Today I was woken up bright and early, to deal with the not so unusual affair that my mothers computer isn’t working correctly 8=). Of course, never ask a luser for details, you will only get an answer that leads to twenty plus possibilities depending on the missing context information o/.

In this case, the one useful bit of information: that doesn’t have to do with my mother’s inability to read error messages, was that there was a power bleep eariler this morning. Something that I have noticed about the equipment here, if the power is out for minutes or hours, it usually retains it’s settings. Ditto for the occasional power cycle. If the power however, goes out briefly and then quickly back on, the fuckers tend to reset to “Factory defaults”. In this particular case both the router and modem did that. Normally that’s not so bad, since the *********** modem our ISP issued just requires an old copy of IE to get to the setup page. In abusing it through both the last bit of battery power on my laptop, and carting ma’s computer down here, I found the relevant portion of the P.O.S.ASP pages were locked out, even when you have the magic key o/. I.e. the only way to get their fucking modem working with our rat fucking router, courtesy of their changes: was to call and deal with a voice recognition program and get the bloody thing reset (so much the damn reset button working) and keyed in again. All of this, I did manually ages ago when we changed to this ISP. Something about being locked out of crap that was paid for ten times over, because other people are to fucking numb to know what the fuck they’re doing, I personally find insulting. Especially when if you consider how little security checks the machine had on “Doing it”. Can anyone say D.O.S. with a dirty mind?

On the upside, I managed to calm down for a bit and got to spend time playing around with several API docs, as well as finally setting up F#. I’m interested to see how well that works, hehe ;). I’ve also gotten in some COD6 time, mostly Free For All mode. Modern Warfare 2 in Team Death Match has about as much to do with modern warfare, as Free For All has to do with a bunch of trainees at BUD/S doing Log PT. For those that don’t comprehend, unless you’re the Terminator, one man can’t toat one of those huge ass logs, and if you try pretending war is like COD6, your ass will be grass fast in the real world, and it might just be blown off by your squad lol.

For the most part, I gave up on many adversarial games some years back. In 90% of games, even in “Team” modes, the only benefit is only part of the server is out for your blood. I only care about structured team games, the kind that have some basis in being serious. In a reasonable game, you’ll either get maps that reward skilled tacticians (Delta Force games used to be great for scout sniping for example) or make it possible for team games to actually become team games, when enough like minded folk are present. BF2 and even COD:UO being examples.

For the most part, when I want an adversarial game, I usually go for Quake Live FFA or Urban Terror TDM/FFA. The former is a frag fest like four times faster than Modern Warfare 2 and the former only about twice as fast a pace, but has the advantage that sniping is still practical once you go into TDM. COD6 plays almost the same in TDM as FFA, except you have to discriminate your targets first.