Author: Tom Kern

Because I should….

For long time readers of this drivel… you know that I’m a fan of “Top Gear” (the UK version) and over the last year I have taken to watching other “motoring type shows” where they review cars and talk about new cars.   I personally do not consider my self a “Petrol Head” I drive a truck and have little desire to spend money on a new car more then once a decade or so.

 

That being said I thought that you loyal readers would appreciate my ranking of “motoring type shows” as of spring 2013.

 

– Top Gear (UK)

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– Top Gear (USA)

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– Listening to Curtis talk about his dream electric car

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– Some guy on youtube

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– Car and Driver

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-Fifth Gear

 

 

That awkward moment…

It’s a bit awkward when your a I.T. professional and you realize that you no longer need a PC at home.

It started out innocently enough… I bought a Mac in 2007 and a new one in 2011 and my bank account quietly wept both times.

I upgraded to Windows 8 in the fall of last year.  Why?   Well why not I’m a I.T. professional I need to be versed on all forms of the dominant operating systems in the land in their native forms (GUI for Windows, CLI or LINUX, and a unholy combination of the two for Mac OS).   I then did the requiste app upgrades that come with any upgrade to windows… I lost the ability to get into work… The Citrix client for Windows 8 is to advanced for the Citrix presentation server that my work uses, and I can’t downgrade versions because Citrix is dumb.

That’s not a issue I can Citrix into work on my Mac.

I find that I have less time to play games and few games that come out really intrest me, I stop buying $60 games.  I start buying games that are on sale which means they are a few months old and increasingly have a Mac version by that point… This matters little since the only game I’m really interested in playing is Batman Arkham City on my Xbox

I install a hybrid drive on my Mac… and things (well some things) launch so so so fast (sub 1 second for Chrome I shit you not) (from cold boot to password screen for disk encryption is 7 seconds)

I get pissed off when I go to look for the calculator on my Windows 8 box… years of muscle memory and a certain f*’d up logic out the proverbial window.

The temperature hits 90 about 3 weeks ago, it hits 95 in my office (I haven’t turned on my AC yet (personal thing global warming be damned I don’t turn on the AC before April 15)) I turn off my main PC to keep from so much heat being kicked out.  That was 3 weeks ago I haven’t turned my pc on since then.  It took me a week to even notice that I hadn’t turned it on.

The change was so subtle I didn’t even notice it till I had been fully consumed.   Not to say there isn’t a place for the PC in my world (“Skyrim” is still PC only) the environment for the level of work that I do has reached parity to a point that the platform matters not.

The bigger point here is I have finally shed the ingrained need for a “Full Desktop” PC and have finally come to a point where I laptop is everything I need a main computer.  This notion is already on a dead man walking path though… The tablet in the living room will see to that in short order.

This leaves the following thought the future of a the high powered all powerful time and space bending machine as a thing of the past.  In the next couple of years the home computer will be nothing more then a server for the mobile devices that need local content caching, the rest of it lives on the internet through a always on society.

Even the top end of the market where I used to live will no longer need high powered machines for gaming the processing power for the high definition polygons will live on a server in a datacenter that scales massively for the latest AAA title where the gamers of tomorrow pay for a license fee and then time of use for processing power (think amazon cloud only games instead of big data) the only limitation being the available bandwidth on the local internet connection.

“Anubis” is the last of the big gaming rigs… I quietly weep at this thought.

House keeping….

With the closure of Google Reader coming up on us please make sure that your ATOM/RSS feeds are able to be picked up by the various RSS readers out in the world.     Feedly will be the best test since I have this service setup and am eagerly awaiting your latest non-facebook/G+ updates.

 

Says the guy who hasn’t posted on his blog since January…

 

One of these days I will get back to the writing…. one of these days.

A Letter to My “Friends” at Electronic Arts….

Dear Electronic Arts (EA),

 

I recently purchased a game that one of your top tier in house development shops spent what I assume to be many years developing.  The game in question is “Mass Effect 3” I bought this game despite having not played the previous two games and “Mass Effect 3” receiving what could only be described as “tepid” reviews.   I have thoroughly enjoyed playing this game over the last couple of week as my personal life and other obligations have allowed.   I’ve found the game to be both challenging and to have a story that I actually want to follow and pay attention to along with characters and choice that make me care about the outcome of the game.

 

This was all brought to a grinding crashing halt this morning when I tried to play “Mass Effect 3” a game I have purchased on physical media to play on my Xbox360, it would appear as though I can not reach the save file for the game if the EA Content servers are down!  Now I could understand not reaching the game files if I were not signed into Xbox Live or my Xbox Profile (which I was signed into and was able to successfully play the Batman demo) but yet I need your servers to be online to play a game that I purchased and want to play in a single player mode?!

 

EA I’m going to be honest, I understand that your trying to make a buck here and that’s your thing and I’m fine with that.  Seriously though you need to stop running game specific servers for each platform that then lock the game to when your content servers are online.   I’m hoping this is only a one time thing and that truly it’s just something that is misconfigured or I’m not doing right (I don’t know how I couldn’t be doing something right when I put the disc in, sign into Xbox Live, and start the game is all the more procedure I need to do).  I’m not a fan on playing games online with the public, especially with the Xbox and it’s rampant contingent of over testosteroned teens and 20 somethings they generally tend to be ass hats (I should know I used to be one of them).  I prefer a single player experience, I like a good story, I want to be entertained when I play a game I don’t want to have to be at the whims of a 3rd party publisher and when their servers are up to play a single player game.

EA I have many issues with how you do business, but I overlook most of them because you tend to do two things very well.  First you put out a generally consistent product for your top tier games and second you actually try new ideas (unlike a certain other 3rd party publisher).   Don’t make me start to think twice about purchasing your games in the future.

 

Thank you,

 

Tom

A gamer for 25+ years.

Balance

Finding balance is always a challenge…. you know the balance between having beer and cake is making sure the beer is a “light” beer.

Anyway, back in November I moved into a new place and for various reasons I had to leave my microwave oven in the old house.  Now at one point I had every intention of buying a new microwave, but I kept putting it off for whatever reason.   Finally in December I made a challenge to myself.

I will go without a microwave for 6 months and eat healthier and out eat out less.

So after six months the net result is…. I’m eating exactly the same same only instead of having warmed pizza I’m having cold pizza.

So the balance here?

None that I’ve been able to discern.

Memories Can’t Wait….

I present to you now a series of text messages between myself and my cousin the high school english teacher…. I was simultaneously delighted and dismayed by these messages….

 

CHSeT (Cousin High School English Teacher): You would be proud; I used and episode of “Star Trek:TNG” in class!

Me: Next time DS9… more thematic english type elements.

CHSeT: We watched the pilot. Our theme for the year is “what does it mean to be human” and we are doing a unit on confilict. What better episode then “Q” putting humanity on trial?

CHSeT: IDK what’s sadder though, that some didn’t like it. Or that many didn’t understand it!

Me: the “BattlestarGalactica” mini series from 2003

Me: I weep for the next generation of students

CHSeT: Was that pun intentional or just a stroke of ironic genius?

Me: Yes.

 

So knowing the audience for this blog, I know that all of you know that the pilot episode was “Encounter at farpoint” and as Renee would say… “the first couple years of TNG are a bit rough”…. In 1987 we were still in the Cold War, little did we know it would be over in 2 years and those early episodes had the same “hope for the future” quality that the orignal Star Trek episodes had… My overriding memory of that episode is one of great underlying tension throughout the episode.   Again overtones of the cold war.

A high school freshman is typically around 14 years old…. which puts them born in 1998 (dear lord I was in college in 1998) high school students today have no concept of the “soviet threat” (not that I did at 14 (which was in 1993, and at that point the cold war was officially over and the major concern was rouge nuclear warheads… my how times haven’t changed)) the boogeyman for todays kids are al-qaeda and sleeper terror cells.  Much diffrent from the supreme soviet threat.

I guess the part that has me most disturbed is TNG marked the start of a mini golden age of sci-fi on TV… Star Trek:TNG/DS9 (and to a much lesser extent Voyager), Babylon 5 (fuck you Curtis, B5 is awesome!), Farscape, Stargate SG:1.  TNG even influenced shows as distant as the new “Battlestar Galactica” (Ronald D. Moore creator and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica was a writer for TNG back in the day).  I guess at the end of the day I’m more sad that my beloved sci-fi channel has become the “syfy” channel and now runs shows that are more soap opera then somewhat episodic science fiction…. I’m looking at you ‘Eureka”

 

I think in the final assessment I can’t fault me cousin for choosing “Encounter at Farpoint” for the course material, but for the record I tend to thing that “Best of both worlds” (parts 1 and 2) are a less obvious and far better example of human conflict and what it means to be human. Mainly because the writing was much better and it has the borg, and honestly who doesn’t like a good borg episode of Star Trek?

Excuse me while I go watch more Dr. Who.