First ride on the new bike is a bit of a trial

Leave a comment

Whenever you start a new exercise regimen you end up using different muscles, leading to duress, and this morning was consistent with that. I have been using an elliptical trainer for the last month or so and had figured it would help me getting used to the bike, and it probably did, but man! The ride took me 25 minutes, was 5.4 miles gradually uphill, and when I hopped off the bike I almost fell over because I was so unsteady on my legs. All in all it was good though – for most of it I seemed to range between 9 and 11 mph and from a cardio perspective I was fine. A couple of times on the steep bits I was down around 5mph and my legs would complain, but the thing has really low gearing and I just dropped down very low and limped along.

The bike itself is a bit of a….filly. The handling is very very twitchy. Not in the sense of feeling like you’re going to crash, but it darts in one direction or another at the slightest touch. The brakes are awesome, much better than any bike I’ve ridden before, and the turning radius is similarly better than any bike I’ve ridden. The worst problem I had was with the toe clips – I’ve never liked them and I spent almost the entire ride trying to force my damned right foot into its clip. Hopefully I will quickly get used to them.

Anyway for a first ride I give it a B. It’s definitely a great cardio workout, which lets me take care of my exercise needs before getting home while saving a bit on gas and being kind to the environment. I can’t wait until the ride home.

Slash’em meets eye of the falcon

Leave a comment

Slash’em is my favorite roguelike, though T.O.M.E. is a close second. They’re sort of two opposites of a spectrum. Slash’em is a roguelike distilled down to tactical dungeon crawling RPG combat in its purest form, whereas T.O.M.E. layers in the mythology of Tolkein’s Middle Earth, adds an overworld, various kinds of quests, and more. They’re both excellent in their own right. Slash’em recently got the graphical overhaul and features that Falcon’s Eye introduced, so if the bare bones graphics put you off in the past, give the enhanced version a look and see if it works better for you. I actually still prefer the tiny tiled version but it’s not for everyone, and maybe the enhanced version is for you. This will run across all platforms, though the mac and linux versions take a little unix-foo to get running.

Podcasts worth listening to: Escape Pod

Leave a comment

How can you resist a sci fi short story delivered to your podcast client every week or so, some by renowned authors and others by authors on the make, and all generally entertaining on some level or another, bookended by often clever commentary by the host. Definitely worth checking out and one of my favorite podcasts – escapepod. They’ve become popular enough that they’re considering adding fantasy content or simply producing a second fantasy-themed podcast as well.

No more penguins or polar bears…

Leave a comment

… but at least we’ll still be able to drive our SUV’s. Check out this yahoo news piece
which endeavors to look on the bright side of global warming and points out that with the melting of the polar ice caps ~25% of the world’s oil reserves will become available for exploitation, and there are expectations that a lot of additional mineral assets will become available. This is already leading to a land rush at the north pole as countries begin to claim previously inaccessible areas. No significant mention of the fact that many of the world’s major cities will have some serious issues with rising water levels. NYC 15′ underwater? No problem a dike can’t solve!

My 40th birthday present

Leave a comment

I bought my 40th birthday present today. I’ve been planning this for a while and the weather was finally good enough for me to go test a few models and then finally purchase a medium-end recumbant tadpole bicycle, a hpvelotechnick scorpion, to be precise. My plan is for this to become the primary way that I commute to work each day, as well as the way I’ll do my weekly grocery shopping and Saturday morning errands. I’m fortunate that there is a local bike trail which runs from my house to the Amherst campus which also passes right by two of the three main shopping plazas in the area, and the third one is also very close to my office. Here’s a high resolution photo of the bike from the manufacturer’s site. I’ll post pics of mine once it’s delivered – I had a few options added onto it (cargo tray, mirror, computer, better pedals, and a better seat material), and it will take them a couple of days to put it together. I also had them remove an option which adds 10″ or so to the length of the chain and makes it easy to adjust the thing for different riders. Less chain is better. The only downside is you have to be around my height to try the thing, and I’m sure everyone I know is going to want to take it for a spin.

The joys of old games rediscovered: Bungie’s Myth series

Leave a comment

A fan group has been maintaining Bungie’s Myth and Myth II engine ever since the series experienced an unfortunate commercial demise shortly after the release of the (at best) mediocre Myth III. I loved the original Myth and Myth II, and spent untold hours playing the solo campaigns, playing coop with friends, and playing online on Bungie.net. Myth was the first game I joined a clan for (I specialized in the the soulless in clan matches), it convinced me I needed real speakers for my computer for the first time, and to this day it remains one of the few RTS style games I’ve truly loved.

I noticed there was a recent upgrade release for the engine and decided to check it out. I also noticed you can score the complete game in the form of the Myth II Worlds package for under $5 + shipping on ebay, so I grabbed a copy and have been playing it.

It’s still as fantastic as it ever was and has aged surprisingly well. The animation looks stiff, the textures are utterly low rez by today’s standards, and the complete lack of lighting effects makes it all look a little flat, but the core gameplay and wonderfully dark fantasy plot both shine through all this, plus the updates to the engine to accommodate large screens helps tremendously. Additionally time has been kind in the form of performance: anyone who remembers waiting 5 minutes or more for a savegame to load will smile the first time they load one and it takes less than an eyeblink to open.

If you’re not familiar with the series I encourage you to give it a look. You can score free demos of the game and apply the modern patches to it to get a feel for what it’s all about. In a nutshell it’s a fantasy tactical real time strategy game with a strong story, great sound, wonderful writing, and fantastic netplay. The engine modernizations are for both mac and pc, including intel compatible binaries on the mac side of things. The Myth II worlds pak I bought includes a number of massive fan created content paks and mods, and you can freely download translations of the original Myth campaign which will run under the new engine. It’s hard to imagine a better gaming bargain than this.

Plus I’d love to find someone to play coop with through some of this content. Any takers?

World of Warcraft: the temptation to cash out

Leave a comment

Years ago when I quit my corporate job I tried a number of schemes to make money. One of them was playing the MMORPG Everquest and trying to pawn off the virtual stuff I gathered for cash. I abandoned it after a month or so – it was one of the worst, lowest paying jobs I ever had, and this is coming from someone who loves playing games. Anyone who camped endlessly for the Speed of Wolf boots (I think I’m remembering their name right) in the original EQ can empathize. Since then I’ve come across many instances of folks making money farming the virtual worlds, and in fact it’s a viable career path in some third world countries these days, but the numbers don’t work for a westerner. Generally you’re talking sub-$1/hour wages. I ran across a discussion about this in regards to WoW the other day on one of my favorite gaming message boards – Quarter to Three. Turns out folks are doing ok selling off their accounts or just the assets from their characters. There’s a risk if you’re just selling off assets because this is a bannable offense and if Blizzard gets wind of it you’re gone, but some quick back of envelope math led me to conclude my account is worth north of $500 on ebay, and probably closer to $900.

!!!

That’s temptation folks. To be clear, I’m not doing it, not now anyway – I’m enjoying the expansion pak, several of my friends still play with me regularly, and more generally WoW is the best MMORPG to date. But to have the abstract turn into a real and compelling number was a surprise to me. I need a car and I’m going to buy a very expensive bike for my 40th birthday present for myself and that $900 or so would come in handy towards either of those purchases.

I’m also not going to go the ‘sell assets for cash’ route, even though I could easily clear a couple of hundred that way, because I don’t want to be banned. After all, I might want to sell this account someday 🙂

Podcasts worth listening to: 12 Byzantine Rulers

Leave a comment

I’m an avid reader of Roman history, from source material like Suetonius, to fictional interpretations like Robert Graves’ fabulous I, Claudius novels and the equally fantastic BBC dramatization of the first one, to more recent dramatizations like the Colleen McCullough Masters of Rome series of novels, and into the present with the current HBO series.

Unfortunately my knowledge of ancient history sort of stops with the sacking of Rome and the rise of the Eastern Empire, so I was pleased to run across this excellent series of lectures by Lars Brownworth, a historian working at Stonybrook School in NY. While no means deep, the lectures are wonderfully broad, cutting across a huge swath of history and giving one a sense of some of the people and lots of the politics at play in the Holy Roman Empire in the ages after the fall of Rome, taking time to digress along the way on matters of language, religion, writing, finance, and more. You can tell the speaker loves his material and his diction is clear and engaging. Definitely worth checking out. My only regret is that it’s finite instead of an ongoing series, but there are hours of material to listen to.

Excellent Gravitar remake

Leave a comment

Gravitar was one of those arcade games that never got as large of a following as it deserved. Possibly it was because unlike some of the greatest games of its era, it had a limited set of levels that just started repeating, and there weren’t all that many of them. I loved it back in the day despite this. Anyway I happened across an excellent modern take on it this week – check out blackened interactive’s Gravitar remake, Gravitron. Great vector graphics, a tiny download, and a level editor is included. If you’re unfamiliar with Gravitar, the basic gameplay involves piloting a spaceship with asteroids-like controls in an environment with gravity. Your task is to destroy the generators on each level while avoiding the fire of their defenses, rescuing any stranded astronauts you can manage, and making sure not to run out of fuel while you’re at it. Simple but fun.

The author promises to consider any fan-created levels for inclusion with further releases of the game, so if you feel like exercising your creative side here’s your chance to shine. I should also mention this is windows only and as usual a tiny download.

[Originally via