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September 28, 2004
Carpal Tunnel Part 2
Ahh, it's been quite a few months since I've been in the gamer groove. My wrist is down from really sore to just a dull ache. ;)
With such a dearth of good games for pretty much the entire year, there's now a flood of promising games coming out. Doom 3, Sims 2, Evil Genius, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Half Life 2, Halo 2, and more. Of course, as any gamer can tell you, probably half or less of that list will actually see daylight by xmas--but hey, even if that's the case, it's still a good group. Sims 2 and Doom 3 have already proven to be winners and the demo for Evil Genius was quite fun. So far, I haven't been selected for the WoW or EQ2 betas, but the games should be out soon (in theory) and the buzz has been promising.
This weekend, I paced my gaming a bit to keep the CTS down to a managable level. During the downtime, I was cleaning house a bit and saw my wine collection in the cupboard. I had just recently cataloged all of my books using a nice program called, curiously, Books. I figured I'd do the same for wines. There weren't any wine cellar programs that looked interesting, so I wrote my own, stole some layout and graphics from Karen's Flog and SquidFingers. The result is my Wine Log (or wlog). As I find time, I'll clean it up and make it more personalized and customizable--possibly over a glass of wine.
Posted at 09:59 PM | Life and Work | Comments (0)
September 23, 2004
The White Light at the End of the Carpal Tunnel
The Sims 2 wasn't the only thing I played this weekend, although I did get quite a few good play hours in. I also finally got to experience the newly released Doom 3 demo.
First thing on Monday morning, my right wrist ached like hell. It's been quite a while since I had a good CTS attack since it's usually been tennis elbow instead. But only today has my wrist actually felt better. I've not played any games since Sunday; babying it has helped and watching Star Wars on DVD has allowed me to do that.
So anyway, back to Doom 3. As with previous iterations, Doom 3 is a swirling palette of brown, black and red with occasional swatches of silver, yellow, blue and green. When people say the game is dark, they're most likely talking about the actual graphics, not the story. My nVidia 5200 is barely able to pump out better than 640x480 with reasonable frame rates and graphic options turned on. But that said, even at such a crappy resolution, the game is still ground breaking. The models and textures are extremely well done and the game is abundant in the oft overlooked gameplay element: mood. The story, while tired and overused, is presented in an incredibly engrossing manner.
When my wrist heals up some more, I just might have to buy the full game and spend another week or two in pain. Ahh, such is the life of a gamer. ;)
On a side note, I've been very impressed with the NewsFire RSS reader for the Mac. It's clean and simple--something a lot of software authors incorrectly consider poor design.
Posted at 09:35 AM | Life and Work | Comments (0)
September 18, 2004
Oh no... The Sims 2
It's taken a gazillion expansions and innumerable years, but The Sims have reared their heads again in The Sims 2. Yet again they become a threat to productivity and bring life to a grinding halt.
There is a bit of MMORPG/skinners influence to the game as creating a Sim is now mired in screen after screen of clothing choices and facial attributes (structure, makeup, accessories, hair styles, etc). It doesn't come close to the same level of enjoyment when customizing your hero in City of Heroes, but it's certainly entertaining to play with endless possibilities. And I'm sure it was a decision they consciously made, but this game has broken the mold for character customization and not provided a breast size modification option.
The engine has also been upgraded to a fully 3D environment. The controls are a little clumsy. You press and hold the mouse wheel for rotation and angle, but many mice don't have wheels that are really meant for click and hold.
The new animation is fantastic. The 3D models allow for subtle things like one character looks up from what they are doing and watches another character, whom they are interested in (good or bad), walks by. Simple actions such as cooking and serving food and sitting down for a bit are also much more fun to watch now.
Sadly, it's still The Sims in many respects. 2 also suffers from the time discontinuity that 1 suffered from. A Sim can change clothes in Tazmanian devil whirl, yet it takes them 20 (game) minutes to walk from a back room to the car waiting to take them to work.
All said, it's a very interesting and time consuming game and promises to be one in which you don't experience the entirety of the game until after many many many hours of play. Now I just dread the possibility of 17 expansions for The Sims 2. :P
Posted at 10:19 AM | Life and Work | Comments (0)
September 09, 2004
Mmmm...Mac
Ok, so I haven't come up with an epiphany, or some sort of mind-melting mental masturbation, but what I have done is some brainless code cleaning. Working on someone else's code--especially someone who wasn't trained properly--is very much like, well, metaphors fail me at the moment. There's so much cleaning up, moving stuff around, fixing broken code, and cursing the coder's mentors for passing on all the wrong bad habits that the brain just shuts down after a while and goes into cruise control. There's no thought involved in fixing broken code after the "code" of the code has been broken. Like that one? I'm proud of it. :)
Fortunately my episodes of mental drudgery have been interrupted by the arrival of a new tool. This machine is fantastic and it all started with bypassing another computer chore--file migration. I turned on the laptop, and it asked me if I wanted to migrate from an old machine. I did, but was afraid of looking thru the gigs of files and folders to determine what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to move. It prompted me thru a short series of steps:
1. Plug the two machines together with a FireWire cable.
2. Restart the other machine and hold down the T key to boot it as a FireWire external hard drive.
3. Click "Copy my shit." (or, something like that)
About an hour later, it had copied over 27 gigs of settings, applications, data files, music, pictures and system settings. Another set of steps:
1. Unplug the FireWire cable.
2. Shut off the iMac and remove the network cable (because I'm using a fixed IP, they would cause network fits if they were both on at the same time).
3. Click "Continue." I don't remember if the Powerbook rebooted or not.
The next thing I saw was the familiar desktop from my iMac, on the Powerbook. Everything was as it was on the iMac--only on a 1.5Ghz G4/1G RAM. The pain of moving was gone. Simply, utterly, overly amazing. Bravo Apple. Bravo!
Now, if only moving houses had been that easy. :P
Posted at 08:33 PM | Life and Work | Comments (0)
September 07, 2004
Blogging - The Antacid
I've noticed that the more often I blog, the more mundane the content becomes and far less vitriol gets injected. To me, the ranting is the fun stuff and the day-to-day stuff is simply boring. I just don't lead that exciting a life and telling others about it is even less stimulating. I mean, exactly how exciting is it to know that I watched nearly all of the West Wing marathon yesterday while retro gaming with Sid Meier's Civilization 2, Civilization 2: Test of Time, and Sid Meier's Civilization 3? BFD!
To me, the extraordinary, the biting, the abnormal and the inciting rhetoric is far more entertaining and thought provoking--even if those thoughts are of anger, disappointment, or dissent. Discourse is a discussion, an exchange of ideas, thoughts and points and counter-points. Relating mundane details of my generic actions is one-sided regurgitation which stimulates little more than the sleep centers of the brain.
To that end, as the blogger, it becomes my responsibility to step it up and establish the, albeit solo, discussion. This involves creativity and thought, neither of which are generally brimming on a Monday (or Tuesday after a long weekend). So let's see what sort of exhilarative verbal spewage I can eek out in the next couple of days. ;)
Posted at 09:03 AM | Rants and Opinions | Comments (0)
September 03, 2004
Moving Electronically
I'm rather amazed at how much of the move was accomplished electronically. I changed the address on nearly all of my magazine subscriptions online via (poorly designed) web sites and a few others via emails to customer service addresses. My postal service address was changed online for $1. Credit Cards were easy as well.
Surprisingly, on Amazon.com it was difficult to change my address. I had ordered a few things and didn't realize until I got the confirmation email that I had forgotten to change my address to the new one. I followed their FAQ to change address and it wouldn't let me make corrections where it said I should. I had to hunt and fight and circle around a few times to figure out how to make the changes and still I'm not sure I got all that I should have. Boo on them!
Of course, every day, I think of someplace else that I need to update my address. :P
Posted at 08:28 AM | Life and Work | Comments (0)