Uncategorized

Why am I looking in the freezer for paper towels?

Because I’m happy, that’s why.

My replacement headset has finally arrived

Hmm, my mother is so deathly tired she walks in my room and asks me to make her something for lunch, a sandwich would be nice. Oh, and while I’m going to be in the kitchen anyway, could I fill her water and bring back her bag of potato chips?

Then she walks into the kitchen ahead of me to fiddle with the water bottles. She’s was also much to tired to take her potato chip back with her when waltzing out of the kitchen. By the time I’ve delivered her glass of water, she’s already gotten up again and walked to the kitchen. I go back to making the sandwich once she gets out of the way.

Somehow, I think everyone else in my family would have shouted, “Make your own ******** sandwich!” If you have strength enough for all that walking, odds are you can at least carry a several oz bag of potato chips with you, it’s not like lugging a 10lbs bag of Kartoffeln!

It seems, that while no one put up a fuss that in the original Medal of Honor, you could play Allied or German characters in death match. As far as I know, there has never been a fuss about the later games which both expanded that very far and even took in the Japanese!  Yet now that they are making a new game, just called “Medal of Honor”, people are bitching that one of the sides in multiplayer was supposed to be the Taliban, to which there has been enough fuss to simply rename it in the usual OPFOR fashion of AA. What the fuck is wrong with people today.

That is how it is, unless you design multiplayer like America’s Army: which few people care to, nor have any reason to, go quiet that far to make everyone the “Good guy”. There is also the old DF approach of making both teams look almost identical, resorting in that only noobs and griefers are likely to TK.

Someone has to be on each side of a multiplayer game, that’s how you tell which set of fucking morons you can shoot at! If having one side be the Taliban is so bad, why not make it U.S. Army versus British Army, and let someone make a stink about that!

Whenever I start reading on the net, I am always moving like a plague: unstoppably grepping all interesting information. The other night, I was looking up the definition of an event horizon. That of course, lead to parsing data trees on the film Event Horizon (haven’t seen it in a year or two), Starship Troopers, the Dead Space games, Armor, and Ender’s Game. The local library only had the Ender series, not troopers or armor :-(.

I read about 50 some pages of it in the 1.5~2 hours I was at the library, and found it interesting enought o check out. By the time I went to bed, I had finished the 352 page book lol. Ender’s Game paints a very odd picture of the world, because the world Ender was born into is both so like and unlike our own. Children can now be “Requisitioned” by the government, and having a “Third” child is both illegal without a wavier and a bit of a social stigma. Ender of course being a disgraceful third with an older brother Peter and sister Valentine.

About 70-80 years previous, the second invasion of earth space was won by a little known peon named Mazer Rackham having a thinkon during doomsday. Ever since, the Earth has been preparing for a third invasion: less the insect like “Buggers” catch the human race with our pants down. Ender is accepted into the Battle School at age 6, after passing the final test. After having the governments monitoring device removed from his neck, young Ender Wiggin being beyond the help of adults, gets stuck in a situation where a gang of bullies are ready to beat the tar out of him, for the rest of his  natural school year. Being smart as a whip, the little bastard realises that he needs to be decisive: win this fight, fight hundreds more but beat the shit out of their leader, and no one will dare touch him. Practically hospitalising the other boy demonstrated Ender’s genius.

In battle school, you see Ender go from a newb to the schools best ‘Soldier’ in history. Using that mechanical mind of his, he outsmarts everyone and twice changes the nature of the war games that their schooling revives upon. When Ender began, you had slow moving formation drills and “Commanders” of an army of 40 boys, that couldn’t lead a pop sickle stand to victory. Ender changes that: battles are fast moving and now rely on what we learned from the Blitzkrieg.  Ender’s army is organised into 5 ‘toons’ of 8 with a specially trained solider from each available if things hit the fan. Each toon has a leader and assistent. Ender tells them what to do, the toon leaders take care of the detail, and you quickly see that Ender has learned to lead: something the other armies have not. It totally revolutionises the games, to the point the school masters begin cheating. Wearing down Ender and his army of student soldiers by any means possible.

The focused discussion on their craft is also impressive, after all if it is your life for the next four years, you ought to learn it well, right? :-). Mean while his siblings are plotting and succeeding in world domination, as the world gets ready to fall apart!

The writing is a bit more bland than I am accustomed, yet the logical drive to it is refreshing. It also paints an excellent picture of Ender being shaped into another master mind, and the hells he must go through, as well as the side effects of being made a tool to fight the buggers. At several levels, I can comprehend Ender’s situation, worse yet because I’ve been in some of them. Arguably Ender’s torments are also, the only thing that lends the novel some depth in the first place, but we can’t have everything. While Lord of the Rings has enough information overload to give you a geekasm for a month, Ender’s Game only focuses where need be. The style of writing, is actually quite “Odd” at first, or at least from the styles of writing that I have come to easily parse, lol.

By the end of the games, things really ripen up. Towards the end of battle school, Ender has become smart enough to figure out the propaganda from the first and second bugger invasion is a crock, as the secrets of the third invasion gradually unravel on his way through to the prestiges Command School. The war games used to train Ender shift, from a zero-gravity game of freeze tag (a cross between infantry combat and football, really) to commanding groups of units. His games become more like a modern Real Time Strategy game with humans forming nested levels of control, rather than A.I. behind it all.

By the end of the third invasion, we have “Won”, the world has gone to piss in less than a week, Ender is outcast—as being to dangerous to ever return home to earth, whilst his brother attempts to bring order to chaos under the pseudonym, Ender sets off for the first distant human colony with his sister Valentine.

Something that I found freaky as all hell, this book was originally written in the 1980s, and based off a short story the author cooked up in the mid ’70s. Yet, it describes very much our modern Internet and an effect that only recently, the hopelessly stupid people of our world have begun to understand. Peter and Valentine, using analogs to things like Blog comments, Twitter, mailing lists, etc to methodically boil over the political waters towards a more stable world. Young (but brilliant) children soon are helping to shape public opinion, and become house hold names published on the news nets as Locke and Demosthenes – in ways that are already believable to any netizen of today, or even 15 years from now. Yet back in the 1980s none of that existed yet, and the closet thing to it (the *old* USENET, rather different than today’s) was likely unheard of by the author. Even if he was a geeky S.O.B. the  most the author could forsee from his present world would likely have been e-mail, since that arguably dates to before most e-mailers were born. What surprises me, is how dead on Orson Card was in describing the “nets” of Ender’s day, and how they seem to resemble our own Internet. In a way, it even explores how realistic games have already become, versus something like Pong and the big games of the 1980s. To the point infact, that it moves past that and the computers have become smart enough to program them :-/.

In so many ways, the book is like looking at today and next week, and only GOD knows what lay in between. Along with the development of Ender, it’s almost bloody brilliant!

Things have been a bit busy, fires of family war stoked, work to get done, plans to close in, and reading to do. I had a short interview yesterday for a job that I don’t expect to get, and worked on several other queries to weed out the small fish and recon a few others as I waited. I also hit the library for a couple hours.

The thing that irks me, if my family wouldn’t like falling on the latter side of the Fore, Neutral, or Against standings, this could all have been sorted many months ago. Or if I was willing to be defeated. That’s what you get when you mess with principal and a super geek o/.

Somehow, I could swear that food must be the single most discussed thing between me and friends :-/. What is it that is so universal about food!!!

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.

In reading this page, I can’t help but think about these two sentences:

We thought, “Sheesh, people are too busy running their businesses to learn how to code HTML emails. Email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it for them.

To a geek like me, that is like saying, “Sheesh, people are to busy running their businesses to learn how to write“. I admit, many people are ‘that’ busy or just lazy – they pay someone to write it for them. That’s how life is.

Well, I’ve completed the last part of my job hunt that requires me hoofing it across the city! Across two days, I’ve compiled a list of just about every business in my city, omitting those that obviously dead weights, like hair & nails salons. I’m not qualified for their work, nor have I any sense in trying to sell them on computerising things lol. My intention is to cross reference all the info into a data store on my computer, than have a program compile it down into an order of contact:

1. Which ones to cold call and offering my “Services” as a super geek.
2. Which ones to apply for online out of necessity.
3. Which ones to walk in and apply.
4. Which ones to call and see if they are hiring.

According to the BBC, it seems that some people think modern technology is making people stupid. I think they were already stupid ;).

The Internet in particular tasks us with the acquisition and evaluation of knowledge, something that separates me from Joe Blow from kokomo, is my super power to quickly gather and parse massive amounts of info, evaluate the details, and push forward using it.