So, before today I was unaware that Orson Scott Card wrote for video games. Apparently, he wrote the dialog for The Dig. What made me aware of this, however, was finding out that Card wrote the screenplay for Advent Rising - a game that I picked up on a whim from gogamer for $10.

The game is actually very decent. It's a third-person shooter with some RPG elements (mainly skill leveling with weapons/abilities). The game is pretty standard sci-fi fare, but you should be warned that it pulls a XIII (or an Anachronox).

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For those of you who might have missed the news, today marked 50 years since the launch of Explorer I, the frist US satellite. All of the interesting things about the satellite can generally be found in the wikipedia article, but there are some things that the article doesn't relate. Perhaps most notably, there are less than 20 people still alive who participated in the Explorer I project. Most of these people are in their 70s or 80s and I doubt if more than a handfull will still be around for the 60th anniversary.

Unfortunately, I am unsure if our generation will see a von Braun.

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So, a few things happened this week that I thought were worth mentioning.

1. It rained. Every fucking day. All week. Apprently, this is something that no one that I talked to remembers ever happening in the LA area before. I mainly found it irritating because it meant that I couldn't bike to work.

2. When items are no longer being used at JPL, it is standard practice to send out messages to other people in a section to see if they need it. Usually, these things are furnature; sometimes they're equipment. Today, they sent out such an email. This email contained listings for two breadboards: one was 4 feet by 4 feet, the other was 5 feet by 6 feet. I wish that I could have justified requesting one, but I would have had serious difficulty convincing anyone that I needed them. It would have been doubly difficult since apparently they are also 3/4 foot thick and weigh several hundred pounds apiece.

3. I'm going to be coming back to Terre Haute for graduation. I'll be officiating a wedding (I'll leave determination of which one as an excercize to the reader), but I'll also finally get to pick up my paddle.

4. The Matrix: Path of Neo is not nearly as good as Enter the Matrix was and Enter the Matrix was sort of middling. Apparently, they decided to make a game based on what Neo was doing through the Matrix triology, but decided it was a good idea to make it a platformer and retcon things. Perhaps the most annoying thing was right near the beginning of the game: I had to make a long jump between two platforms, but kept missing and dying because the controls were bad. What made it truly annoying was that Neo would catch onto an invisible ledge, pull himself up onto said invisible ledge, then plummet to his doom.

5. Don't Stop Me Now. That didn't actually happen, but I found it relevant.

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So, I picked up Shadowrun for the PC a little while ago for $10. I had heard middling things about it, but I hadn't really paid much attention to the details. Yesterday I started playing it and realized what a complete train wreck it is.

The game only has multiplayer content. The only "single player" parts are the 6 training missions (worth 10 gamerpoints each) and "solo matches" which are really just standard multiplayer matches against only bots.

For multiplayer games, there are 2 modes: private and public. Private is used for LAN games or closed games over the internet. Fair enough, that's what we expect. Public games are games over Xbox LIVE against other people. The only problem is that you can't play over Xbox LIVE unless you either have a Gold membership (and are thus paying a monthly fee) or you're playing on a dedicated server that isn't set up as a "Gold-only" server.

I don't understand why I should have to pay a monthly fee to play a game on hardware that Microsoft isn't even providing when I already had to pay for the game. What makes matters more irritating is that of ALL the dedicated servers that were online, there were only TWO players online (at approximately 3:30 PST) and they weren't even on the same server.

I guess I understand why the game was only $10. I feel like I was ripped off. The game isn't even worth that.

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I just got home from work. I missed lunch today because I was in a telecon that started at 10:00 and ran until 14:35. Four and a half fucking hours of being on the phone. Of course, this was a telecon that we set up so that I could do testing, so I couldn't just wander off or not pay attention. We didn't even begin testing until 12:00 because the network on the other side wasn't working properly.

I suppose I should be glad that noone has invented something that allowed you to convey pure loathing through the telephone line, else I might have burned out their telephone.

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So, I mentioned some time ago that I was going to replace Magi due to a hardware failure in the video card and due to its general age. Well, I finished most of the disk copying earlier today and just had a couple of home directories left to copy, so I decided to go ahead and put the replacement, Mystique into Magi's old case and to put magi into the test harness to finish off the copying.

During this process, one of Magi's hard drives managed to die.

Luckily, the discs are in raid 5, so I'm able to pull the data off, albeit slowly. This is the second failure in the array since I put it together my sophomore year of college, so consider it an endorsement of RAID 5 (or an indictment of Maxtor's quality control).

Also to my irritation, the ATX 12V connector in Magi's old case is approximately 5 inches too short to reach the connector on the motherboard. Some idiot decided to place it almost directly behind the I/O plate which means that the connector (which comes in from the direction of the PCI slots) has to go the maximum possible distance in the case (made worse by having to dodge around the video card). I've ordered an extension cable from Newegg, but that puts another 2-3 days wait before Mystique can go live.

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So, Walmart has pre-orders for Super Smash Brothers Brawl for $20. If you haven't already pre-ordered it elsewhere, you probably won't find a better deal anywhere.

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If I drank tea and thus had a reason to purchase a tea set, I would choose this teacup set. I don't care if it is effeminate, it is awesome. This is what we call "brilliant product design".

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Immediately after my previous post about Gears of War, I recieved an IM. Below, I have pasted the entirety of the conversation. It serves as yet another reminder of what it is like out here on the internet.

Oh yeah, you probably don't want to go to the link. It is a picture of a penis covered in feces. It may do things with javascript (it at least resized my window), and may be nefarious aside from merely being a shock site.

(04:42:02) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: your friends only posts have been stolen: http://guyblade.on.nimp.org/?u=bantown
(04:42:42) guyblade: I see.
(04:42:47) guyblade: who are you exactly?
(04:43:36) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: my name is Dobernala
(04:43:44) guyblade: and you know me how?
(04:44:00) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: saw u on lj
(04:44:13) guyblade: I see.
(04:45:04) guyblade: So you look at the LJ recent posts and send random people to websites of penises covered in what is presumably shit?
(04:45:21) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: you don't have to thank me
(04:45:23) guyblade: Have you considered doing something productive with your time?
(04:45:37) guyblade: Perhaps mixing amonia and bleach in a small enclosed space?
(04:45:38) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
(04:45:39) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: I often think of that lovely young guy dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful shiteater.
(04:47:22) guyblade: I see.
(04:48:25) guyblade: I'm afraid that I don't share your proclivity for human feces; perhaps you should look elsewhere for people to bother.
(04:48:39) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: I'm a grateful shiteater
(04:49:01) guyblade: I believe you already mentioned that.
(04:49:01) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: i enjoy fresh golden terds
(04:49:07) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: would you drop some solid gold from your sweet, pink asshole?
(04:49:16) guyblade: No, I'm afraid not.
(04:49:28) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: why not
(04:51:11) guyblade: I could give any number of reasons, but I'll just go with the old standby of "I don't accept propositions from people on the internet".
(04:51:32) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: can i proposition you in real life
(04:52:04) guyblade: Probably not.
(04:52:56) guyblade: Perhaps you'd have better luck on 4chan or someplace similar.
(04:53:03) guyblade: Good luck.
(04:53:15) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: everyone on 4chan is anonymous
(04:53:17) guyblade: I'm going to block you now.
(04:53:21) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: I need some realtime
(04:53:26) RSHXDLOVESTERDS: dont be screamo
(04:53:34) guyblade: bye bye

Following my blocking him, he sent me IMs from 25 other AIM accounts informing me that "BLOCKING [HIM] ONLY ENCOURAGES [HIM]".

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Fuck General RAAM.

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Comedy Central's comercials for Futurama are bad and they should feel bad. I just hope they don't slot it so that it is adjacent to Mind of Mencia or some other flaming peice of shit.

Ideally, they would schedule as such:

8:00p Daily Show (prev)
8:30p Colbert Report (prev)
9:00p Scrubs
9:30p Scrubs
10:00p Futurama
10:30p Futurama
11:00p Daily Show (new)
11:30p Colbert Report (new)

However, I expect it to be something more like:

8:00p Daily Show (prev)
8:30p Colbert Report (prev)
9:00p Mind of Mencia
9:30p Futurama
10:00p Mad TV
10:30p Mad TV (cont)
11:00p Daily Show (new)
11:30p Colbert Report (new)

Such that I won't see any Futurama because I won't want to be anywhere close to the garbage being spewed on the screen.

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So, last night I beat Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. Since I purchased the game without reading any reviews or reading anything about it, I was a bit suprised when I found that the game was a rail shooter. I was even more suprised when I found out that the game consisted primarily of abridged remakes of Resident Evil 0, 1 and 3. I'm not sure why they chose those three games in particular to remake. It seems especially odd to remake 3 since it really wasn't part of the main plotline--it was mainly a sidestory to RE2 and reused many of the same areas.

Umbrella Chronicles does fill in many holes that had built up in the RE universe, especially those concerning Ada and Wesker. The game explains both how Ada escaped after her aparent death in RE2 and how Wesker survived being impaled in RE1. It does not, however, explain the how or why of Wesker being in Antarctica during the events of CODE: Veronica.

The game itself is relatively short. I beat the whole thing in under two days with a large portion of that time being spent on pause. If you're an RE fan, the game is probably worth picking up to fill in those msising details from previous games. If you like rail-shooters, it is a very decent little railshooter with respectable voice acting and a decent plot. If you're some loser who starting playing the RE games at RE4, you can pick this up to get a rather skewed idea of what you missed during the Playstation 1 era (and Gamecube era for Zero, I suppose) of RE.

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Earlier today, I closed my accounts at National City Bank. The two accounts that I had open their had been open since I was in middle school (for the savings account) and since I was a sophomore in high school (for the checking account). With those closings, I have severed all financial ties to Indiana that are not familial. I'll roll the funds from these two accounts into the appropriate two accounts at my CA based banks instead which will give me significantly enhanced access to them.

In other news, I bought an OLPC XO-1 the other night. I'm still off on my never ending search for a device that is closer to a laptop in functionality but with the accessibility of a PDA. The Nokia N800 wasn't quite the answer (though the N810 might be close), but the XO-1 will hopefully be closer to that goal or at the very least an interesting distraction.

There is an approximately 90% chance of Magi being retired and replaced in the next month. If you have an account on magi that suddenly stops working within the next month, you'll know why. Magi suffered a hardware failure after a recent power outage. It is currently functioning, but it needs a new video card. Rather than simply replacing the card, I've decided to go with a new 2 TiB system built from scratch (mostly) to replace it. This is mainly to reduce the current complexity of the two 1 TiB systems in place. Hopefully the transition will be straightforward.

I may also use this transition to check out disk destruction techniques. I've developed a curiosity recently for secure data destruction and, since I am lacking a blast furnance, I am thinking about testing the feasability of other options. One idea that has recently come to mind is grinding--simply taking a platter and griding it into powder using an appropriate tool. It seems like a sure-fire way of destroying a disk, but I am unsure as to the speed of such a system. Would it take hours or days to destroy a single 3-platter disk? This is why we have science!

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Tomorrow at 6:45am, I'm heading back to Anderson for a few days with my family. I'm going to be there until Thursday. This will be my first time back in Anderson since I left in mid-June. We'll see how it goes.

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I was going through my wallet and found the following:

1. Ticket stub to Pirates of the Carribean 3 (circa 5/2008)
2. Ticket stub to Serenity (circa 10/2005)
3. Ticket stub to Star Wars: Episode III (circa 5/2005)
4. Ticket stub to Matrix Revolutions (circa 11/2003)
5. Ticket stub to RENT (circa 12/2005)
6. A fortune cookie fortune which reads "Everybody feels lucky for having you as a friend."
7. My Anderson Public Library card.
8. My high school student ID.
9. My Rotary/Interact Club membership card.
10. A card reminding me to be a "Servant Leader" from the Anderson Area Youth Leadership Academy.
11. The kanji for "swordsman" as given by my highschool Japanese teacher (circa 2001).
12. Blockbuster membership card (issued 1/5/2002) for the Scatterfield Road Blockbuster.
13. My operation catapult RHIT ID card.
14. Two AAA cards.
15. Two SPS cards.
16. Pocket periodic table.

I believe the continued need for these items is limited.

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