Yes, victory indeed. I am now officially up to speed on the Half Life universe, having completed Episode 2 on Tuesday. Of course that means that I need to find something else to occupy my time with while I'm waiting for Episode 3. It's weird having to wait for the next episode - since I came in late, I've never really gotten a good feeling for the amount of time between releases. I suppose I now have no excuse to finish Shivering Isles, except, of course, for the fact that Oblivion crashes my computer when it gets in a foul mood. It tends to make things rather inconvenient since it's not just a regular crash to desktop where I can restart it again and keep going. No, no, I have to actually restart my computer before it will even let me play more. Ah well, I'll be building a new computer within the next 2 or so years.
The other accomplishment for the week was my successful baking of a loaf of sourdough bread. I've been trying to get the starter to work for the past month or so, and my first attempt at a loaf failed miserably. This time I gave the dough extra time to rise, and I think it came out fairly well. I'll be working on tweaking things in the future, and I might try some regular yeast bread as well. Regardless, I am pleased.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Victory
Monday, April 7, 2008
Short post
Short post, just wanted to indicate a very good petition online.
Stop Uwe Boll
If 1,000,000 (one million) people sign the petition, Uwe Boll has said that he will stop making movies.
That is all.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Life - a poor substitute?
So, as Ryan seems to have figured out, life is no substitute for video games, unless you happen to live in a video game. Well, I've taken another step down that road, myself. I've finally figured out who I will be working with for my PhD, starting this summer. His focus is theoretical high energy physics, so I'll be following in the footsteps of the great Gordon Freeman, though I doubt my dissertation will be nearly as interesting as his: Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array (from wikipedia article on gordon freeman).
In related news, this year the LHC should actually be turning on, unless, of course, people like Walter Wagner get their way. Really, if I were them, I wouldn't talk about possible black holes and strangelets, I'd be more focused on the possibility of a resonance cascade.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
I'm doing Science, and I'm still alive
There hasn't really been any big developments that I can think of in the past month or so, except for the progress I've made in my collection of video games. Near the end of January, I finally got around to buying and playing Half Life, and found it very enjoyable. So much so, in fact, that I finished it in a week. I had started it Monday night or so, and by the weekend, I was ready to buy the Orange Box. Thus armed as I was, I fought my way through Half Life 2, and loved it even more, despite the fact that I missed being able to execute the scientists as I was wont to do inside Black Mesa. Of course, complicating things slightly were the few errors that would pop up every so often. With the help of my trusty ally, the intarwebs, I was able to prevail, and finished that game in about a week and a half.
Next, it was time for me to take on my next foe, Episode 1. It seemed that this time, the errors were not to be so easily defeated, and that I might be relegated to playing on my laptop (which has a slightly inferior GPU than my desktop). The performance, was of course inferior on my laptop due to this fact, and the slightly slower cpu (2 as opposed to 2.2 GHz), since the Source engine does not, as far as I know, take advantage of multiple cores. Just when I thought all hope lost, the intarwebs rescued me once more, and I just finished off the first episode about 30 minutes ago.
Next up is Episode 2, which should bring me up to date with the series, at long last. Of course, as the title might suggest, Portal did not slip by me either. My first time through it only lasted 4 hours before succumbing to my might. The second time, I was able to defeat it in only 2.5 hours, and my next attempt will be going through with the commentary on, and I might attempt to earn a few achievements as well. And who knows, maybe some day I'll actually beat Narbacular Drop.
The rest of my time has pretty much been taken up by classes, homework, and teaching, although more the former than the latter. This semester my teaching is pretty nice, two classes, the graduate Math Physics, and an undergrad Gen Phys to which only 4 students show. The graduate class is fairly easy for the time being as well, since the class is on C programming, and none of the students have finished any of the programs yet.
Even with the coursework that I've had, I find time to visit Mel every weekend, which is a very nice thing. Also, this past Monday evening, I created my own pet, a sourdough starter. Tonight will be the third day I've had it, and it looks like its pretty much ready to go make me some bread. I'll end up feeding it tonight, then throwing it in the fridge for the weekend, and then attempt some baking on Monday, or Wednesday of this coming week.
Well, I'm off to free up hard drive space and install Episode 2. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, hopefully I'll actually start updating this more often from now on.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Late and Bored
So I've been browsing Gamespot's reviews lists looking for a decent game that sounds good and I saw Darkstar One listed with an 8.1 or something. Personally, I did not think it deserved an 8.1, probably more along the lines of a 6.5 or 7ish. Click Read More at the bottom of the post for my thoughts on it.
I still want a new game to play, feeling kinda bored with what I've got. I've kinda been in the mood for some sort of sci fi adventure, or an epic fantasy RPG. Lately, however, what I've really been wanting is a fantasy themed game similar in play style to Star Wars: Battlefront. Basically a battle (or series of battles, I suppose) between two armies, where you take the role of a regular soldier (of some type), you're nothing terribly special, the other soldiers around you are just like you, except controlled by the AI. If you die, you can respawn as a new soldier, once again picking what type you'd like to play as. Each side has a set amount of units that they can spawn for the battle, with the goal being to kill all of the enemy units.
I've recently discovered Savage: The Battle for Newerth, which sounds kind of similar to this idea, however it has no single player, and one player on each side must be the "Commander" who plays the game as an RTS, whereas the rest of the players play it as an FPS/RPG.
In other news, first day of classes was today (or yesterday, I suppose). Quantum should be better than Solid State turned out to be, I just have to make sure I am reading the book ahead of where we are in class. Particles will be interesting, 8 people in the class should make for something different, at least. We shall see.
I had heard some things about it being a "spiritual successor" to Freelancer, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I figured it would be good, and I bought it. Not that long into the game, however, I started to conclude that it was more like a step backwards. In Freelancer, you had different sectors that you traveled to, and each sector had a number of different systems that were connected by "trade lanes", basically space highways - you traveled much faster than usual, however you could still be attacked, although it's rare. Most times, the systems would have a planet or a space station that you could dock with and trade at. At the very least, there was a star at the center of the sector and various planets or other, smaller, stars around other places. These places weren't just scenery, either, you were able to travel to each one, and would suffer the consequences if you got too close - for planets, you'd "collide" with their atmosphere, and burn up in entry, with the stars you'd be incinerated when you spent too long in the corona. The different sectors were connected by "jump gates" - basically points where you would be teleported to another sector.
Darkstar One, on the other hand, had the different systems connected by "jump rings" - you could leave any system yourself, but only enter through a ring. Each system, however is almost exactly the same, one planet (that you can reach), one star, one space stations, one research station, special systems might change those numbers, I don't fully remember. You can't land on a planet, only dock at stations. The star for the system is just background, no matter how long you fly towards it, you will never reach it - I think I spent about 5 minutes flying straight towards one once, and the size still remained the same. The same thing goes for the other planets that they threw in the background, other than the main planet you can't reach any others that you can see.
Another thing that bugged me about Darkstar One was the money, usually I save up my money in games to try to build up enough to buy that really cool weapon or accessory. In Darkstar One, for the first few missions (basically the tutorial levels) you're a little short on cash, but after that, there's very little need to even do the extraneous jobs that you can get at any space station since you're inundated with credits. Frankly it made the game seem a tad too easy, especially since you could buy artifacts (items used to upgrade your ship - very important) despite the fairly steep prices to do so. That, coupled with the fact that your universe map shows you which system an artifact is "hidden" in, means that it's a snap to grab up artifacts and pimp out your ship.
The main things that I liked about the game when compared to Freelancer were the land battles, they added a nice break from all the space fighting, even if they did consist of "Travel down long ravine, blow up building at the end, destroy or avoid enemy ships on the way." Again, a little too simplistic. One final point of contention I had with the game: the story was almost the same as Freelancer's. There are a handful of different races in the galaxy, some a little more ready for war than others, and some powerful alien race from outside the galaxy comes in and tries to maneuver the races into war. You find out, and must save the galaxy. I mean, I know that original stories are hard to come by, but seriously, couldn't they come up with something better?
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
I know, I know
Yeah, I know it's been a long time and I said that I would keep this going. I just kind of forgot about it, and would never get around to updating when I did remember it. So mebbe I can actually keep somewhat regular updates going, wouldn't that be a treat.
So my lappy has been having issues with the copy of Symantec I get from Temple, in that it has been showing that I have tons of viruses about once a day. These viruses - called simply 'Trojan Horse' - only show up after my definitions are updated. For example, I usually leave my computers on at night, I have Symantec do a full system scan around 4 AM, and then I update the defs around 6 AM. A few minutes after 6, it shows up as having found some viruses. All of the files that are found infected are named DWH*.tmp. and they are always in my user/blahblahblah/temp directory. I even tried restoring one of the files so I could upload it to an online virus scanner, but the file never appeared where it said it should, and less than a minute later, Norton said that it was there and that it had quarantined it. I found some power point presentation where some pklace was having similar problems and Symantec Service said that the issue was a set of corrupt virus definitions. So, today I finally got around to uninstalling and reinstalling Symantec and Liveupdate, and we will see in the morning if that fixed it.
The only other thing that is really bugging me with my lappy is that the nvidia drivers don't want to change the scaling option for the screen. It's set to stretch the image a program wants full screen, but not with the native resolution. Whenever I tell it to change to no scaling and hit apply, the screen goes really dark, and doesnt lighten back to normal until I reboot, at which point the scaling option has reset itself. Hopefully newer drivers will fix this.
I think that's about all for tonight, I'll see about being more regular with updates and whatnot from here on out.