IT'S A WORK OF ART

So, I have this new laptop, an HP tx2z touchscreen laptop, and I've been generally happy about it, but I didn't realize how much so until I started trying to touch non-touchscreen screens like they'd automatically respond.

It's an amazing laptop for its price: I got mine for $900, shipping and tax included. What I needed was a worker laptop, and that's precisely what it is. I had to sacrifice the idea of an onboard video card (no options for it last I recall) and sound card (a Realtek chipset instead) which means no heavy audio processing and no hardcore video games, but honestly I don't care, that's what my desktop's for anyway. Or will be, when I upgrade my processor... anyway. The one thing that really has me excited about this touchscreen laptop is, indeed, the touch.

It's a multi-touch display for starters. In practicality this doesn't mean much except with photos you can resize them and rotate them with your fingers. However, it does mean that you can use your fingers for single touch as well, and that's very important--taking out a stylus every time I want to touch something is pointless. And wow, I've gotten used to it quick. The thing is, it's just so natural to run my finger over something I want to highlight, for example, or to brush up and down on the screen for scrolling, or just pushing on-screen buttons for navigation. That can be hard to manage windows being minimized and closing even with thin fingers like mine, but using the Chrome browser, it's easy to select the address in the address bar or click one of the recent webpage buttons in the 'new tab' section... it opens up a whole new dimension to laptops that has to become standard in the next couple laptop generations, seriously. Even when transitioning between the mouse and the touchscreen, it's a very natural feeling, and it's not even in tablet mode yet. (In tablet mode, by the way, rotating a PDF by 90 degrees gives you a book-size reader mode, and you navigate pages by brushing your hand back and forth on the screen which is so easy.) But using this laptop makes you feel like you're in the future, and anyone who's sat next to me while I've used it has agreed.

There are some downsides, some of which is listed above--video card and sound card weren't even an option if I recall, and that's likely because there's just so much stuff already to go with this laptop. The buttons for general navigation through a Windows OS are just too small by default though I think that can be changed (with the elderly in mind). Most problematic is that the HP laptop uses an N-Trig digitizer pad for the multitouch and stylus input, which doesn't mean much to anyone except artists trying to use Photoshop. The first thing any artist would realize is that they have absolutely no pressure sensitive control with the paintbrush, which I found out the hard way too. And while someone claims to be working on a solution, this has been a problem since the last generation tx2. Fortunately I don't need that level of control, but it means that there is no serious market for this laptop yet except those who really like having toys that can help save a bit of time and be ridiculously cool-looking to play around with. Artists, musicians, and gamers will feel left-out--despite what I've heard about Starcraft on a multitouch interface--but me, playing the role of programmer this time around, find the touchscreen useful for drawing notes, flow charts, diagrams, all that. And as a media laptop, it's brilliant. Watching movies on here is a joy when you don't have to worry about the keyboard being in the way, and HP was kind enough to include 2 headphone jacks for a friend, as well as a pop-out remote control.

It's the future of computers, and really this should be mainstream technology by now. Certainly it doesn't take long to catch on to poking one's screen and finally seeing something happen beyond pixels turning funny colors for a moment.

Today is when the SciFi channel is changing its name to SyFy, and so here is a poorly-formed insult to go with the poorly-designed new name:

Fuck you, SyFy, fuck you and your hats.

I can't explain why that was the first thing into my head, but I said it. Which I'm pretty sure is how things work over at SciFi: "What exactly is the logic behind that?" "It just popped into my head. Roll with it. Nothing could go wrong." It's probably how we got such gems like Mansquito from these people.

Here's a bit of irony: when the channel was first made, there was a panel of science fiction writers talking to the people who wanted to make the SciFi channel, and the writers were angry, quite so, that they wanted to go with 'Sci Fi' as they said repeatedly that it was science fiction which was the serious, thought provoking storytelling that they do, and that sci fi stood for all the corny, goofy mainstream gibberish that has no place next to true science fiction. The panel didn't calm down until Isaac Asimov gave a dissenting opinion from the rest after some time, saying they should give the channel creators a chance. Asimov, a great writer of profound, compelling science fiction stood up for these guys, likely in hopes that they'd be able to bring the serious stuff to the mainstream.

And all that comes out of these guys now is corny, goofy gibberish, when they even bother to do anything sci fi. They just went all "suck it, Asimov" over the years, and WE get to reap the benefits!

Way back when the channel was for the first time included in our cable plan, we were pretty mystified. We had a lot of sci fi we liked to watch, and we figured this was the natural place for it all, the goofy and serious stuff, and for a couple years we rarely deviated from that channel whenever we didn't want to watch the news or something. Now it's hard to stand watching any of it. Sure, they have a couple interesting shows, but more or less they aren't compelling like good science fiction should be, it's stuff like Eureka which, while a decent show, is still goofy and stuff and should be countered with more upcoming serious programming, what with BSG having disappeared. And with reality shows? Ghost Hunters? They think this name change justifies them to do that stuff since now people don't even have to expect sci fi programming from a sci fi channel. I'm just... argh.

It had grown increasingly apparent that there was no place to go to get good science fiction over the past few years, and then even good sci fi. Before long, there won't be any sci fi, and there will be the ultimate irony solidified in the fact that the only place to turn to for high-tech science fiction stories won't be what should be an increasing television and movie presence, but it'll be a low-tech book.

My final thought is this: Why SyFy, and why not some other word that redefines what the channel is and will let them play their dumb little game more justifiably? Like "Imagine" or "If" or "Journey" or something like that, all of those could stand for a wide variety of television (Except ECW, that's just stupid anyways) and it seems like that would've been the wiser choice. Failures after failures... At least it wouldn't be hard for me to just boycott this channel, there's hardly any reason for me to turn it on these days.

This is a message to anyone and everyone who is interested in testing out some IRC software.

I always felt kinda bad for Khaled, the guy who wrote mIRC. I'd always use his stuff without paying, though he graciously allowed my use of his client anyways.

That is, until I found out I could hack together a bare-bones client in Python in a week.

That's right, yours truly has written a simple client that has its own GUI, connects to a server, parses the (horribly ugly) IRC protocol for the most basic commands, and allows for chatting.

It's still horribly buggy, as there's so much random tidbit info that has to go back and forth between the server and client for soooo many things--however, the current release is more a proof-of-concept than a fully-fledged client. It does things like, oh, if you click the X to close a window/then you can't re-open that window until after you disconnect, nick changes in a channel make all the ops display your nick instead of theirs, so on... but hey, it's a start. Of the few hundred handle codes the server hands out, I take care of... 10? 20?

Anyways, the client is in pre-alpha 1, which means it's got only 800 lines of text and might as well be held together by duct tape, but the pre-alpha test phase is one week long. If you want to give it a try, I would appreciate any and all feedback on bug fixes to add to my to-do list (which is already big). Send me an IM or email and I'll provide the link. All I ask in return is some screenshots of the client on your system to see how it's formatting, the OS and screen resolution you're running, and then any obvious stdout/stderr messages (they pop up in a little window for you, how convenient). By the time it's ready for Alpha (which is when the client will be altered drastically) I'll have an IRC client that will rival mIRC in design and likely will keep a copy like that--or redistribute it to those who want another IRC option.

Watch some Internet: The Movie.

Educational video from 1997 about how to use the internet.

Educational videos are, by their nature, pretty bad. This one is mind-bogglingly bad. And that makes it great. Plus, it's fun to make fun of a time when Netscape was THE browser.

A friend's brother found the video tape at a garage sale, and they made it into a digital file and put it up on the internet for your enjoyment. That's a fun anomaly, an out-of-date internet tutorial hosted on the internet to watch only to make fun of said internet and the horrid production values.

It doesn't even do anything helpful for a new internet user until like 20 minutes into the hour-long feature (and around that time is probably the most hilarious moment in the thing). That's 1/3 of the movie being an intro about random nothingness in the most ridiculous way.

Go watch.

I currently have a beta for Windows 7 that I'm giving a test-run, and it's fairly interesting. Got it from someone who nabbed a disc and then changed their mind about messing around with potentially-wonky software, so here I am.

Good stuff: well, it's Vista with all the things people complained about tweaked properly. You can turn off the little warning notifications that are standard in Vista (though they don't bug me, I'm a rebel in leaving them on) and things can be set to look and feel like Vista. I'm testing the software on an old Inspiron laptop though, so high graphics capabilities are off--and actually, without them, this thing boots and works fast.

Also nice is the taskbar, which instead of having long text lines next to an icon, are now just icons showing what's opened. It's no harder to navigate, and it actually works out better for me since I like to have my taskbar docked at the right side of my screen rather than the bottom meaning I don't have to have a huge taskbar. Couple that with clever things like a download in IE8 that shows a green progress bar within the icon itself, and it really saves desktop space and rummaging around to see statuses of downloads. On top of that, tasks from the same program stack, so there aren't five IE task icons in the taskbar. Rather, it's a click to the icon and then a click to whatever window you want displayed, even if it's within a tab on a window--that tab will be displayed right at the top rather than fishing around for the right tab.

Also, as Vista had it, stuff is really integrated and it works well together. Windows Defender/Firewall and a download of the antivirus of one's choice, and they all seem to sync up. Granted, I had to look around for AVG Free as it wasn't offered in the provided links, but it works just fine and doesn't get in the way of anything else. And once it was installed, it ended up integrated with the system as the 'Action Center' took over notifications and scheduling requests for it. As well, AVG works within IE8 (Which is faster than the latest Firefox for me and doesn't hang on ads) to do some on-screen site checking and can alert me of phony sites or whatever with a little icon next to a link, pretty nifty even if that isn't something special to IE8, but with AVG Free and IE7 on Vista I didn't see that. Even hardware is integrated well--I put in a Linksys wireless card and while I was looking for the install CD, Windows automatically determined its driver without connecting to the internet.

The bad: well, it's a beta build but people are saying it's as good as a release candidate, so I'm going to point out the fact that in the... 11 hours I've had it installed, it's crashed more times than my Vista machine has in its entire lifespan, and that's a valid point if people want to consider this beta a release candidate worthy build. It's spiffy, it's shiny, but under the hood things are still buggy.

Also, Explorer seems weird now, it's not intuitive to navigate. There's Favorites and Libraries, but no installed setting for jumping straight to my user folder where I tend to store things rather unconventionally. I can add that to Favorites, I assume, but it's something that wasn't ever weird on Vista for me.

Anyways, that's that. This stuff runs on an old PC and looks pretty good at that, hopefully bugs will be worked out for the final release.

So... sore...

We had to make a trip back to the east side of the state early for school, even though there's still about a week's worth of winter vacation to finish up. And, of course, as I look out my window now, today would've been a much better day snow-wise to return.

Yesterday, the first problem we encountered was trying to get over the mountain pass, which was basically Hell, frozen over. To top it all off, we got to the pass only 15 minutes too late to avoid avalanche control work, so we ended up stopped for an hour listening to a howitzer cannon fire into a mountainside to force an avalanche and then clean it up. That wasn't too long of a wait fortunately, it could've been worse if we wait 4 hours to find out we had to go back and then take an 8 hour drive to get to our destination...

Anyway, we get here, and I have to go shovel the snow while other people grocery shop, we left the car in the store parking lot. The trek just back up to the house was evil, because all the snowplows moved -all- the snow onto the sidewalks, and the only way to walk up was to walk in the holes of other pedestrians or make my own, until I got to the side-road where I could wander in the middle of that. At that time, the snow in untouched areas was about a foot and a half--plowed up, it was nearly four feet in places and at times I sank into the snow way further than I should have, and had to actually dig myself out.

The shoveling part was the next 'fun' part as the idea was grocery shopping would work as a time sink while I moved at my own pace. Lo and behold, though, I got a call 10 minutes later saying shopping was done. Well, by the time, I had... found the shovel. So I relayed a message back to sit tight for like an hour until I had a space for the car. Of course snow was piled high in front of the driveway by the plows too, they don't take that into account, so not only was I digging some crazy-heavy rain-laden snow, I had to dig out the mess that was nearly as tall as me in front of the drive! >_<

Anyway, I made just enough space for the car to come up and not be sticking out in the road, though things were difficult when it turns out there was a giant fallen tree branch buried in the snow. Big one, and half-buried by the plow, meant we couldn't move it, I had to shovel the path around it and then hold it back while the car moved up in the drive. From there, we shoveled the snow in 3 stages to get the car up and into the garage, painfully long work with how much snow was left. Not to mention the walkway and such were buried so we had to do that too, but whatever. We eventually got everything in, but not after doing some painful work after having sat still for 6 hours.

And of course, today, the rain and 'heat wave' is taking care of the snow, it would've been easy to do all that stuff today, but of course we just had to get here! Why, I dunno, as my brother's not doing any work until later... but we're here again.

You probably don't remember reading this post about the Space Needle fireworks show in '08, but it was very funny to go back and read it.

And after watching this year's presentation, I found it actually rather interesting--they re-used the music from last year in some spots, though shuffled around--they made sure to re-use the music that had failing fireworks in 2008.

It seems a bit symbolic to me, like 2009 is a second, proper chance at things. And given how my last New Year post was prophetic in how crappy 2008 was in many regards, 2009 maybe will be a proper fix.

Here's to hoping!

In a medical tale that would be weird enough to be an episode of House but is unfortunately too non-life-threatening and ultimately boring to ever be featured, a condition that has afflicted me since very early this year will finally be corrected after this school year's ended. ...maybe it'd be that miniature side story they have sometimes.

Anyways, first doctor trip, three months into facial twitching and ear problems with pressure and hearing, they said it was an allergy causing a eustachian tube dysfunction (runs between ear and throat and affects ear pressure)--my sinuses were acting up. Gave me some nasal spray, that didn't work. Second trip, there could've been something wrong with my inner ear, maybe requiring surgery to fix the pressure. Trip to ear nose and throat guy, he says to get an audiogram. I take one of those--the ears themselves read as fine. This, obviously, puzzles some doctors. And me too. A list of possible causes arose--jaw, neck, spine, tumor, neurological, or psychological.

Fortunately, once the neurologist saw me, she was able to pretty quickly figure out potentially what was wrong--the nerves behind my ear, two large ones with one controlling hearing/balance and the other nearly the entire left side of my face, were for some reason shorting out. Their unusual interaction creates the hearing/balance problems (it turns out I sway and I'm not supposed to, but I didn't notice) and causes my face's left side to tighten up.

The reason other doctors didn't consider it to be this problem is because the usual candidates for this neurological problem are women in their 50's and 60's. ...I am not in that bracket.

Fortunately, it's treatable, and perhaps fixable. I have an MRI scheduled on Christmas Eve of all days, and if they can determine why they're shorting out (blood vessel's weird perhaps) they can do surgery, otherwise the recommended solution is--I find it funny--botox. They 'fix' the nerve by in essence killing its effects.

In any case, I'm done with medical mysteries, next year I'm shooting for: zero.

I know it's just a game, but... being #1 at something is real exciting.

At the moment, I'm ranked #1 on the XBox leaderboards for a time trial in the Mirror's Edge demo, on the Edge map. With a time of 42.74, I beat the previous record holder by a huge gap of .14 seconds when usually we're lucky to shave off one or two hundredths when approaching the top. I think there's an even faster time on the PS3 leaderboards, so I'll still have to work before I can say 'fastest everywhere'.

That game is fun as hell. Though, getting that fast in the time trial mode was frustrating, but I don't think it was just a lucky break--I'd made a pretty steady progression upwards in the ranks, where I was at 209 for a while yesterday.

There's a whole other map, I'll probably play that one for a while until I have to reclaim my spot at the top. It is, after all, only the third day of the demo...and nine more days until the actual game is out for me to re-earn the time.

What makes me happy is I've been stoked about this game for months, and when I'm truly excited about something it usually ends up being either really crappy, or something I find fun but not something I'm necessarily good at. Mirror's Edge fortunately fits nicely in everywhere, as the gameplay is enjoyable but to excel it's exceedingly difficult. It lends itself very well to a musician's sense of repetition in practice.

Edit: I returned from class and saw I was third, with a really impressive time leading the way at 42:50. So, I did what any good gamer would do, I challenged it! And I walked away with a time of 42:39. Getting close on that 42.24 mark that I think is what the PS3 record sits at...

38 miles per gallon

Created by The Car Connection

Hehe, nice.

It's not really the article but the comments that get me.

For those who don't want to click, it's basically about someone using a Blackberry as reference to the work McCain did in support of telecoms while he was a senator. I'd say about 90% of the (huge) comment list misinterpreted this into an "Al Gore invents the internet" moment, saying they're trying to say McCain invented the Blackberry.

I'm no McCain fan based off of, you know, actually reviewing policy and stances and weighing in on how that may affect presidency. But dear gods, people are going to use this sort of crap to weigh in on an election with? "McCain creates blackberry = more lies on McCain camp!" Ugh.

Just because k-12 education is mandatory doesn't mean the people of the nation are actually educated to the point where they can make rational decisions en-masse. And honestly, I don't think the right to vote should apply to everyone over 18 if this is how it's done. There should be the condition that people are voting after being well-versed on the subject matter. Voter pamphlets aren't enough if people think this is proper.

I'd like a system like jury selection. It doesn't have to be excruciatingly divisive into the kinds of people who can and cannot vote, but giving people a voice when they don't understand the issues -constantly- happens in elections and that should change. It may sound a bit draconian to restrict who can vote (even by a degree of maybe stopping %.1 of potential voters from weighing in) but other fields don't let you cast uninformed opinions on huge issues that actually reach the source in some sort of result. The selection process would simply pick out people who think it's fair to vote on someone or have their opinion swayed solely on their looks, on stupid misunderstandings like above, so on and so forth.

You know what has a voting system that works better than our current political system? American Idol. You vote for the singer you like to hear, and while you may not be a vocal expert, you're certainly somewhat qualified to pick something you'd want to hear more of, and it's based (mostly) off of the experience between what you hear from the person. Good people stick around, bad people (usually) get the boot except in special cases of people doing that idiotic phoning in for the worst to keep them around because it's for the lulz.

Next time on Haley's rants: why the evolution of "for the lulz" is retarded.

Just got back from a John Butler Trio concert, fucking wow.

First, there's no question why they're platinum artists in Australia, they're all amazing. Butler played Ocean which is all him doing percussion, bass, and guitar on his acoustic. Drummer had an 8-minute solo, the other two just left the stage while he played, it was pretty crazy. To top it all off, in the encore, the other two stopped playing while the drummer continued again--but this time they all picked up drumsticks and were all banging on the drums.

What -does- beg a question is what the hell they were doing in the middle of nowhere. They'd never played here before, it seemed spur-of-the-moment for them to hop in and for the crowd to show, it was all free and felt very impromptu. Not bad, of course, but did their jet break down and it just so happened to coast into our local airport? I dunno, some people said there were posters in a building, but I didn't see them. And they had no clue they'd even get a turnout, the band was convinced no one would show according to some of the security folks.

Odd, but one of those "hell yeah" moments where I get an excellent vantage point in an excellent concert for free.

Now, to figure out when Mike Birbiglia is coming back to Seattle, since I'll pay to see his standup shows. Being broke sure doesn't help, gotta pick and choose to see all these free shows and then Birbigs somehow.

People who want a game to play in beta in a couple months and want to try an online game with a different feel (as in cops-and-robbers feel) should go to www.apb.com and click on Register Interest.

I'm already guaranteed an APB beta key, so I'm just waiting it out. The game is, above all else, going to potentially offer up tons of character customization as well as vehicle customization. Likely, images will be able to be imported to print directly onto clothes, skin as tattoos, and vehicles. If anything, people can try making fun characters and go about as far with the game as the Spore creature creator.

Haircut daaaaaaay~

Wavy hair's a curse. People may be envious of natural waves and curls, but it doesn't exactly work out like magic... it usually waves exactly like I don't want it to. So, shorter is better.

In other news, everyone's having fun somewhere, whether it's PAX in Seattle or DragonCon in Atlanta... haircut is my most exciting weekend activity.

Video game rant!

In yet another example of games that used to be fun but are now following the trend of 'not', we look at Soul Calibur 4. Or I do, as I still on occasion get the idea that I might find a fighter fun.

Technically, this game still has aspects that made the last one fun, the problem being another person is required to partake in fun-having. Yes, versus mode is what ends up being the saving grace in games now, because humans are usually on the same level in the important aspects. We have to read what's going on on the screen, and then respond to it via our controllers, and the game has to account for our wireless controller's lag times and human error of inputting bad commands on occasion.

Computers, on the other hand, have none of that. They can input commands with a fail rate of 0%, and do so on a stack that requires minimum downtime between combos. This, in fighting games, makes some of the later stages very difficult in that you're competing against a machine designed solely to be smarter than you at playing that game, but even then programmers were kind enough to leave reasonable openings and windows that a trained eye could exploit. Bandai said 'fuck that' pretty quick, though. In all modes of the game that aren't ridiculously easy (such as normal story mode, which consists of five unbearably short stages with... no story...) the game lets the CPU have its way with the human characters, and the CPU seems very aware of that. The Tower of Lost Souls is the new game mode, which consists of 60 floors where on each floor you fight between 1 and 3 opponents, and usually floors are arranged in sets of three--so getting to level 52 means one must beat level 50 and 51 every time they wish to reach 52. It's expected that around floor 50 is when the game should be hard (and it is), but it was also incredibly difficult at level 20. There's something wrong when a system like that is difficult beyond belief and you're not even halfway through.

Hard, yes, but not impossible. The key to beating most of the levels is to customize characters that can handle that floor set. The problem with this is customization means putting on a bunch of different clothes for a character (either established or fully custom, you can adjust either) based only on the stats that each article of clothing provides. This means you cannot fight through stages looking how you want to, which I thought was the -point- of customization. Instead, characters look like they woke up that morning and had a bout of clothing ADHD, which is the only way to explain why I was wearing an officer's hat, thief's mask, prayer beads, ruffled shirt, some sort of bone belt, and big honking armored boots.

The sad thing is, this strategy of building effective characters only takes one so far--for me, it took me to level 50-52, where I remain. I've been there for 4 days, despite constant revisions to characters. Twice I've nearly come close to beating it, but that was based on sheer luck. That's because there's more to the problem than letting the CPU have a field day with combos--not only can it react faster than humans, the system allows it to input and execute moves where even the best human players are forced to sit through a frame delay. What this means specifically is if I swing my sword, I have to wait for the sword to finish swinging before the game registers my block command. Because CPU commands can go on a stack or at the very least are not limited by the variables a human must face in the game, their responses are instant and impossible for the best human players to replicate even by accident--a big no-no for gaming if you ask me. Because I cannot ever rise to being as good as what I play against, despite using equips that are much stronger than theirs, another problem arises with the fun: it becomes pointless to do anything but use one or two moves on characters. Level 52 has four characters with rapiers that can attack with near no opening for a long timeframe that becomes impossible to continually block. The only thing to do for three of the characters is a move that throws them out of the ring, which is difficult enough to pull off when I'm not being stabbed to death. Oh, but it only works for three, the fourth character happens to not take much damage from even my strongest attacks and can't be knocked out of the ring... and at this point, I'd just fought through two levels of characters that obviously died, but still were a headache, as the CPU is brutal when you give it an inch. If I'm lucky enough to get rid of the other three characters on level 52, I have to face a tiny girl who is freakishly strong, can respond instantly to me, can throw combos with little to no error, and my health bar is at nothing anyways.

Again, that's level 52, but that means once I do somehow get through it, there's level 53 and on, with even harder people to fight. It's just not fun, it wasn't fun to get to that point and it won't continue. And that's a problem, when the only reason I want to get through a level is to show the disk that I am better than it, which I am, as I can take the disk out and step on it. It's supposed to be hard at this point, but it shouldn't have been near-impossible getting to that point. Some levels were just ridiculous, and that shouldn't be acceptable for a game that doesn't provide a lot of alternative options. Games that have modes designed to challenge people usually have plenty of stuff for the casual gamer to do as well, but this game feels like except for the incredibly boring story modes, it's just one big challenge mode. It's just poor brain processes going into Bandai's idea about what makes a game interesting, as everything that -should- be fun had the fun sucked out of it. To be good at the game I have to play an ugly character that knows one move, as anything else just leads to more frustration.

These problems plague games today, though. Sure, I spent a lot of time talking about specifics for SC4, but it's not dissimilar from everything else out there. Customizing characters elsewhere is either very limited, or restrictive in stats. You can't dress a character up how you want because gameplay becomes gimped, and so on. A.I. is ridiculous at times, it's at a point in games where it's either too easy or too hard, there's rarely a happy medium because programming algorithms that would grant a human sort of randomness rather than a faux-computer randomness would require the Japanese programmers to put down their hentai mags and stop worrying about the rendering of breasts (which is one of the few things that looks like it had extensive work done in the game, sadly, and even worse is that they still didn't get it right). On top of all of that: grind. Grinding is the worst, absolute worst, thing to happen to gaming.

"But all games have some form of grind" you may say. Yes, gameplay elements dictate that usually you'll do the same thing from the beginning to the end, but usually you'll do them because you want to, you can see the natural progression throughout the game and it keeps you excited to continue onward. I wouldn't call that grind, that's just gameplay. The grind's that point in-between where you're tricked into playing the game as if it were some sort of job--the void between fun times, even if you're using elements that occur in the fun times. When you have no alternative game modes except "practice" to use to get better at a part of the game, you have to repeat endlessly through earlier or current levels to learn to win--and you have to repeatedly play levels over and over to get gold to buy new items and weapons. That's where the grind comes in. Of course, the best way to make money often tends to be either tedious or difficult, and having to fight the same characters 100+ times in a row is definitely grind. If Bandai actually paid me, I'd mind less. They're making me do a job, after all. But they don't even give me decent rewards for my efforts. I have no reason to continue on, there is nothing waiting for me as I have all the items unlocked through the XBox achievements, which circumvented the game's idiocy by letting me do fun things.

Unfortunately I don't think I got out all the frustration I currently feel for this game. It is not for a casual gamer, and pros would find it painful too. Everything fun is tainted or screwed up from past games, and while the game is beautifully rendered, that is near only its redeeming quality. Why gamers let this crap continue to be made and sold for the ridiculous prices games are at is beyond me.

Oh, it has online mode, but no way am I playing with the brats on Live. No one wins or loses, you hax or 'are noob'.

I don't know why my dad does sudoku puzzles.

I don't think he's ever finished one, because when he works on them he falls asleep partway through it. Always.

So I'm reading this article about which OS will be more appealing in the future, Mac OSX series or a Linux one. And I do understand that Windows wouldn't really be in consideration for future computing purposes despite its size, mostly because of computing trends and the dichotomy that OSX and Linux offer--one for users that want an easy experience that we willingly call "geniuses", and the other for actual geniuses of computing that we willingly call "pricks".

But people forget that the present-day situation requires Windows, because that's the platform of choice for development and compatibility. I know that it's a bit wonky, but really, without Windows there'd be less of the standards we have today--and yet in the article's discussion the idiots are willing to go so far as to call installing a Windows OS on a computer "Infecting" it.

Windows is not a virus or disease, it's a powerhouse that the underdogs (and their userbase) are too stupid to combat outside of a poorly-worded verbal lashing. Mostly the Linux users that have the audacity to say such crap, nevermind that Linux is generally ugly, has the learning curve the size of Everest if you didn't grow up on computers, and... get this... just doesn't work as good as a competitor to Windows should. Sure, it's free, which is fine--people can find uses for their free OS, and I even have it on my laptop so it's not like I'm saying this out of hatred for the OS. But without WINE, the WINdows Emulator, it'd be fucked. Because to be honest, some open-source alternatives just can't compete with some Windows stuff.

Now, it is the fault of hardware and software makers that they are designed only with Windows in mind, but it's not like Linux is throwing them a bone. Not even some of the open-source programs in the package manager know how to properly utilize the OS they were written for.

It's a lot like this: Windows is a model airplane kit, Linux is Legos. With the kit, you can only really get what the kit is supposed to make, but it's pretty obvious what goes where, and that makes people happy. Without the lego instructions, though, you may be able to make whatever you want, but not only is it daunting to try to come up with an idea of something large from all those small pieces that look nothing alike, but so many combinations are just crap. Innovative, but crap. And trying to make add-on parts, maybe paint or decals for the kit is easy enough for some 3rd party developer--designing a new lego part is workable in theory, until you try and figure out just how you can always stick it on in certain configurations that just don't make sense.

The bottom line is, Linux doesn't work as a viable alternative to Windows -right now-. In the future, if people can get their act together and make it appealing and useful, maybe we'll see it loaded more often on computers being shipped out to Joe Somebody. But for someone to attack Windows as if it is a plague while they're running an OS that is only useful and functional to a crazy minority, they are stupider than a Linux user should be.

I enjoy some of the arguments against Vista, though--like talking about how you have to verify program accesses all the time as an admin. Funny, though, as that's exactly what Linux does, except you have to type your root password every time. If they use the back way in and just act as root on their computer, they can very easily open their computer up to all sorts of trouble. Kettle? Pot's calling. He says "black".

There's just something annoying about a Linux fanboy. Which isn't to say other fanboys are any better in other departments, but they're what piss me off today.

So, internets are finally, finally back to full normalness. It was painful to get things back to full capacity even after getting the proper modem and technically having working internet for a while. 'Working' meaning connect-worthy, but slow. IRC was the only reliable thing that didn't seem to suck up all the transfer capacity the network would give me, as trying to go to one website with any amount of pictures meant a 5-10 minute wait... it felt like being back on a 28.8 connection >_<

Anyways, now that I'm back,I decided to pick up the WoW battlechest so I could play with friends at their request. Telling people about it, though, doesn't result in the kind of conversation I expect. I expected stuff like "Oh, I've played that before, it was fun," or "I haven't played it but I saw the South Park episode" and stuff like that. But -every single- person I talked to said a variation of "you should play in this server, I have a friend there with like five level 70s and he'll hook you up!"

-_-;

Anyways. Also in the fun news, parents are on a trip to Canada, via motorcycle. It's uncharacteristic for my mom to be willing to tag along, but I guess we'll see how she manages on the back of a bike for hours. They left this morning, they'll be gone until Tuesday, when they... leave for Pullman. I'll have the house to myself for a week or so, save for a half-day of them arriving, unpacking, re-packing, and departing.

And I ordered a shirt from Woot, it went off track for a while--at one point it was in Kent, WA, and then a day later it was in Indianapolis. Likely it was an error on someone's part, but it also hopped around to Wisconsin as well for a bit, meaning it was a multi-person error. I don't get how something like that could get so off-track for so long, at least in the computer tracking age. A day after the 'estimated arrival date' they finally changed it to reflect a mistake. Took long enough. But it should be here Monday.

Internet update!

...Sad internet update.

Comcast has been by, and while yesterday they found some corrupted cable in the connection from the house to the street, its replacement didn't solve anything. The guy admitted there was something really weak with a conduit from the next section out of lines, saying that we were on some sort of tap that's usually used for long-distance, yet the tap's only across the street. Anyways, we find out today that it requires a private contractor of Comcast, so they will fix it on their own schedule despite us not having internet for near two weeks now. It could equal weeks more, which means I may be back in Pullman before proper internet is restored here.

To make things worse, my homemade wifi dish--amazing as it is--can only do so much, and it can't pick out noise between a distant access point and the computer, it can only focus the noise. Which means on some days, great signal. On others, if people are using too much in the way of electronics, I can't get a clear or stable signal. Which is rather sad, it's what I was trying to avoid.

It has provided me, though, with the opportunity to really make sure my new phone is awesome. And, by the way, it is. I have a library of Genesis games on it now, where the cartridges I own are gathering dust because I've yet to fix the actual Genesis, but it runs those great. Despite whatever complications hosting those games may have...

Truly, though, for the games I like, I wouldn't mind paying for digital roms on an official emulator for phones and stuff. Like with iTunes, pay a dollar, get a game that can be used on a program designed completely to take full advantage of the mobile phone hardware. It runs Sonic 2 far more cleanly than I'd ever seen on a TV, and I'd rather have my HTC be my portable gaming system than a DS or PSP. And as phone start to do cool things to this capacity, Nintendo and Sega could make a killing with their old games on them--as long as they released their own, non-buggy hardware. Truly, the current stuff out is painful.

Sad news this Independence Day.

The lightning storm fried the cable from the house to the network, and this can't be fixed for an entire two weeks.

So, this means that except for rare occasions, I will not be online for those two weeks.

If anyone reading this could, please pass the message on to the IRC room so people don't think I'm dead. Any messages please leave here or call at 253 678 7186, otherwise I may not be able to get to other messages for a few days.

Unless I find a solution, see you in two weeks.