So long free time…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
I’ve just written the last bit of new code that I’m responsible for on our current seemingly-neverending project. For the last, uh, 6 days or so it’ll be just bugfixes from here on.
As a special treat, I’ll let you in on a bit of secret, proprietary knowledge and show you exactly what the very last line of code was.
Are you ready?!
Continue reading “Ugh, Finally”
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
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.
A game sure to annoy mothers and girlfriends everywhere: Dream Stripper
Based on targeting like this you’d think gamers were largely desperate, lonely, immature men who…
Oh.
*sob*
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…
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…
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…