Speaking of Driving Games…

Though I don’t have an XBox, I keep running across bits of information about Forza Motorsports here and there.

The good news is that it features the ability to highly customize your cars, including custom paint jobs with a lot of detail, and race them against others online.

The bad news is that it means you may wind up suffering the humiliation of being beaten by someone in this. (From the Forza Customization site.)

Thirty-Second Reviews

So named because that’s about all the time I’ve had to play them recently…

Champions of Norrath (PS2): It bears little resemblance to the original EverQuest, and could be any old generic fantasy environment with the names swapped, but it’s still a fun hack-and-slash Diablo-II-esque game. Sometimes you just want to run around and Beat Stuff Up, and this fills that need perfectly.

God Of War (PS2): Wow, a fighting game I might actually not suck at. Great graphics (and not just for the prurient reasons), smooth controls, and plenty of action and puzzles.

The Simpsons: Hit And Run (PC): The Simpsons meet Grand Theft Auto. Much like the GTA games it’s fun to just randomly explore and find hidden stuff. Missions are challenging, but not impossible, and usually quick enough that you can retry it a few times without getting too frustrated. Plus, it’s fun to drive around like a maniac in the various vehicles, knocking lampposts and mailboxes over and sending people diving for cover…

Gran Turismo 4 (PS2): This game is a continual reminder of how awful I am at driving. But, it’s at least still fun to collect all of the exotic cars, take some action shots, and fiddle with the B-spec mode on the longer and more difficult races. I just wish I had the time or patience to dedicate to actually putting in some real practice.

Pushin’ That Rock

As part of the effort to work more exercise into my day, I’ve been taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever possible. It’s a lot more practical at the office now that we’re only five flights of stairs up instead of seventeen.

Unfortunately, the building staff is being a bit lax in their duties. About half the time, I come in in the morning, walk up the stairs, and suddenly discover that the stairwell door is still locked, even though they’re supposed to have opened it an hour earlier. So, then I have to go back down and take the elevator up anyway.

At least I still get the exercise, but it still feels pointless sometimes…

(Update: And it’s still locked as of lunchtime…)

I Think I’m Going Nuts

There’s still some construction work and last-minute repairs going on around the new office, and sometimes they’re hard to ignore…

There’s a high-pitched whistling sound coming through the air conditioning vents in the areas around my office. It might not be so bad if it was a constant tone as it would then just blend into the rest of the background noise, but it wavers slightly in frequency, constantly drawing attention to itself. And, apparently my hearing is better than I thought it was, as I’ve been having difficulty convincing others that it even exists. It’s plain as day to me, but I had to drag the boss into one of the rooms where it was the loudest before he could notice it. Supposedly it should get fixed when they rebalance the air flow, but they can’t do that until they fix a broken air conditioning unit, and who knows when they’re going to get around to that…

They’ve also finally placed the glass partitions by the door frames and sealed them with silicone. Unfortunately, that means the whole office now smells like silicone fumes. Plus, my door frame is apparently slightly crooked, so they’ve placed a brace there to force it open a bit wider while the silicone sets. And by ‘brace’ I mean a chunk of wood stretched across the middle of the door frame so that I have to duck underneath it every time I leave or come back.

To my smelly office. Where my brain gets stabbed with a high-pitched knife.

A Hint To Ebayers

Don’t link to someone else’s site when putting up pictures of an iBook for your auction. Not only is it bandwidth leeching, but it’s potentially fraudulent since it’s not really your own system. Yours could be missing half the keys and have a huge scratch across the screen, but the buyers can’t tell that if it looks brand new in the picture because it’s someone else’s.

Plus the webmaster could replace it with goatse…

(fortunately I’m in a good mood)

At Least It’s Exercise

When I first started working here, our office was in the same building as a fairly decent food court and right next to a couple other good ones. When we moved away, I could still get to those food courts through the +15 walkway system, I just had to go through about 9 buildings to get to it. After the next move, it was 15 buildings. And now it’s 18 buildings, and backtracks a couple blocks since not all buildings are directly connected.

Ah, the things we do to avoid going outside…

Not Paranoid Enough

Dammit. Despite thinking of myself as someone careful about these things, my web server was hacked earlier this morning. It’s my own fault though, as I’ve been getting a bit sloppy. I tested out AWStats a while back, left it installed, forgot about it, didn’t keep it updated, and of course the hack was then done through an AWStats flaw…

What I should have done was either 1) not have kept it installed, 2) placed a password check on it, 3) joined the AWStats announcements list, where I would have gotten a notice about the flaw earlier, or 4) used a distro where it would have been part of the standard packages and automatically updated.

Oh well. Fortunately, since I watch logs like a hawk, I noticed it and shut it down within 15 minutes of the initial break. Since the web server runs as ‘nobody’ it couldn’t actually damage anything; it just kicked off a script to port scan other systems. It’s still depressing to realize that you’ve helped make the problem worse though, even by only a little, and if I can’t find the time to admin this properly, maybe it’s not worth the hassle.

Too Old, Too New

One of the great things about operating systems like Windows is that, in its role as an abstraction of the hardware and other fundamental tasks, with an emphasis on backwards compatibility, you don’t have to care too much about specific versions of the OS. Write code that works on Windows 95, and it should work on future versions of Windows forevermore, right?

Well, maybe…
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