I went on a glorious hike this weekend in the high peaks region of the Adirondacks. I’m completely wiped out today so I probably won’t get around to posting pictures and the story of the trip until later this week or this weekend, but meanwhile, here’s where we were. Soolin and I climbed our first 46’er on this trip. It was great but exhausting. More to come….
Excellent free racing game from BMW
Here’s a great friday fun link – a free racing simulator from BMW, released as part of a marketing campaign for their cars. It was developed by a commercial game developer known for their racing simulations, and you can tweak the settings to the point where this is a very difficult sim. It’s free, runs fine on older hardware, and worth a look whether your tastes tend towards arcade or sim racing since you can configure it either way. Promotional page is here, and here’s
Friday fun – flash based shooter
Check out Battlemachy, a flash based shooter. You’re a dude mounted on a Pegasus armed with a spear. The game is mission based and in each mission you can only move on a clearly defined track. Some missions play out similar to space invaders, others are like star castle, and so on. You earn money based on your performance in each mission, which you can spend between missions to upgrade your gear with things like faster flying and shooting speeds. Simple fun with good graphics and a worthy friday fun link.
Shoulder surgery in my future
I met with a specialist today and he’s pretty sure I will have to undergo shoulder surgery, the only question is the extent of the surgery. I have to go back and get another MRI, this time with a dye injection which will help highlight the tears (turns out there are multiple tears) in my rotator cuff muscles.
The gist of what’s going on in my terms is, your shoulder is sort of a fulcrum, with a ball of muscles that holds the joint in place in the center of its socket. There are tears in those muscles on my shoulder, which allows the shoulder ball to abrade against my shoulder blade bone, which in turn is causing tears in the muscle at the top of my shoulder blade. I may need repair on all of those muscles, or only the ones holding the ball in
Things that suck: discovering your shoe is untied …
… in a men’s room with a suspiciously wet floor.
Thats is all,
A movie in honor of Halo day
So, today’s Halo day in north america, probably globally as well though I haven’t paid close enough attention to know for sure. Despite my mixed feelings about Halo, I’ve got my copy and will be playing it online tonight. In honor of Halo day, here’s a live action halo movie created as part of the marketing effort to convince Hollywood to finance a Halo movie. Or something. Either way, pretty cool live action Halo follows:
Download game demos and mods faster
Here’s a great idea – take the digg approach to ferreting out the ‘best’ of the web and apply it to ‘fastest game demo download links’. That’s Filerader in a nutshell, and at first blush it seems to work as advertised. Users post links to downloads for game demos, mods, and other content, and if the link is fast users vote it up. The better the link, the more votes and presumably the faster you get the content. Worth a bookmark if you regularly grab game demos like me.
Why I’m not buying a house…exhibit D
Yet another in a series of articles illustrating why I decided not to buy a house when I moved to MA. The basic facts remain the same: median income has not kept pace with the median purchase price of housing. Historically this has always meant a correction in housing prices, and the level of disparity between income and housing costs is huge this time, suggesting that the correction this time around will be huge and painful. There’s a lot more detail to be found in this piece if you’re curious.
A webpage creation tool so simple even a technotard can use it
Check out www.jottit.com, a new site which lets you build a webpages or an entire site. The interface couldn’t get any simpler -there is none, you simply type text (or html if you know it) into a form. To create new pages you hit one of the few ‘buttons’ available on the site, and you can similarly edit previously created pages. You can create an account and get a subdomin to permanently store your pages at, which I’ve done (it’s at tempus.jottit.com), and you can choose whether or not to make pages public or share the ability to edit them with others.
I’m really enamored with this, for many of the reasons I like wikis so much. This lowers the barrier to entry for creation of web content – if you can type text, you can create web pages, basically – while still allowing for more more sophisticated content creation for those who need it. Having spent this summer getting beat up via proxy by the alumni of my current employer, who are displeased with the complexity of the tools we’ve built for them, a drop dead simple interface like this has distinct charms.
It’s not clear for how long this will be free or what the creators’ intent is for the service, so I don’t know that I’d go building out a lot of content in this yet, but it’s easy as can be to pop over and check it out and is well worth a look.
Revisiting old games: System Shock 2
Given my mention of Bioshock earlier in the week, and the fact that I’ve repeatedly talked about how System Shock 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, I thought this little recipe for getting System Shock 2 upgraded and running on a modern windows box might be of interest. It includes instructions and links to patches and graphical, gameplay, and sound updates for the original game. If you haven’t played it, even without any of this it remains a superb game and has aged much better than other games of that era (I’m thinking of you, Deus Ex). It also has online co-op which I’ve tried and failed to really interest any of my friends in, though Nick gave it a shot one winter weekend long ago.
You can score System Shock 2 cheaply off of ebay, where it shows up periodically, or via the home of the underdogs, where there are links of questionable legality available to download a copy.
Most long time PC gamers would agree that System Shock 2 is one of those games that belongs in the gaming canon – a classic that any game lover should play, even if just to get a sense of how its design choices informed the games that came after it. I’ve played all the way through it twice, the only non-strategy game I’ve ever done that with, and have replayed portions of it, especially the beginning, dozens of times. It’s really that good. Give it a shot, it’s well worth it.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 