Category Archives: Video Games

Leaving your car running; Games

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First off today is a bitch about gas prices. Not a traditional bitch about them either, we all know that the price is too damn high so there is not point in ranting on that subject. What I want to bitch about are some of the most wastefull people on all of the planet: The people who leave their cars running while they go into a convenience store to “pick up a few things”.

The biggest argument that the people who do this have is that it takes more gas to start the vehicle than it does to leave it running for five minutes while they are in the store. This has been debunked so many times that I am not even going to look for one of the thousands of reports that did the debunking. I am also not going to go into people leaving the car running for a few seconds because they forgot to grab a letter that they wanted to mail, that is something that we have likely all done at least once and it only take a few seconds. The people that I am going to rant about all seem to fit a certain demographic, and I see it far too often.

If there is a vehicle left running in the parking lot of the local convenience store, I am going to guess that at least 90% of the time (and I have no evidence whatsoever to back this up, only my own personal experience) it is either going to be a diesel truck or a really old car/truck. I notice it, and it sticks out in my mind, because it is always the vehicle with the most horrid exhaust fumes that gets left running.

I am sure it is possible that some people leave smaller cars running when they go into convenience stores, say to keep the AC on so that their child or pet doesn’t get extremely hot, or to keep the heater running when it is really cold. I don’t even think that that is all that wastefull. I can understand the practice when viewed in a very specific light. That light just never seems to be the one I am viewing when I see the vehicles that are running in the parking lot.

The vehicles that people leave running in the parking lot are usually older cars, like from the ’70’s, that are lucky to get 8 or 10 miles to the gallon in the first place. They are usually junked-out, shitty cars that shouldn’t be on the road in the first place. These cars (which I call them for lack of a more descriptive term) would not be legal to drive in several states, most metropolitan areas, regardless of state, and anywhere where they make vehicles undergo emissions tests before they are registered. They are likely driven by people who have more fingers than teeth (depending on their prowess at woodworking), and should be taken off of the road both for the foul smell that they emit as well as the horrible fuel economy.

I am being a bit hypocritical here as I did once own a 1963 Ford Galaxy, however, it had been impecably restored. Even with its 352 engine and an automatic transmission it got better gas mileage than the vehicles I am calling into question. There is a pretty big difference between a fully restored ’69 Camaro and a ’73 Chevy Truck that has had no work on it except bondo: One works as well as it did the day it rolled out of the factory, the other works occasionally, usually billowing black smoke as it goes.

This whole rambling and pointless story is due to the fact that I pulled into the Circle K pparking lot last Thursday and noticed that the gas price was currently at $2.33 a gallon. There was a newer Diesel truck sitting in the lot with the engine running, as well as a ’70’s Chevy truck also idling there. I was annoyed by that. I was far more annoyed when I went into the store and saw the two drivers (trust me they were the ones; they were both dirty and smelled really bad) trying to chat up the cashier. It is just so aggravating!

It has made me think, though, that maybe I should start printing out little labels, maybe business card size, that say something like, “Thank you for leaving your engine running. Your wasteful nature has already killed over a thousand Americans in Iraq. Their only job was to secure the oil fields so that you could leave your car running all day long. I am sure that the dead soldiers (and their families) appreciate your wasteful nature.”

•Online games!

Due to a missing html tag several paragraphs of this post were not visible on initial posting.

My online gaming had been confined to pogo.com for quite some time (not counting diablo II). Then, Flux, of Blackchampagne.com sent me a link.

The link that he was trying to plug was the BMX Ghost game. I tried that one, even got some of the boards done, but hated it. This screen shot is from a completely different game, the name of the game is ‘Chuck’. You just throw around this guy, and he moves as he should, your movements being requisite, and it makes him fly all over the place. Three of the four events you are literally just throwing around a little crash test dummy, the fourth (second in order of play) actually can use skill. The photo that you see here shows you the exact place the you have to have the mouse cursor to get the “Incredible shot”, which will follow. The smaller mountain in the background (just below the ‘x’, is the important spot).

It must be noted that you can do three shots in exactly the same place and get three completely different results. The body doesn’t ever fly the same way twice, sometimes the head will strike first like a javelin, other times the entire torso will hit making the shot count as far less accurate. Still, it is a heck of a good time.

The rest of the ‘Chuck’ game is pretty much hit and miss. You want to let go of the “spacebar” while you are still moving the mouse left to right, if you let go too late you fall short, if you hold on too long you fall short. The distance is seems to be related directly to how fast the mouse is moving when you let go of the spacebar, so make sure you don’t run out of mousepad before you huck chuck.

The angle of the throw is also quite important in the first event. I have found that if I hold chuck with his feet barely touching the floor and move the mouse up about an inch while travelling to the right I am able to get the longest throws. This does make him bounce off of the ceiling occasionally, but that doesn’t slow him down nearly as much as repeated bounces on the floor. The third event you have to land him as close as possible to a flag which is easily reachable in a single throw. You can try to high arc him or do a soft throw, but it seems easier to just throw him pretty hard and bounce off the tree that is twelve meters past the flag. The tree slows progress quite a bit so the rebound isn’t quite as you would expect but it still has yielded me more throws within one meter of the flag than any other approach. Who would have ever thought that throwing around corpses would be so hard?

The fourth event you have to collect all the stars on the screen in three throws. I have never gotten all of them. I think my best is 40(I think there are 48 total), so I am not gonna comment on that one.

The leaderboard for the game shows a few people who have scored over a million points, while the rest of the leaders are in the 900,000 range. My best so far has been just over 400,000, so I really suck at the game. The thing is that on this one I don’t care that I suck. It is just so much fun to pretend that you are throwing around Dubya -or insert any person of your choosing- that it more than makes up for my ineptitude.

If pretending that you are throwing around the leader of the free world makes you uneasy, just remember that there are leaders, from many countries, that have died from much less than a little intellectual competition. Bring it on. Of course, Dubya might be the only leader that would consider the game intellectual in the first place…

Meta; PC; Games

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Okay, so just an open question here. Please do respond if you have any personal knowledge on this issue.

Since the problems (conveniently discussed below) with my old PC continue, I decided to try to find some other sorts of malware/trojan/virus removal programs. Most of which I got from download.com. Here is the problem: They all give you a ‘free trial version’ which will show you all sorts of malicious crap on your machine, but not a damn one will actually remove it unless you pay for the program first. But, you see, I wouldn’t be looking for a new program to remove this shit if the current programs I have could do it… Currently all of the programs that I have to remove this sort of thing completely freeze the PC when the trojans in the registry are being removed. They simply will not do it. How in the hell does a company expect me to pay 30 bucks for their product when they won’t even let me see if it will actually do the job that it was designed for? It is like I just said to my wife, no one would ever expect you to buy a pretty new car just based on looks, they always give you a test drive.

I do understand that in the world of computer software it would be far too easy simply steal the products, hell I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro that is on something like day 1246 of my 30 day trial period (I actually did buy the license for it, but lost it on a system restore and never bothered to register it again). Isn’t there some way that they can make it possible to actually use the software before purchase? I was thinking that maybe it could quarantine all of the objects, even if only for 24 hours, to let you run any system scan you want to make sure that it actually got rid of the crap. Then, if you don’t purchase the license, it just reinstalls all the crap that it got rid of. There has to be some way that you can actually test this type of software before laying out cash for it.

The open question is: Do you know of any programs that will actually remove the trojans from the registry before making me pay for the program? Or, failing that, a program that will simply give me the actual path name so that I can do it manually?

Any help would be appreciated

It is Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Well you may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I posted anything here. No real reason why, well I guess there actually are a couple of reasons why, just they aren’t very good reasons. The main reason is that I just really didn’t feel like it. The other reason is just a lack of interest stemming from very little response to what I do write. I never expected that I would be getting hundreds of emails every day, but I would have thought that I could have generated a hundred in the course of a year, which did not happen.

As the anniversary for my site approached I briefly thought about not renewing the domain and giving up altogether. Why I decided against that is something I may never know. I guess I really do enjoy having the site when there is something on my mind that I really want to bitch about. It is a pretty liberating feeling to know that you can throw all your opininons out there for the world to see, regardless of the fact that only a handfull of the world ever actually read them.

This is all self-inflicted of course. If I had chosen to do something other than feature a couple of stories that I wrote a long time ago, like, say, have an actual theme, or actual content, it might make the readership swell a bit. Unfortunately, my only expertise is in the butchering of deceased bovines, I doubt that this would make for very stimulating reading for anyone who was not in the industry. I could spend more time commenting on news items, but that has been done to death IMHO and done far better than I could do it anyway. If I was really interested in generating some hits I could simply feature a Porn Pick of the Day, as it seems that the only search strings that result in hits to my site have the word porn in them.

When I made my decision to keep the site open, I made another decision at the same time. I am not likely going to ever be back to doing a daily update. That being the case I am going to quit wasting the time to save each page individually. I am going to start having a weekly update page with any posts made during the week separated by Horizontal lines. The latest update will always be at the top, and if the page seems to go too long I will add handy linking to the particular days (not that I forsee this as being necessary at my current posting schedule). This will have the added benefit of making it easier for me to set up an archive system, if I ever get off my ass and try to get caught up with that. The major benefit of this (for me) will be to have multiple posts on the same page, thus people who only visit once a week (and never click any links) may actually find something worth reading and, hopefully, commenting about. It’s my fantasy damn it! I can pretend to believe anything!

• Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I treated my wife to dinner at a local place and we exchanged cards. Of course we actually exchanged gifts on Friday night, as we both bought each other computer software, and they were both newer titles, and we didn’t expect that either of them would work correctly on the old PC. Boy were we ever right, but more on that later. The games that were exchanged were Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 , which she bought for me, and Leisure Suit Larry – Magna Cum Laude which I bought for her.

If you have never played any of the Leisure Suit Larry titles, you should know that it is not exactly the type of gift that you should buy for a woman unless you are very sure that she has the sense of humor to appreciate it. The entire premise of the game is that you are a guy, a real loser, and the entire game is spent trying to get women to have sex with you. This lends itself to a lot of hilarious situations, and it is one of the most entertaining series of games I have ever played. The wife also loves the humor and situational comedy, that is why I felt confident to buy it for her, as a Valentine’s day gift no less. I even went so far as to pay extra for the uncut and uncensored version, just to gurantee the most humorous gaming experience. Yes, it is fun. I would highly recommend it.

The latest Roller Coaster game is pretty sweet as well. They completely changed the interface and I have been having a hell of a time learning the new commands, but it has so many more options that it makes up for it all. The single best part of it is the option to ride the rides. That lets me actually get onto the roller coaster and see why the people don’t like to ride them. It took me a while to figure out how to import the roller coasters I designed in the other games, but once I did I was easily able to see why no one wanted to ride them.

One of the coasters that I built has an intensity rating that is about 24 (which the game calls ‘ultra extreme’) and having seen it run through on the pc screen, I can see why. There is probably not a span of more than a half a second where there is not an inversion, there are so many loops and corkscrews that I lost count, and it is a launched coaster; launched directly downhill. I can see myself having a lot of fun with this game just trying to make the most fucked up riding experience (for me at the monitor). The strange thing is that when you sit down in the chair and watch the ride, you feel yourself leaning into the corners (at least I did, but that may have been just since it was such a new experience). Definitely a very enjoyable game. I will probably write more about it later, after I have gotten a bit more used to the interface and all of the available options.

Getting back to the issues with the old PC. The old PC only has a 466mhz processor, but it does have 256mb RAM, a 64mb 3d video card and a 40gig hard drive. It meets most of the requirements for games that are coming out today, the only one that it really lacks is the processor. The thing is that all of the titles will install and run on it, then randomly freeze. Not like just run really slow and choppy, but complete lock up. It didn’t seem to me that it should do that if the processor was just a bit slow…

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to figure out just what the hell the problem was. I found that by running Ad Aware from safe mode I was able to remove a lot of crap that I wasn’t able to do while in normal Windows (98) mode. Then, via AntiVirus.com, I found that I have two Trojans in my Registry. The unfortunate part of that is that it doesn’t actually tell you anything other than a name (which a search of my pc did not find a match to). I downloaded a Registry Editor from Download.com and got the same result. If you know anything about computers, you should see where this is going.

The only way that I am able to get rid of the trojans (which are both just spyware, but they are memory resident) is to boot into safe mode and run Ad Aware. Then I have to go to either a normal or clean boot, either options is going to load the Windows Registry, thus reinstalling the damn spyware. If I knew the actual command lines for the damn things I could just go into the Registry and delete them myself. Problem is that if the trial version of the Registry Editor told you the command lines you would never need to actually pay for it. I am certainly not going to pay the $29.95 to buy the Registry Editor for this PC, since it may or may not actually be worth that much at this point, but I sure would like to be able to get rid of those damn PC slowing trojans.

I actually have a ‘rescue disc’ for the pc in question ( the one that I am typing on right now, as it were) which could restore the entire thing back to factory settings. There are many problems with that option, most of which are not all that serious, but one is horrible. I could get past any of the problems with most of the after market stuff, like the cd burner, the video card, all of that. The problem is with the hard drive. When I bought the 40gig hard drive for this pc, it took me several hours of fucking around in the BIOS to get it to work properly and recognize the size of the drive. The drive did not come with any sort of an instruction manual, so I had to do a long guess and check game to get it to work in the first place (not to mention that I had to modify a cable to get the thing plugged into the motherboard, since the motherboard did not support this type of drive). That is something that I am really not planning to do again, unless it is obviously necessary.

If you happen to be privy to information about removing trojans from the registry of a windows 98 system without simply wiping out and re-installing the software, please do tell.

That is all for today. Tune in at some future point for more…

Plumbing; Roller Coaster Tycoon

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The new year marches on. It really seems pretty hard to believe that we are already midway through the ‘aught’ decade. I can remember the eighties pretty well, even the nineties, but if you were to ask me about anything that has happened since the calendar rolled over to 2000, the only thing that I could come up with would be 9/11. At least the only thing that I could come up with quickly. Were I to sit down and think about it for a few minutes I am sure that I could start to name off a bunch of crap that has happened since then. I don’t really want to though. Not to mention the fact that doing something like that would make me think about the president, which would lead to me thinkinking about all of the presidents there have been since I was born, which would lead to me starting to think that I am getting older. Not that there is anything wrong with getting, just that it is something that you usually associate with your parents, not something that you think would ever happen to you.

On that subject, I did get a bit of satisfaction from a comment that one of my boss’ daughters made. Apparently she still has a picture of me from the time I went to the prom with a girl in 1994 (which was the fifth consecutive year that I had been to a prom, still a stat that I am kind of proud of). I was twenty at the time. She said that I haven’t aged a bit since that picture, which made me feel good. Unfortunately, I think that she was only talking about the face part of the picture. The slowing metabolism that seems to come with the late twenties/early thirties has hit me full force, I have put on a couple of dozen pounds since then. My hair is graying more and more. It takes me more time every day to get up and walk without pain in my lower back (which is based solely on the fact that my entire adult life has always involved jobs with a lot of heavy lifting). My eyes seem a bit more sunken, I have wrinkles when I smile, the list goes on and on. Still, it was a nice compliment…If only I could feel like I was still twenty…

• The plumbing issues that I have been discussing since Christmas have been mostly taken care of since last Monday. I have additional parts at the ready to replace the rest of it throughout the house, but I have yet to do so. I had put off filling back in the ditch that houses the new pipe for a week, just to make sure that there weren’t any leaks, not to mention that we have been getting a hell of a lot of rain down here which kept leaving the hole partially filled with water, and the dirt I needed to put back weighing in at double what it did dry. I did take care of that yesterday, man it was a lot of work.

Let this be a lesson to all of you; If you are going to dig a ditch at your house for the purpose of plumbing, fill it back in ASAP. For some reason, most likely the fact that it had been wetted and dried so many times, the dirt was just about the consistency of nearly dry concrete by the time I started to fill the hole back in. It was so thick and heavy that I was afraid to try to do heaping shovelfulls for fear that I would break the shovel’s handle. The dirt was only like that for the first couple of shovelfulls from the mound though, unfortunately, that meant for each section of the mound. All forty feet of it. I initially started filling in a section of the trench completely, then moving forward to the next section. Problem was it was so hard to do the first couple of of throws each section that I feared I wouldn’t be able to get it all done if I continued in that manner. When I finally decided to just do the hardest part all the way down it started to go a bit better, except that by the time I was done with the hard packed stuff my arms were like jello. Fortunately for me the rest of it went it pretty easily, I just used the shovel like a rake/hoe and scooped it in (which would have been a much easier endeavor if I owned a rake or a hoe. I do own both of those, but the rake is a ‘leaf rake’ -yes, an absolute must own in a desert, when you have nothing with leaves-, and the hoe is a children’s toy that is about three feet in length. Both of them were at the house when I bought it, I never really thought I would need real ones). I finished that by about 10:30a.m. yesterday, and that was it for me as far as any sort of physical labor.

My plan had been to fill in the hole, then go ahead and replace the copper lines in and out of the water heater, you know, baby steps. If I do a little bit of the plumbing every weekend I will have it all done over a couple of weeks instead of waiting until something else breaks. Much like any plan I ever have, it all went to hell. Each process is always way harder than anticipated and usually takes twice the time I think it will. I will say again, though, that I really think the hard part is done now. Which I am not even sure I believe. Considering that I said that after I dug the ditch, after I ran the pipe under the sidewalk, after I drilled the hole through the wall for the pipe (both times), after I had the main water line run into the shed, after my father-in-law helped me tie it back into the existing plumbing, and now that the ditch is filled back in. That makes it quite a few times that I had speculated that the hard part was over, only to find that there was more ‘hard part’. I fear that every damn thing is going to be the ‘hard part’. When you live in a house that is more than a century old, you really should expect that things are not going to be as easy as they would be if you lived in a mobile home. Funny how I can say it, but I never believe it.

Enough about plumbing.

• The rest of Sunday was pretty much consumed by the damn Roller Coaster game. I would probably have felt pretty guilty about wasting away the day in that manner were it not for the fact that my wife was sitting right next to me playing it on the other computer. I don’t know what it is about these little ‘simulation’ games that sucks me in, but they always do. The wife actually seems to be a lot better at the game than I am. She can play the scenarios through while maintaining a near perfect park rating, while I am usually struggling to keep it at the 60% or 70% that is required. I am going to attribute that to her being a girl. Girls have, it seems, a knack for design (not the rides, but in general) that makes them far more suited for this type of game. While I use the ‘throw the shit wherever you can fit it in’ method, she kind of seems to think about it a bit more logically. I am not sure if she is going for an aesthetically pleasing layout, but I am sure that she does a lot better at the park layout than I do.

I can still be proud of the fact that I make damn near the most sick, sadistic coasters available. Well, not judging by the ones that they have on exchange on the RCT website, but I am getting better.

Roller Coaster Tycoon

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It seems that the little ‘Roaler Coaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack” Christmas gift has been a heck of a lot more entertaining than I could ever have imagined. I seem to have pissed away the last couple of weeks just trying to figure out how to build bigger, better, faster and more exciting coasters. While I still would not consider myself an actual ‘Tycoon’, I would say that I have a foot pretty firmly into the door of being a “Roller Coaster Mutual Fund Investor”, which obviously doesn’t carry the same punch as ‘Tycoon’, and which is also a bit confusing.

Much like in any game you play, I began to get bored with just following through the scenarios and trying to achieve whatever goal was necessary. I had noticed as I was playing along that my initial attempts at free form coasters were all rating as ‘extreme’ with nausea ratings to match, all the while having a pretty low excitement level. After a bit of guess and check work, I was able to determine that you get really high ratings in those areas when you put curves after very large drops, especially so if the curves were not banked. I did correct that in the course of the scenarios, but, I kept it in mind for the purpose of experimentation outside of gameplay.

One of the single best features of the second RCT game is that it gives you a coaster builder section. This section allows you to build a coaster without the obstructions in the actual scenario, and, more importantly, without wasting valuable time in the actual scenario. They let you save the coaster, then load it directly into your scenario later, provided you have enough cash to do it. This was the most educational part of the game for me, at least as far as learning how to make a ride that will attract people, and thus help me to win the scenarios. However, I am a pretty sadistic little bastard. I began to wonder just exactly how extreme a coaster could get; how much g-force they would let you build into the coaster and still be able to test and open it. That has really been the most fun part of the game.

To your right you will see the test data from my latest sadistic coaster. I am kind of proud of the 22.51 intensity rating, since the ratings seem to be loosely based on a 1-10 scale with anything over ten being extreme, or extreme with an adjective. The nausea rating doesn’t matter to me all that much, that is the whole point of the ride, isn’t it? If you want to go on a coaster and not feel sick, I am pretty sure they have those baby coasters out there somewhere. It is the G-Force ratings on this one that I am pretty proud of. The lateral G’s are because it is a launced coaster (meaning it is shot out of the gate as opposed to being pulled), and at damn near 5 G’s I am pretty sure that this alone would take your breath away. The negative vertical G’s is there only because they wouldn’t let me launch the thing downhill, meaning I had to make a hump which led into the huge drop. The positive 9.95G is the one that I am most proud of though, I mean, damn!

I can’t seem to find any conclusive proof regarding the subject, but I have heard that without the aid of a special suit pilots will start to black out at around 6G’s. Whether or not that is true doesn’t really matter though. Just imagine going a carnival ride like the “Gravitron”, which only does 3G’s, and multiply that by 3. I couldn’t move my appendages forward while riding on the gravitron, and it almost felt like the skin on my face was starting to slip off. If the forces were three times that amount, I likely would have been, at the very least, a bit sick. Man that is a lot of G-force.

The really sad part is that I may never know just how the ride would affect little pixelated sprites, as I have put that coaster into a couple of different scenarios and have yet to have a single passenger. Isn’t there some little, pixelated sprite out there that is being egged on enough by his little, pixelated friends that he has to ride it? If there is I have yet to find him.

I really should try to come up with something more interesting to put here, but the roller coaster game is calling me again. It is really a damn shame how easily I can get addicted to these mindless little games.

Hopefully I will have actual content here next post. Hopefully.

December 28, 2004

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I decided that I better go ahead and throw something up here today, lest you all think that I died a horrible death and was not able to slap together a post in the last week.

The Christmas Holiday is always a pretty hectic time in these parts, especially this year. I had ordered a gift for the wife through amazon.com (which is not linked to or capitalized because I am a bit pissed at them right now). A couple of days later, I got an email saying that the item was ‘delayed in shipping’, but not to worry it would still be here in time. Of course the next email that I received from them said that it was out of stock, and wouldn’t be getting here at all. That sort of thing really sucks. Especially if you are like me, and don’t want to set foot in a department store anywhere between Thanksgiving and New Years, but I really had to in this case.

The item in question was not even any sort of a ‘white elephant’, it was just the ‘Titans’ expansion to Age of Mythology. While I was not able to find the expansion at the local Wal-Mart, I was able to find the gold edition of the original game, which included the expansion, and that was what I bought (it did cost a lot more than the expansion, but I needed it at that point). This is where doing your planning at least a couple of weeks before Christmas could really have helped me.

Angry Amazon stories aside, Christmas went pretty well. I did buy the latest Harry Potter DVD for my wife, while she instructed her Parents to buy the same for me, so we now have two copies of it (I kept my receipt just in case something like that were to happen, so it is not that big a deal). We all seemed to enjoy the day, it was a pretty good Christmas.

My wife gifted me the second ‘Roller Coaster Tycoon’ (well, the ultra, mega, version, with all of the expansions) game, which has been draining away most of my waking hours. The second RCT game has gotten rid of a lot of the issues that I was having with the first, but it has left a lot of them as well. I just enjoy the second version more since they give you scenarios where you don’t have to make any money at all, don’t have to have a good park rating, just have to have exciting coasters, and you don’t have to pay anything to build them. That was the whole reason I wanted to play the game in the first place, I wanted to build gnarly roller coasters and see if anyone would go on them. I did have a lot of deaths on my first couple of attempts, but who knew that you actually needed to put brakes at the end of the run?

The Christmas haul also had some socks and underwear. While, ten years ago, I would have hated to see such items as Christmas gifts, this year I was totally stoked. The wife managed to find some of the underwear that I failed to find in both an internet search, and a local store search. Add to that that the wife has been searching for said underwear for several weeks with the holiday approaching, and never found them. Imagine my excitement when I opened a package to find 8 pair of underwear! I may never have to buy underwear again! Well, that is certainly not true, but I am starting to think that, since the underwear are so hard to find, I may only wear them on special occasions from this day forward. Of course that is the type of bold statement that you could make if you weren’t married. For some reason, women seem to think that you should be wearing underwear every waking moment. Unless, of course, they are horrible sluts, in which case they might get confused if you offer them underwear.

One more thought for today, I have recently started to read the book “The DaVinci Code”, and I find the first few chapters to be a tad boring. I know that it has glowing critical acclaim and all, but it is (so far) seeming to be some sort of a history lesson. I am sure that there will be action in it at some point, but for now I am reading it solely because it has so much buzz about it. Perhaps every mundane factual mention in the first few chapters will come into play in the end, I don’t know. I will say that it has me intrigued enough that I want to to turn the page to see what happens next, and that is the hallmark of a good novel. I sure hope it starts to happen soon though, else I might just start to think that whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not I am reading about it..

Turkey day and Rollercoaster Tycoom

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Turkey Day!


Technically, I think it is only turkey day in the U.S., but since I am relatively sure that my readership has yet to venture beyond the state that I live in, let alone to other continents, I am pretty sure that all eyes upon this page celebrate thanksgiving (or at the very least acknowledge it).

This year, the wife spent hours and hours over the last couple of days trying to get everything ready, and did a marvelous job of it. Unfortunately, being that it is a holiday, things must go awry. Nothing terrible this year; the turkey is done, as are the rolls and other such fare, we are simply waiting on the potatoes. The unfortunate part of this is that the potatoes are my responsibility, at least in theory.

We were up at about 8 this morning to start with the turkey, you know stuffing it and getting it into the oven. That task was completed by about 8:40, and with about five hours until it would be cooked. That was a pretty ideal time, I thought. Have the turkey ready by about 2 so that you can start to use the oven to make the sides (sweet potatoes and the such), and such it was. Even as I type this I can smell the pleasant aroma of the turkey that shall soon be on the plate in front of me. The rolls are golden, fluffy and beautiful. We are waiting on my mashed potatoes to begin the meal. Unfortunately the potatoes have not yet arrived at the house. Makes it a bit tough to cook them.

The potatoes appeared just after I finished the last sentence and have since been peeled and set to boil. The Thanksgiving feast should be here within about thirty minutes. That makes us just about an hour and a half from our goal of eating by 4, but what are you gonna do?

• On to discussing horribly outdated video games!

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that it seemed that roller coasters was not really the meat of how to win the scenarios in roller coaster tycoon. Today I tested that theory, albeit on only the second scenario. I was able to meet the goal (barely) with only roller coasters (and some bathrooms, food, etc. No other rides though). Unfortunately, I still have not found a way to build one of my own that people actually want to go on. If I use their pre-fabricated designs, there are people lining up to ride them. If I build them myself, even when I am trying to make them tame, I get intensity and nausea ratings that are ‘very extreme’, while the excitement of the ride remains unusually low. I am still working to remedy that problem.

There is yet another annoying aspect of the game (which would have been solved had it come with the instruction booklet) regarding the trash in the park. I did not know that you could build trash cans. Who would think that you would list trash cans under the ‘Scenery’ option? As a result of that little oversight I was forced to have at least double the amount of mainenance guys that I needed. Once again, it was a lesson learned, and a lesson that anyone who plays the game probably learned a half a decade ago. At any rate, I did discover that a bunch of trash cans can easily replace a bunch of idiots that just walk around looking for trash to pick up. It turns out that some of the people will put trash into a bin if it is available. Of course there are others that will throw it on the ground three steps from the can, but this is America…What do you expect?

I mentioned, in a previous post, that I bought this game based on my enjoyment of the game ‘SimCity’. One of the things that always annoyed me about SimCity was that you could not control whether the buildings that you built would turn into condos’ or the projects. Well, you could, but that would require moving power stations, adding parks, putting police and fire services closer, etc., etc. That is not one of the issues in the roller coaster game. All you have to do here is build big rides, put in the shops, sweep the vomit off of the sidewalks, and build a few trash cans to be successful. That is my kind of game. More of the building of enormous rides, less of the worrying about where the local fire department is. Of course I did have 16 deaths in an accident that I could have avoided (changed the configuration on the cars on a self-built coaster), but that was just a drop in the pan…Knocked the price down on the ride for a week or two and it was back to normal.

Simulations are nice when they don’t simulate real life, only the way that life should be.

• It seems that my potatoes are almost ready for smashing….almost…At any rate, enough for today.

Games and Religion (come to think of it, just games)

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Yesterday’s missed post can be blamed directly on Roller Coaster Tycoon. I took the liberty of breaking the EULA so that I could install it on both of the pc’s here in the house, since I recently gifted my wife the Age of Mythology game (since she seemed to love the Age of Empires game so much). After that point, I was playing the roller coaster game and not typing much at all. It seems I have grown accustomed to the split keyboard, while I can still type on a normal keyboard, the typos would be horrendous. Well, that and I really wanted to keep playing the game anyway. Pick any of those excuses and take it to heart, ’cause that was the real reason… Now, on to bigger and better things.

• Interesting article in the news, or not. I do suppose that it would depend a lot on your personal religious beliefs. No need to link to it here, since the story itself only seeded a thought in my mind and has nothing to do with the story that I happened to see the quote in. While I don’t remember the quote verbatim, it went something like this:

“I don’t know what the truth is. The only way we will find the truth is to put all of the parties on the stand, under oath, then we will know the truth.”

That is a very good argument. Unless you happen to be talking to someone who is not religious. You see, I am not religious, and as such, I would lie with my hand on a copy of the ‘Holy Bible’ without a second thought. Is there really someone, anyone, out there that is so naive that they think that a person who would openly break ‘God’s Commandments’, would admit to it if they had their hand on a bible? Like you kill 39 women, then deny all of the crimes, but the second you put your hand on the bible you start saying you killed them all? Yes, interrogate him under oath…No one lies, ever…

Lest you all start thinking that I don’t believe in god, I offer you this tidbit. I don’t believe in god, it is a sham that organized religion created to get you to give them money. Yet, when I do commit the mortal sins, I ask for forgiveness to cover my tracks. That is religion in action! Instant gratification for hell-bound practices…Damn, I may be Republican after all…

• Thanksgiving is tomorrow, in the U.S., and everyone is celebrating it. My number one question is why the ‘native americans’ are celebrating it. Was this the last holiday they had before the white man started killing their warriors, raping their women, and forcing them into the reservations that they eventually made it into? Is the ‘white man’ remembered fondly for his ability to trade vodka for gold?

• My mind is in a bit of a flurry right now, please excuse me for ending this shorter than expected.

Diablo and Republicans (you never see them in the same place at the same time)

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After my last post, Diablo happened. I got stuck, once again, in that neverending cycle of ‘just one more waypoint’, but then I have the area cleared so might as well do whatever act related quest is necessary, etc. That consumed most of my day on Monday. Tuesday brought about election day, and with that I found myself watching the news all night just waiting for them to say that they had grossly miscalculated the votes and that Bush was actually way behind in voting. Of course several hours of that didn’t yield any results, nor did it result in my typing anything here for you to read. Wednesday was just a late day at work, as that was the day of our bi-weekly grocery delivery. That leaves me here on Thursday wondering how it is that I have not updated this page since Sunday. Time sucks.

A question that I asked my wife last night, that I am really curious to know the answer to, is “What point is there in having a democracy if the majority of the people vote for the wrong person?” I know that the question is based on some pretty faulty logic, but in reality I think that it is a lot more true than it appears. This year’s elections have made it so that all three branches of government are being ruled by Republicans. Not just any Republicans in many cases, but the evangelical, second-coming-of-Christ type Republicans. I am sure that I am being a bit cynical here, but, isn’t that sort of like having a dictatorship? Well, I guess it does differ from a dictatorship in the fact that 51% of the people voted for it. Why this happened truly escapes me, makes me sick to my stomach, and further pisses me off since I have been paying money into Social Security since I was 16. While I have only been paying it for fourteen years, I will still be pissed when Dubya gets something through congress to do away with it completely. I also know that they (Republicans) are not actually trying to do away with Social Security, only change the way it is managed (like a forced retirement plan for people who don’t ever save money).

Here it is in all its pixelated glory. My breakdown of why I really, really, really hate the Republican agenda. Really rich people pay more taxes than poor people, which makes sense if you do it all by percentages. Really poor people pay no taxes, then get government assistance programs to send a bit more money to them, since they are so poor that they can’t afford a house, car, food and other necessities. The very wealthy people feel that they are being taxed too much for the sake of supporting the poor. The poor think that they aren’t getting enough assistance since life didn’t give them a fair roll of the dice. The solution, in the Republican’s eyes, is to decrease taxes on the very rich, and decrease government assistance programs to the very poor. That is where the problems all start. The rich (current administration included) don’t want to give any money to the poor, don’t want to take back tax cuts made for the very rich, and don’t care to hear any proposal whereby the poor can make it up to, at least, poverty level. So taxes must be raised, but on whom? Well, the middle class of course. So it pushes on, the poor staying poor, the middle class getting closer and closer to poverty, while the upper class roll around in their collective piles of money.

This might have made me sound like a freak, might even have worked itself into a full blown Manifesto, were it not for the fact that the day Dubya cut taxes on the wealthy last year, my state and federal taxes went up. I am all for a smaller government, I mean, hell, if we were to take away the wages of all of the Senators and House Representitives we might be able to work things out. How many millions of dollars did each candidate spend on the campaign trail this year? Imagine if that money was just sent to underfunded projects across the country, we might have been able to do some good.

With luck, I might be back to normal form tomorrow (be it good or bad). That is all for today.

Diablo; Electricity in my life

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I had intentions of getting this thing written pretty early this morning, had and idea that I was going to go on about for however long it would take, then got sidetracked.

It was that damn Diablo again.

I realized that it had been quite a while since I logged any of my characters on, so decided I better do a quick once-in with each of the reamaining ones to make sure that they were not also lost. Of course, as it happens, I found that I had a Paladin that was on his way through the frozen part of act 5, so I figured I would give it a go for a few minutes. What happened, as it always seems to, is that I found the next zone before I found the waypoint. I then retraced my steps and explored out the zone until I did eventually find the waypoint. Thing is, I had already cleared the zone and had a map to the entrance of the next area, if I didn’t continue I would have to clear the whole zone again…

That type of logic kept me going through the ‘Frigid Highlands’, ‘Arreat Plateau’ and even into the ‘Crystalline Passage’, where I again found the next zone before I found the waypoint. Of course it would have been selfish of me to leave ANYA freezing down there when I was so close to the ‘Frozen River’, so I made the decision to free her. The ‘Frozen River’ was actually pretty easy, mind you I am on normal with this character. The thing that made me spend the better part of my day on this damn game was the first drop I got when I entered the ‘Frozen River’. It was not an amazing item, just the Tearhaunch Greaves, but I lost 18 out of 24 characters from my three accounts some time ago, as a result I don’t have anything remotely good that you can use prior to level 45 or so, and those boots were simply made for the Pally I was playing, problem was I couldn’t even pick them up.

For better or worse, I collect the gems and runes that I find along the way with all of the characters that I start. The better is that I always have the right gem/rune for whatever I am trying to do (not counting the higher level runes, as long as I have a Nef and a Lum I am happy). The worse is that I end up with all of my new characters being jammed full of the damn things. Makes me wonder how I did this in D2C, before they doubled the stash size. Anyway, I spent almost an hour clearing the inventories of my three most recent players of their gems/runes, upgrading them as necessary, and saving them to a brand new mule (who will likely get deleted in eight hours or so, making this whole point moot). Then I looked at the clock and saw that I had been playing/muling for almost four hours, at that point I simply saved, exited, and started to type this.

I hate that weird Diablo time warp.

• Fun With Electricity!

As I was laying in bed last night, unable to sleep after having a horrible day, my mind started wandering to weird events in my life that involved electricity. Well, to be fair, the events didn’t always need to involve electricity, but they always did. The results of such were usually not good, and as they streamed through my mind I thought it might make a good anecdotal thing to slap up here. Of course I don’t really know what my adoring fans want, since I never get emails to the positive or negative, so you will take it and you will like it. Or you could choose a different destination, but come on, other than my site, how many more sites are there on the internet?

I didn’t discover the mysterious power of electricity until I was seven or eight. I knew that flipping a switch was not what was making the light come out of the light overhead, but I had no idea what could be causing that to happen. I spent my youngest years, even until I was in the second or third grade, just wondering how it all worked -yet, not wondering enough to read a book on it. And, honestly, if I read a book that explained how the power was carried through little wires, even today, I would think it was a load of crap.

After my first year of school (first grade, as none of the children in my family went to pre-school or kindergarten) , the school that I attended, “Riverside Elementary”, was closed. I am not entirely sure why it was closed, the story that the children were told was that it was too close to ‘Garden Valley Boulevard’, which, through the years, had turned into more of a Freeway than a street. I still don’t know why Riverside closed down, what I do know is that half of the kids then got transferred to “Fir Grove Elementary”, while the other half was divided between “Sunny Slope” and “Rose”. I lost several of the friends that I had made in my first year of school through this change, but you must always trust that your parents’ always have your best interests at heart (even if you think that the best-interests are wrong, or, at best, misguided).

There were only two of my friends, in my grade, that also got transferred over to Fir Grove. Even with the number at 3, we were still only about 10% of that class. That makes you do weird things, things that you would not ever do if you were not being judged by a bunch of people that you didn’t know. So, finally, on to the fun with electricity.

The first, and most unbelievable, experience with electricity involved an electric fence. There was a field around “Fir Grove” that was surrounded by an average chain-link fence, yet instead of having military style razor wire at the top, it had an electric wire. Through the egging on of the other kids, five of us got brave enough to see what would happen if you actually touched the ‘live’ part of the fence. There ended up being a group of five of us, myself and a friend, as well as three guys from the new school that did it. No one actually wanted to touch the fence, so we decided that we would all hold hands as someone did, finally, a much braver kid than me, said he would do the touching. After that we filed in until I was the 3rd person in the chain. We all assumed that it was going to be an equal shock to all of us, turns out that we were wrong. For some reason, which I still don’t understand, the only one that got shocked was the kid that was at the very end of the line, furthest from the power. He looked like he was damn near dying, while none of the rest of us felt a thing. Once the lead kid let go of the wire, the kid at the end quit his spasm. Was it a staged event for our benifit? I dunno. What I do know is that the kid at the end of the line looked like he was having his bones removed through his ears, not a happy face, if that was acting, he should be up for an Oscar.

The next incident involving electricity was much more painful, for me anyway. An Aunt and Uncle of mine lived in a small trailer on the property of another Aunt. They told me that if I was going to open the door of the trailer that I needed to be standing on the milk crate that they used as a step to get inside. I did that each time I opened the door, never questioning why. Of course, being ten or eleven at the time, my memory lapsed just once when I reached for the doorknob.

The second I touched the knob the shock hit me. For some reason, not sure why, I was not able to let go of the knob. I was also not able to shout. I was just standing there jerking around like someone in the electric chair. I don’t know how long I was standing there with the electricity running through me, but it certainly felt like it was at least a good minute. Thankfully, my then Stepdad saw what was happening and reached out to pull me away, but he got shocked when he touched me. He lowered a shoulder and hit me linebacker style to knock me free of the knob, which hurt, but was nothing compared to the jolt I was getting from the trailer. To this day I don’t know how or why the outside of the trailer was electrified, and I still get a bit nervous every time I open the door on a mobile home.

There was a day in my early teens when I was riding my bicycle home from the Tenmile store (why it was called Tenmile may never be known; It was not ten miles from anything.), when I had to stop to relieve myself. This was in rural Oregon and there was hardly any traffic so it was a pretty common occurence. Even at that, I climbed down a small embankment to make sure that no one would see me. I started to water a tree (so to speak) at the bottom when I heard a car approaching from my left. As I turned to the left to make sure that I was not in the line of sight of the car my body, and thus the stream, followed. I had heard that it was not possible to be shocked by peeing on an electric fence, but I am here to tell you that it is possible, and it hurts! I didn’t even know that the tree was holding the electric wire, if you have ever seen a field surrounded by nothing but an electric wire you would understand what I mean. It is just a tiny little strand of metal, but it sure packed a punch. And much like with the trailer in the previous tale, it was not possible for me to move or stop peeing. It did only take a few seconds for my bladder to empty, but still, ouch. Electricity running through your penis is really not all that pleasant.

Now for one where no one gets hurt for a change. You have no doubt seen those Touch Lamps at one time or another. I always wondered how they work (of course as I just google up that link I found the answer, kind of disappointing really, I was hoping it really was magic). While at my then Girlfriend’s house one day, I was screwing with her touch lamp when I wondered what would happen if I touched the lamp, then she touched me. We tried it and it worked. For some reason though it will only work with two people. When we tried it with me touching the lamp, her touching me, then her dad touching her, it just didn’t work. Also, if I was touching the lamp when her little dog licked me it would also trigger the lamp. That was good for a lot of mindless fun, also I did win couple of bets where my buddies would not believe that it would work with more than one person.

In my late teens, myself and a few friends had the most ridiculous form of entertainment that you could imagine. We took an old electrical cord, -I think it came off of a toaster but that hardly matters- and stripped the ends of the wires. We would then take turns plugging it into the outlet, holding one bare end in our hand, then touching the inside of that elbow with the other wire. The electricity would cause the muscles to contract, it kind of looked like you were doing curls at high speed. Now I am sure that you are thinking, “what could possibly go wrong?” Well what went wrong is that one of the friends’, I can’t remember which one, muscles flexed so tightly that he was not able to pull the cord out of the crook of his arm. Strangely, well maybe not considering what we were doing, it took us a good thirty seconds to figure out that we could just unplug the damn thing. In that scenario all of my friends were smoking pot which kind of gave them an excuse for their stupidity. I was stone sober and did it as well, what does that say about me?

That is pretty much it for really memorable moments involving electricity. There are hundreds of other times that I have been shocked, usually while doing something that was at least a tad foolish. The rest of the times that I got shocked were all probably avoidable had I not been in a hurry, or had I thought things through a bit better. Things like getting shocked when changing a light bulb, something that would never happen if you just turn off the switch before you start, but then how do you know when the bulb is screwed in far enough? If you screw it in too tightly it is more likely to break when you try to remove it. There have been a couple of times when I have been changing the ballasts on fluorescent lights at work when someone turned the circuit back on, thus giving me a shock if I was actually touching the wire at the time. This could easily have been avoided if I had just put a piece of masking tape over the switch with something like “being repaired” written on it, but I never think of that until I am sitting on my ass with a weird buzzing going through me.

I have gotten better over the years. Hell a couple of years after I bought my house I actually bought an electrical tester to make sure that a particular circuit was off before I started fucking with it. The down side to having all the bad experiences is that now when I am working on anything electrical I practically shit my pants if someone touches me or I hear the slightest buzzing sound.

That is a bit odd also. Why is it that you can clearly hear the buzzing while you are being shocked but no one else can? Perhaps next time I am doing something foolish enough that I may get shocked I will go ahead and set up some sort of sensitive audio device to record it, just to see if it actually makes an audible sound. Then again if I were to spend that much time setting up the audio device it would seem I would be smart enough to just turn off the circuit first. In theory.

Pogo games; PC issues at work

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So it seems that I am letting silly little games get in the way of my (supposedly) daily rant again. The game that I have been playing at some length recently is a a new Pogo.com game called Canasta. It is, I understand, a game that little old ladies have been playing for a long time, as my mother says that her mother used to play it, but with actual cards as opposed to a monitor and a mouse. The game is laden with weird rules (some of which are listed on that page are not totally accurate to the pogo version I am playing), but then most card games are, aren’t they? The quickest way I can think to give you an idea of how the game works is to say that it is like Gin, only you play two full decks -with wildcards.

I have been using the ‘Practice with Robots’ option on the game while I have been learning the rules. I am getting pretty good at smacking the crap out of the computer, but I am pretty sure that any woman over the age of sixty could hand me my ass, with a side order of mashed potatoes, if I actually tried to play agains another person.

If you have never played any games over there at Pogo, I really suggest you try a couple. Most of the games are free for play, though there will be a 45 second intermission every five minutes or so if you have not actually paid to become a ‘club pogo’ member. It is not all just card and board games either. It is either owned or sponsered by EA, and as such has some of their golf, basketball, football and such simulations there. There are also a couple of racing games, trivia, sports trivia, hell there are a lot of little games over there and you will certainly find one to your liking. Some of the games do require that you have a subscription to the service, I am not sure if Canasta is one of them, but I already have a subscription so play it I shall.

When Pogo first announced their subscritption service I thought I would just go ahead and quit playing their games entirely. In fact, there was a period of almost a year where neither myself or my wife really played many games there. I think the reason that I ended up paying for the subscription was that they had upgraded their old game ‘Word Whomp’ with one called ‘Word Whomp Whackdown’, but it was subscription only. Someone in one of the rooms gave me a 3 day guest pass, which gives you subscriber status for a few days, and I found that many other of the games were worth playing as well. With an annual membership fee of $29.00 U.S., it seemed silly not to do it.

For less than the price I paid for ‘Hoyle card games’ some years ago, I got the whole site, every game, multiplayer when necessary or possible at no extra cost. Of course there aren’t a lot of people out there who would admit to being ‘Cribbage dorks’, but cribbage would have actually cost me money per month through other sites and, though it is one of the free ones through Pogo, has a really nifty rating system and chat room and stuff.

Dear Random Fluctuations of Time and Space, I am starting to sound like a 3am infomercial for POGO.

• On to the crap about the computer problems at work!

Well, the little thingy that was broken has been fixed. It turns out that the little thingy was not the problem though. Tom, the guy who fixed the part for us in the first place, came over today to assist me in checking the wire from the pc to the register. By “assist” I mean that he had the tester and I didn’t and that was the next thing that we checked. The signal went through perfectly, thus the entire 120 feet of line was good, as well as the connectors. At this point I was pretty sure that the problem was in the circuit board in the register but, to be sure, we checked the rest of the variables as well.

Using a separate device through the communications port on the back of the pc, we were able to say, without a doubt, that it worked. The only other pc-based problem that would even be possible would be that the db-25 to db-9 convertor was not functioning correctly. Since we actually had a spare laying around, we tried it out with the other one. I don’t know what the odds are on one burning out while connected to the pc, while the other simultaneously blows out while sitting in a box, but I would say that those odds are pretty low.

At this point, Tom didn’t really have any new ideas. I checked a couple of other things after he left. First, I plugged the archaic db-25 to db-9 convertor into our hand-held system to make sure it would upload, which it did. I then used that same cable to plug the rj-45 from the register into the pc…Nothing…I even tried swapping the register interface to the other serial port, still nothing. At this point I know that the cable is good, I know that the pc port works, I know that the cables in the back room all work, what is left? It has to be the board in the register itself.

There has been an NEC technician down here to look at some problems we have been having with the registers over the last few days, he mentioned that there may be a problem with the main circuit board of the cash register that is making it so that the scanned items do not actually ring up on the register. He also mentioned that these were the oldest registers in the area, and while they are only eight or so years old, I guess that is kind of right. The fact that they are several years old should not keep them from functioning though. Sure you can get a new pc for 500, but when you are looking for a cash register, with a scale and scanner, go ahead and add a zero to that number. If the crap product that a company sells can not even perform the tasks for which it was purchased, for at least ten years or so, then the merchandise is just crap…Hell, they had been using the previous registers since the early ’70’s, and they still work perfectly!

Perhaps the store is going to start looking a lot more like an Old-West mercantile in the future, there is no way that the owners are going to pour a lot more money into technology that they don’t understand, especially when the out-of-pocket cost of the repairs is rapidly approaching the out-of-pocket for the purchase in the first place.

I know that no electronic device can go on forever without a bit of help. But when you have an old register still plugged in up front, and another in the storage room, that have both been going strong for thirty-some years, while the ones you bought in the late ’90’s are crapping out less than ten years later…I guess it is true of everything when they say, “Well, they just don’t build them like they used to.”

Every single circuit that you add to a system is going to make it both weaker and more likely to break. A Cash Register is something that really needs to be built pretty solidly, since it is going to get hammered on by everyone from here to Jesus and back. When the nerd shows up to say that, yes, the power surge a couple of weeks ago caused the problem, I am going to ask him why the 30 year old registers in the store can take that surge, while the much more expensive, newer, better, registers can not. I wonder what the response will be to that question….