Sorry on the lack of updates. A little vacation and a little illness have conspired to keep me away from blogging. I’m off to the doctor today for a look-see. I got bitten by a tick while I was on LI and am a little worried that I have Lymes, but my symptoms aren’t really consistent. If not for the tick, I would have said I simply have the flu or something similar.
Month: May 2008
Game finished: Shadowgrounds Survivor
I finished up Shadowgrounds Survivor this morning. It was on sale a couple of weekends ago on Valve’s Steam software distribution service for only $5. I had played the demo some time ago and liked it but hadn’t gotten around to spending the ~$20 to buy it, so when it came up for only $5 I jumped on it. By and large the game is worth $20 though there are some annoying glitches to be found playing through it.
It’s an old school action arcade game with some light RPG elements layered onto it. The plot is a riff on the old ‘aliens that look like the aliens from the movie aliens attack a space colony’ which has been riffed on any number of times, but it’s done competently enough and you can pretty much skip through it directly to the alien blasting action if you want. Controls are straightforward – mouse to rotate/aim and shoot and WASD/arrow keys to move your character around. Over the course of the game you get to use and level up three characters – a marine with a lot of firepower, a drunken russian with a flamethrower, and a lithe little assassin with some stealthy and long distance firepower. There isn’t much variety in terms of enemy types, but the game is about the blasting of the hordes and this never bothered me. The graphics themselves are pretty good:
Image via Wikipedia
There were two major technical issues with the game. The first had to do with the camera. Often as you entered a level the camera would swoop around in an in-game cinematic, and this would sometimes then get stuck in a weird location leaving you unable to see the action, or even worse, sometimes after the cinematic I’d find my character trapped in the level geometry and unable to move or stuck in a confined area. Reloading from my last save always seemed to clear this up. The second problem was worse – there is a known save game corruption bug with the game which would always happen as you transitioned into a new level and would crash the game. This one is really annoying. There’s a workaround to this problem on the forums over on steampowered.com that involves downloading known non-corrupt save game files. I suspect this one would have pissed me off more had I paid more than $5 for the game, but for what I paid…ehh, I more than got my money’s worth.
Anyway, the game’s worth a look if you like action shooter games. PC only, price between $0 and $20 (it’s on Gametap if you’re a subscriber) depending on where you pick it up.
A weekend spent in Maine
Susan and I spent the weekend in Maine. It was her brother’s birthday and her Dad’s birthday is next week while we’ll be in NY, so we headed up to Brunswick Saturday morning, had lunch with her family, played mini-golf (I came in third out of 9, not bad given I haven’t played in at least 10 years), went clothes shopping in Freeport, played boardgames till the wee hours in a borrowed unfurnished condo, wandered about Portland reliving my youth and sipping mediocre au laits, and finally took the dogs for a romp on one of my favorite places:
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(that’s Higgins Beach in Maine, looking south down the rockfaces)
All in all it was a pretty fun weekend.
Oh, forgot to post this – I’ve been using Vimeo to send my niece Isabella little greetings from the places I visit. She’s on the other side of the world in Australia and it’s one of the few ways I can connect with her. We filmed this while we were at Higgins Beach this weekend:
Susan and David at the beach from David Hamilton on Vimeo.
Nothing special I know, and here mostly for her, but enjoy it for what it is and scope out the windy higgins beach action 😉
I’m done selling things on ebay
I’ve had it. Two times in the past year, I’ve put up large batches of stuff on ebay, something I’ve been doing for literally a decade now, my own periodic virtual flea market. Each of the last two times though I’ve had serious problems with at least one of the sales. Last time, a guy from Canada managed to freeze my paypal account because he got impatient waiting on the shipping and after 6 days filed a grievance with paypal, who froze my account for weeks while I waited for the idjit to receive his package. Apparantly in his version of the world he can pay for the cheapest shipping and have the item make its way across the continent (he was in British Columbia) in under 4 days. This week, I sell a relatively high end game (The Witcher) to some numbskull who has crashing problems with the game, describes how he ‘tried cleaning the disc with a microfibre cloth,’ then demands a refund because he claims I sold him a damaged disc. This on a game still going for $50 at retail which he purchased for $10.25.
In order to protect my perfect feedback rating, I’m going to have to give this chump his money back. The whole exercise just isn’t worth it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my constant stream of surplus stuff now, from used computer parts (I’m sitting on 2 video cards, a SFF case and a motherboard as I type this), games, and misc. electronics like my GPS which I want to upgrade. I guess it’s worth trying craigslist for some of the stuff, but the whole ‘arrange to show your stuff to perfect strangers’ seems like more of a hassle then it’s worth.
How to make windows shut the hell up
Oh, there’s so many contexts where that would be useful. Unfortunately this post is only about one context, but it’s useful and you’ll love it nonetheless. The scenario: windows prompts you to update it and you dutifully do so, after which it tells you it needs to restart, but helpfully allows you to defer this until later. Great! Except it reminds you…every…goddamn…minute…with an annoying as fuck popup window. Ever shout at that thing? Turns out a little googling reveals how to shut that thing off for good. The cheatsheet, if you don’t want to clickthrough:
Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations
I can’t get ‘The Road’ out of my head
I’ve been on a bit of a Cormac McCarthy kick of late, working through Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and now The Road. It’s completely fantastic, telling the story of a boy and his father struggling their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape, questing for food and safety in a world turned barbaric. It’s also very grim. I had nightmares while I was reading it, but at the same time I couldn’t put it down. If you fancy a stroll through a post apocalyptic landscape bereft of hope, I can’t think of a better book to recommend.
How’s that for a sales pitch 😉 Seriously though, the book is fantastic so long as you know what you’re getting into and appreciate it for what it is.
Suckegg rides again
Windows sucks, sucks so profoundly that words cannot express my loathing for it, yet it’s the standard OS for gaming and I love my gaming action, so I’m stuck with it. I took Friday off last week because windows registry cruft had finally gotten to the point where the machine was taking ~5 minutes to finish booting and no amount of registry scouring could cleanse it of the problem, plus the boot volume was writing a disturbing amount of error messages to the logs, making me fear for its life. It was time for the ‘once every couple of years’ clean install of windows.
Since I was having to go through this, I took the opportunity to buy a new motherboard and videocard. The motherboard only supported 1066 bus speed, leaving me unable to upgrade to newer faster cpu’s including the new wolfsdale 45nm cpus. The videocard has had overheating problems since the day I bought it – it’s an ATI 1900xt and I basically dislike the thing. Performance wise it was ok, but it’s been loud and flaky due to the heating problems the whole time I’ve owned it.
I went cheap but effective on the motherboard side of things, with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. It’s lean on the features but the right price and with a solid review and reliability record. The one thing it lacks is firewire, which my last board also lacked and I survived without (though not without the occasional annoyance). It doesn’t support DDR3 RAM either, but I figure I am at least one machine away from moving to DDR3 anyway.
On the videocard end of things, I switched to Nvidia after at least 4-5 ATI cards in a row. ATI still produces decent cards but the 8800GT I bought is basically the value performance leader these days and ATI cards continue to run hot and loud. I didn’t want a repeat of my last ATI card is what it boiled down to. It also helped that I found a deal on an ASUS for around $150 after a rebate.
The build went pretty uneventfully. The only problems I had were initially getting it to boot, which turned out to be because the cooler on my CPU has a broken peg which was causing it to not stay seated against the cpu. Boot, overheat, shutdown immediately. I figured it out pretty quickly and brute-forced a solution. Next time I upgrade the CPU I’ll toss the cooler. The other problem was me being a dummy coupled with bad labeling on my RAM. For some reason I had it in my head that I had 4GB of Patriot RAM, the the labels on the RAM are misleading, so I spent a ton of time fiddling with ram slots and BIOS memory timing settings before I had a V8 moment and realized all was already working well – I had 2GB and the machine was seeing it correctly.
On the OS side of things, I did a couple of things differently. For the first time I used a slipstreamed installer disc, in this case one with service pak 3. I had an initial blue screen with it but the second install went smoothly, and it was a beautiful thing to go to windows update and see only a small handful of patches instead of the usual hours worth of patches to apply. I also installed Ubuntu 8.04. I’m going to try and force myself to only use windows when I’m gaming and linux the rest of the time. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway I just figured I’d write up how the build went, as I’ve done a number of times in the past. The whole thing took me a full day and then some, though portions of it were spent watching progress bars creep by, fiddling with my DS or PS3 while I waited. The current build’s name is ‘suckeggridesaga,’ which is short for ‘Suck Egg Rides Again.’ Every one of my machines has been named some version of suck egg, cause, well, you know – Windows really does suck eggs.
Oh – one other thing to mention. Steam, as in the software service from Valve, is just awesome. I have at least a dozen games installed in Steam, and to get everything up and running again all I had to do was install a new copy of the steam client, log in once, then log out, copy 70 some gigs of data into the steampowered folder, and re-login to the client, and all my games just worked. Compare that to installing a dozen games using the physical media, then installing all the patches and adding in all the mods and addon content. There’s no contest – digital distribution is totally the way to go. The same was basically true of my gametap stuff as well – I copied over the client and binaries and all my games were good to go. Physical media for PC games can bite me. Given the choice, I will go digital distribution every time.
This week’s friday fun link: Everyday Shooter
This week’s friday fun link costs money, $8.99 to be precise. One of the best reasons to own a Playstation 3, Everyday Shooter, is now available for the PC, and it’s on sale this weekend on Steam for a measly $9. This is 80’s arcade gaming-inspired perfection, with superb retro graphics and a guitar riff soundtrack to die for. Gameplay might be described as what you would get if an art student dropped acid and riffed on robotron. If you don’t buy this, you don’t like fun!
A happy Susan eating her first coop meal
Here’s a photo of a happy Susan eating her first coop meal, a delicious steak from a locally raised cow.
8 years of effort rewarded
Here’s Susan in front of the new Northampton Coop on its opening day last week. She’s volunteered tons of her time over the last 8 years to bring this to fruition. We’ve already been in shopping twice already since then, and so far, so great.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 