Just another Weird site…
You ever play the game “Left4Dead” with me… know that I have something of a reputation as a friendly fire maven. As evidenced by the stats for one particularly “good” round;
Most damage to teammates: 4,334 (on Expert)Average damage to teammates: 140.00
So in a effort to actually get some good community service out of this here blog I now provide as another free service “movie watcher”! I watch the movies and mostly protect you from them….
Speed Racer… Every wonder what would happen if a Saturday morning cartoon from the 60’s was drugged by the guys who completely screwed up the Matrix? Wonder no more! It’s seizure inducing fun! (If you are prone to seizures do to lots of bright shiny colors avoid this movie)
Verdict….. Pass (but you knew that already)
Appaloosa… New timey actors meet old timey Clint Eastwood western…… nothing good happens….
Verdict…. Pass (unless you like watching Renee Zeiwelger really mess things up for no good reason)
The X-Files: I want to believe…. See Mulder and Scully 8 years after their FBI carreers went down in what could only be described as a strange and convulsed path….
Verdict…. Watchable, no aliens to be found just one messed up murderish mystery.
You know I must be getting old when I’ve been meaning to write about this Springs sojourn out to NASCAR for 4 days and keep putting it off because….
I haven’t recovered yet!
Well not exactly anymore, I’m recovered (finally) it just took 6 days more then I expected it to I don’t think it has anything to do with the 2 thirty packs of Coors light…. though I’ve been wrong about this kind of thing before.
Anyway it was the ususal debauchery…. Cars turning left, mullets in full bloom, rednecks were out in full force. Oh and top it all off I lost my cell phone…
I know I know…
Let me start at the beginning… so there we were watching the grocery cart races which had devolved into putting people into 55 gallon drums and rolling them down the hill (You won if you made it 10 seconds inside and didn’t puke). The sheriff’s office finally rolled in and put a end to the barrel rolling the grocery carts mysteriously disappeared…. Anyway Greg, Dan, Allan and I say “Hey it’s only 11 lets grab a couple of beers and see whats going on out there” So we all grab a couple of beers and go on “Safari”.
So we wander the wilderness of campers that is Nascar in the spring and alot of people have turned in for the night but in every row you find a group that is still going at it. One of these groups has two travel trailers parked together with a white sheet up on the side of the trailer displaying Karaoke! So of course we pull in there and are welcomed with open arms and cold beer (good thing since we were all about out). We sing… actually Dan and Allan sing… I hang back drink beer and enjoy the crowd.
So now at this point I’ve had more then “my fair share” of beer and we all know what happens when I have to much to drink… nothing good. And up walks so redneck chic in her Dale Jr. shirt talking about how great her driver was. Now I’m standing there listening to this in my Tony Stewart hat (who incidentally came in 2nd that day and not 31st like Mr. Jr.) and I’m listening to all of this and I star to analyze it and say “bullshit” not in my head but out loud. I now have the drunk redneck chic’s attention and not in a way that I wanted… I don’t remember how I got out of it but I’m told that it was a very intense 3 minute conversation with this woman and I was also told “If she had started to kick your ass you would have been on your own brother”. I can’t fault anyone there.
So we hang for another bit and start to wander back to camp it’s at this point that I realize that I’ve lost my phone… so we wander back to camp karaoke and no one’s seen it but we look around no luck. So I call into Verizon and flag the phone as lost. We get back to camp a little after 3. Later that morning at 7 I wake up and head back to camp karaoke to look in the day light, yep still no phone. We break Nascar camp and head home.
Next day I walk into my friendly Verizon store and purchase a new Blackberry Storm. it’s not the one I was after but I will give it a try. And as I’m setting up the email on the thing I have a new message… it’s a email asking if I’m missing a phone…. Is it a blackberry pearl with a big scratch on the side of the screen?…. sure is.
Damn…
It’s Saturday before the guy who found it and I hook up, but I get the phone back a little bit more cosmetic damage on it then before. But seems to be functional, well except for the SD card that is missing but that is a small price to pay (and there were no pictures on that card that I didn’t have backed up to Flickr or Facebook if I wanted them that bad).
So the moral of this story?
Don’t go on Safari with a phone in a holster have it your pocket!
Also the Storm with the 4.7.132 OS rocks.
Ok so in case you haven’t figured it out yet this post is going to be about Battlestar Galactica, and it’s been damn near a month since the show ended and from what I can tell Curtis still has them sitting on his DVR. So out of respect for our friendship I have withheld talking about BSG because I figured he would watch them by now.
I was soooo very wrong…
Curtis stop reading now… and if you continue to read it’s your own damn fault I don’t want to hear any whining.
Tennents of BSG… leave them wanting more… in the end I wanted no more… not because I had lost interest in the show, but because I had gotten everything out of the show that I had wanted.
Roslyn died… she should have died sooner (like a couple of episodes back but I can accept why they kept her around till the end)
Starbuck was kinda sorta reviled for what she is… I don’t know how to explain this one but I like they way the writers did this. No explanation nothing just there one second and gone the next. perfect
Earth is a lie… but new Earth is shiny and new… turns out New Earth is our Earth (Sol III for those of you tracking at home)
The last battle with the Cylons…. that was some of the best effects work across the board that I have seen. I think that helped to quench alot of the thirst I had for some good solid action sequences. Also the Galactica ramming into the side of the colony was neat!
I would write more but so much has already been covered on the Internet it seems a little beyond redundant at this point….
Why did I do this then?
Just so I could use the Battlestar Galactica tag one more time and say my TV series have a new standard to live up to.
Ok the whole title from the song that is playing through whatever I’m using for music thing may need to stop… You have to admit that I do come up with some pretty intersting titles from time to time.
So the unfathomable has happened… I’ve found happiness…
With a cell phone
*que shock and awe*
The current phone is a Blackberry 8130 and it is the only phone that I have not wanted to throw to the trash heap with in 6 months of getting it for one reason or another. It’s small, it’s fast, it has great audio for calls, texting and email are actually not cumbersome (most of the time). I think the main killer app for this phone is Facebook mobile… I’m just a social networking whore though so that shouldn’t count (also the facebook mobile website is one of the better ones out there so even if the Blackberry didn’t have the mobile app facebook would be good)
What pains me is after a year of pretty much constant use the phone will die, if it’s slow or fast is up to the phone but it’s a fact it will die.
Which is where my condrum comes to play… I’m off contract with Vzw but I won’t leave them.. You know all of those commercials about how good the network is?
They are all true! (At least in the East Valley they are)
I’m 90% certain I’m going to stick with the Blackberry as a platform, I just don’t know the form factor… there is a flip pearl out there (updated version of what I have) but I’m not a fan of flip phones and it’s twice the thickness of the phone I have now. I could bounce to a Curve it’s only slightly wider has a full keyboard and runs the same OS and hardware… which means it will be unsupported sooner rather then later. The Storm would be a good phone if the damn interface were to be faster, but I still wouldn’t buy one since I have no love for touchscreen phones (iPhone included). Which pretty much leaves with the 9630 (coming soon) It’s bigger then I want, but I’m willing to trade size for the upgraded features. I just don’t know about the rest of the stuff.
I guess it’s a good thing my phone is still good and I have the extended warranty, at least I can use what I have until I can’t use it anymore!
Ever wondered what it takes to really foul up a batch of beer?
Yeah me too… well these guys have it figured out.
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Brew_Your_Own_Beer
If you follow these instructions you deserve what you get.
Things that just make me smile… (yes it’s been known to happen)
Health Reports on equipment that say 119,874GB Total capacity
Seeing 20,000 screaming soccer idiots in Seattle
musings of a back porch
Not playing gears of war
Grass so tall my sprinklers can’t quite get the water out totally over the top
Fridays (the day of the week)
not being on call
The Taco when I blow a porsche off the line (ok thats just me being a dick, and he had no clue I was going to do that either so I had surprise on my side)
Things that piss me off
The hiccups
beer that gives me the hiccups…
So as I’m sure most of you know by this point I went out and purchased a Xbox 360 just over a year ago now.
Much to my surprise it hasn’t blown up on me yet as most of the media reports in the gaming press would have believe at this time last year.
The main reason for the Xbox was I wanted to expand my menu of games on their native platform, outside of Valve FPS and alot of RTS and RPG games there isn’t much that comes out directly for the P.C. these days. Most of what does come out is ported from our friends in the console realm and most of that tends to be of the craptastic level for quality. It doesn’t help that I have this thing for if I’m going to play a game I don’t want to play it on a ported platform I want to play it on the platform it was developed for.
The Wii being the major exception for this rule most all of the games that came out for it that I wanted to play showed up in 2007 so I still have it and does very well sitting there just like the Gamecube did before that and the N64 before that… hmmm I’m starting to see a patern with the Nintendo stuff.
Anyway…
I’ve bought a few games over the course of the last year for the old Xbox… GTA IV (Awesome story, gun play and driving need work but the physics model is top notch so I won’t get that down on it) Rock Band 2 (also awesome and a game that is popular enough that everyone under 30 can play it) Fallout 3 (I don’t RPG’s that often.. I will get back to you on this one once I get into it some more) And of course the two games that everyone and their brother who owns and Xbox and considers themselves a “real gamer” as…. Halo 3 and Gears of War / Gears of War 2
Lets talk about Halo 3 first… up until I bought this game I was a Halo virgin. I honestly don’t get what the big deal is with Halo? I know it was a launch title for the first Xbox way back when but honestly I don’t get it. I don’t know if it my lack of understanding of the entire Halo universe and the overall story of Halo 3 and not understanding the various interactions of some of the main characters. I honestly didn’t get it. I think Curtis summed it up best when he said “You know if your going to play Halo 3, you may want to check out the first two before you do that”… I don’t know if it would have made a difference. Also beating the thing in a afternoon didn’t help it’s cause.
Don’t get me wrong I had fun with Halo and I do enjoy occasionally popping on to Xbox Live and wasting someone but honestly I don’t get what the big deal is.
Now lets talk about the Gears of War games…. obstinately the original Gears of War was the tent pole title for the Xbox 360 in 2006. Thing of it as the big blockbuster summer movie of video games that year. Think of it like “Independence Day” good enough the first time through, a passable way to kill a couple of hours of time every time you watched it after that. That is what Gears of War aspires to be… Honestly this is the first game that it felt like a chore to get around to finishing it, seriously on my to do list for the last 3 months for weekend would be something like;
Laundry
Clean kitchen / bathrooms
Yard work
Beat Gears of War
I think it was made all the worse that I knew I was only about 45 minutes of game time from the final boss, but would have to depend on my skill to beat the game since there are no cheat codes (yes I know I shouldn’t use cheat codes but some of us play games just to play games and not to improve our overall skill). I knew the Gears was really a chore when Curtis and I had a choice we could either play a 6 hour game of “Sins of a Solar Empire” and we knew it would last that long with the both of us working together or play Gears of war CO-Op for 3 hours and beat the thing from start to finish. We chose the 6 hour RTS game and loved every minute of it.
Which brings me to tonight’s reason for posting, the 45 minute save point to the end took me about an hour to get through it to the final boss. The final boss took me probably 2.5 hours of trying to finally kill. And in the end it was a lucky shot that did it (which pisses me off more then you will ever know). Now why was I so obsessed with beating Gears of War? Simple I already had Gears of War 2 and I wanted to have the full experience of beating Gears of War when I got into Gears of War 2.
Imagine my surprise when I get into Gears of War 2 and it’s basically a stand alone game! And the more I think about it the more it pisses me off.
What is the payoff you ask? Other then a few Xbox live achievements? Not a whole hell of a lot it would seem.
OK this one is a technology puzzle… if you don’t like the techno babble tune out now and come back after the next post.
So about a month ago we got a new VPN appliance at work and for “security” reasons we don’t use a client less model for hooking into the vpn… it’s not a secure https connection it’s called a “smart tunnel” and works with either a active x control or a java applet. The general concept is you put in your credentials into the website which authenticates you in and starts the “smart tunnel” and then you can launch a approved application for connecting in.. In this case the approved application is Remote Desktop Connection.
That is how it is supposed to work, and it does work well in a Windows 32 bit environment. If your using Mac OS X or 64 bit Windows your screwed. And that is not the point of this post it’s a technical limitation of the device the vendor has not addressed but could be taken care of by the usage of a vpn client… oh wait we can’t use those for “security” reasons.
So since my two main OS of choice at home are Mac OS X and Vista 64 (in that order) I’ve been trying to figure out a way around all of this. My current best method is to use my work laptop (XP 32 bit) as a “gateway” I remote desktop to it and then from there jump to work. Now this works mostly ok, it’s not very elegant and if I leave my laptop at work I’m screwed. So as a direct result I’ve been trying to come up with a better method.
I landed on the idea of using VMWare Fusion w/ my Mac this morning.
I’m using OS 10.5.6 running vmware 2.0.2 and XP 32 SP3 is the guest OS.
Now here is the weird part when I try to initiate a connection in “Unity” mode the “smart tunnel” hooks up or looks like it hooks up per usual and then the Remote Desktop Connection times out on me. When I do the connection in it’s own dedicated window I have no problems!
Explain that one to me… unity mode is running on a VM in the background it just has the window hidden. For as far as I can tell it’s using all of the same virtual interfaces. It just seems odd to me.
So through the power of my TiVo I magically found myself watching “Scrubs” tonight (you know that show about doctors that fawns over other shows about doctors).
Anyway they had introduced Courtney Cox as some sort of new muckity muck (and I could tell you more if I was actually paying attention instead of fiddling with facebook on my phone) who was really really really really nice to everyone. Of course this leads to the final reveal that she isn’t any better then the last guy by saying a line that goes something like this…
“Of course we are running a million tests on him, this guy has great insurance! MOMMAS GONNA GET A NEW X-RAY!!”
For some reason I keyed onto this and the first thing that came to mind was
“It’s not going to be a digital unit”
And then after thinking about it for a few more seconds…
“Probably going to be used too”
About 2.5 hours later I realized that maybe I’ve been doing my current line of work for a little to long.
At least I don’t glow in the dark… yet