Coupon fun

Posted on March 4, 2009 by baudattitude

OK, like I REALLY needed to add more to my backlog.

But, see, I stumbled across a link to a pretty decent coupon this morning: $20 off any of a pretty long list of (older) PC games at Best Buy.  It requires you to have their loyalty program card, presumably so you cant load up for resale, but eh, I finally gave in to a cashier last month so I fit that criteria.

Anyway, one of the titles on the list was Crysis, for a whopping $9.99 after coupon, which has a reputation for being, well, a benchmark AND a game in one, and since I just bought a new video card a couple of weekends ago, I figured I would temporarily put aside my long-running boycott of EA titles and buy it.

When I say “long running”, I mean since, oh, 1989 or so.  So twenty years of boycotting EA for dropping support for the Atari 8-bits.  Pretty good run there.

Anyway.

I got to Best Buy and found out that the coupon, while limited in some regards, was a little less restrictive than I’d thought.  While it was still tied to your loyalty card, one per person, you could use your one coupon for up to 3 of the titles off their list.

So I wound up with Crysis, the Orange Box, and Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Premier Edition for a total of $29.97, which is a pretty good deal any way you look at it.

Let’s hear it for being behind the curve.

Edit: For the record, Crysis recommends “High” settings for me at 1920 x 1200.  Not bad for a machine with a 2 year old processor and PC5300 RAM. 🙂

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Two Years Blog

Posted on March 3, 2009 by baudattitude

First, a self-congratulatory stats regurgitation before I get on to today’s normal post.

Today is the second anniversary of Baud Attitude, which really goes to show how much I love talking about myself.

Surprisingly, about 95000 people have come here to watch me talk about myself – of course, 60000 of those are people looking for pictures of weird Japanese burgers and another 30000 are people looking for drawings of anime characters in compromising positions, but even the leftover 5000 represent a startling number of people.

Regardless of how you’ve come here,I like to think that you leave in a better mood, even if it’s only because you realize that, no matter how tragically average and unexciting your life is, it could be worse.

Case in point: I’m currently enjoying a glow of personal satisfaction stemming from having finished recording a whole mess of cassettes and minidiscs on to one computer, transferred them from that computer to the server, backed up the server drive to an external HD, and then wiped the drive of the recording computer using DBAN, meaning that I have three computers decommissioned and ready to be taken to local computer recycler or something similar and we only have, uh, eight computers left.  My desktop, our file server, vanity, the mac mini, two laptops, an eee pc and my wife’s tablet.  That’s a scary thought.

It also means that I can donate or craigslist the cassette deck, the minidisc deck, a massive fisher receiver from 1996, a record player, some speakers and the… let me think… the third CD player I ever bought.  I’m a little sad about that last one, because, while the first two CD players died in a couple of years each, this one has lasted over 15 years.  It deserves a viking longboat funeral, not to be unceremoniously dropped off at a goodwill donation center.

The point is, it all represents an awful lot of hardware that I won’t have to move in a few months.

This is what I consider the satisfactory culmination of a project, which brings us back to my original point, that I don’t care how boring you think your life is, you’re a regular party animal by comparison.

I think just knowing that I’m the sort of person who would use the phrase “party animal” really drives that particular point home.

For my next thrilling escapade, I think I’m going to thin out the cable box again.  I should say, cables BOXES, as I have one each for audio/video cables, power cables, and data cables, with a fourth box devoted to “assorted computer bits”

Then, oooooh, then I’m going to go through the bin of MANUALS and get rid of manuals for hardware we no longer have, and maybe toss old driver disks and… wow.  I’m all a-flutter.

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Unexpected Benefits Of Education

Posted on March 2, 2009 by baudattitude

One of the classes I’m taking this term is ART208, “Art of China”, which I was a little hesitant about signing up for because it wasn’t directly linked to my Japan studies but I figured what the hell.

I hoped it would be at least somewhat educational, since the Japanese have been borrowing or adapting culture from China for centuries anyway.

I have never had such low expectations and gotten so much out of a class.

Mostly, it’s because the teacher is spending an awful lot more time teaching us all the assorted invasions, rebellions and assorted drama that China has gone through then he is actually teaching us art history, or maybe he’s just being really insidious about how he’s teaching us art history, which is a distinct possibility.  We’ve also gotten a good helping of Buddhist history as it applies to Asia, and the more of that I get exposed to, the more I understand just how useful it’s going to be.

Today’s lecture was on the Qing dynasty, so it was pretty much about the Manchu invasion of China in the 1640s and the assorted resistance movements that held on for a few years and so on and so forth.

As a result, I now understand the plot of every Jet Li movie I have ever seen.

Even if I’d gotten nothing else from this class – and I’ve actually gotten an awful lot – it would STILL have been worth it.  Think I’m going to watch me some Fong Sai Yuk and Last Hero In China this weekend.

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More on Jeanne

Posted on February 27, 2009 by baudattitude

To quote myself from a few days ago, on the topic of Jeanne D’arc:

“Those minor things aside, serious thumbs up. It’s challenging, it’s satisfying, and – tragic lack of catgirls aside – it’s awfully pretty.”

Well, how was I supposed to know about Mawra?

jeanne_mawra

So, really, pretty much the perfect game.

I wasn’t able to play for about 3 weeks – I had that much homework, and being sick for a week and having a hard drive crash didn’t help – but now that I’m back to it, it continues to entertain.

I’m unfortunately stuck on a – sigh – protect mission, where I have to get an incredible pansy of an NPC to a set point in 20 turns, and if he takes a single hit he’s pretty much dead for sure.

I got quite close once, and then the game decided that, since I’d killed almost every enemy in the level, I needed to have six reinforcements show up, one of them almost on top of the NPC I need to protect.

Still, I will persevere.

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Proving the depths of my ineptitude

Posted on February 26, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I found out a couple of days ago that Valve put out a free sort-of-level of Half Life 2 as a tech demo for some lighting engine they’d worked up.

I quite enjoyed Half Life 2, regardless of the lack of ending, and while I’m putting off playing the “episodes” until they’ve released the last of them, I figured I should track down this thing, called “Lost Coast”, and give it a try.

For the record, in the space of playing a 15-20 minute long level – which was pretty neat, by the way – I managed to get stuck hard enough that I needed to look up a hint on the net.

In my defense, I only got that stuck because I ran in to a bug; there’s a point where you blow something up and it’s supposed to damage some of the environment in a way that lets you get through, but when I blew it up, it didn’t actually complete its script so I COULDN’T progress.

Still, it was pretty embarassing.

Oh, I had to install Steam for this thing.

I have in the past looked at Steam rather critically.

Honestly, I still think it is astonishing that Valve has pulled it off; they’ve managed to convince legions of gamers that they are to be trusted, and even though they’ve shown in the past that they can cut off your access to content you’ve paid for, leaving you with no recourse, they remain in the good graces of what seems like the majority.  There comes a point where you have to take a leap of faith, that they wouldn’t have gotten this level of trust without earning it in some way.

So, I may even make the odd purchase on it in future, with the following caveat:

I don’t, as a rule, pirate games and haven’t felt the need to since I was, oh, roughly 17 or so, so over half my life ago.  That marked the point where the amount of money I could spend on games meant that I had enough games TO play that they could occupy all the free time I could devote to games, so if I went and pirated stuff it would just be adding stuff I didn’t have time to play to the piles of games I’d actually spent money on and didn’t have time to play.

If I buy stuff via Steam, and then Valve decides to muck around with me, I’m not going to feel shame in going to any lengths necessary to get my digital “stuff” back.

At the moment, Steam is in my good graces.  They gave me the bonus level I mentioned, and a Portal demo and a couple of other freebies, and when I put in the serial number from my thrift-store-purchased retail copy of Half Life, they gave me the two expansions – Blue Shift and Opposing Force – free of charge, threw in Counterstrike, and added in a couple other online deathmatch style games.  It’s not hard to be in my good graces when you seem to be falling over backwards to give me Free Stuff.

We’ll see how it progresses.

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Crappy EULAs

Posted on February 25, 2009 by baudattitude

OK, there’s no way to start this 100% tastefully, but I trust you’ll forgive.

I was in the men’s room at school, and the bottom roll of paper had run out, so I was trying to figure out how to make it drop down the spare roll.

I am sure that this is an experience that everyone can emphasize with.  It is a somewhat humbling experience, being subordinate to an inanimate piece of plastic while in a, well, quite vulnerable state, trying to find the Magic Lever or Hidden Button that will make the mechanism work.

I did figure it out, proving once again that man is superior to machine, but as the top roll dropped down, a sticker fell out of the dispenser, and I felt it needed to be shared, in sort of a “dear god, we’ve come this far, there is no hope for us as a species” sort of way.

tp_eula

The toilet paper dispenser had an EULA.

Well, sort of a EULA, anyway.

A small bit of legalese, that I couldn’t see before I used their product, telling the end user that, no matter what the physical presence of an object might suggest, they don’t actually own their toilet paper dispensers, can’t use any toilet paper other than the Approved Toilet Paper, not that they’re allowed to refill them themselves anyway, and can’t make any alterations or sell them because, as noted, they don’t actually own them.

It sounds like a EULA to me.

I considered calling the 800 number to make sure I was using GP’s products in an approved manner, but I quite honestly feared the answer, so I finished my possibly-infringing business, got out of there, and now I share this with the world at large because, while I’m sure that it has some sort of humor potential, I’m not up to the task.  I’ll leave it in the hands of anyone who is, well, funnier than I am, which is a pretty low bar to step over really.

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Sony missed an incredible opportunity

Posted on February 24, 2009 by baudattitude

After having finished Resistance : Fall Of Man this last weekend, thanks largely to my gamerspouse buddy coming over – I didn’t make it through the FIRST LEVEL playing solo, even on Normal difficulty – I realized that Sony missed a huge opportunity when they released Resistance 2 recently.

That is to say, they failed to call the game: “Resistance 2: Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back”

OK, so that’s kind of lame really.  But what the hell, it will probably get me an occasional pity visit from Star Trek fans, which will be a change up from my average visitor, who finds this site through searching on terms like “fatal frame panty shot”

Not that I have a problem with that.  The sort of man searching for “fatal frame panty shot” is a man who is true to himself.  I salute you, random pervert, because you capture the essence of what it is to be a man.

Let’s get back to Resistance, shall we, before I disturb my readers any further?

Anyway.  Resistance is a satisfying shooty experience and taught me that I had been, since 1995, holding Playstation controllers in precisely the wrong fashion, which was in itself worth the price of admission.

It didn’t really have a BANG ZOOM CROWNING MOMENT OF AWESOME ending… actually, to come right down to it, it was remarkably reminiscent of the ending to the first Halo game, if Bungie had forgotten to include the kick-ass Warthog bit right at the end… but it was fun and I am looking forward to trying out the sequel just as soon as it hits Greatest Hits status.

Posted in ps3, videogames | 1 Comment

Milestones and money

Posted on February 20, 2009 by baudattitude

So, didn’t get fired today.  Actually quite a nice meeting, it seems that we are bucking the trend and doing all right despite the crashing economy.  We have more customers than the year before, delivered more products in less time, and so on and so forth.

My corporate overlords actually handed out bonuses, just to make the point about being in good financial shape, and I made out surprisingly well.

See, every time we ship a project, we send the customer a satisfaction survey sort of thing with a dozen or so questions; they’re asked to rank us on a scale of 1 to 5.

At the meeting, for every project that came back straight 5’s, they gave $50 checks to the developer, PM, and QA guy that worked on it.

We have six developers and two QA guys.

Most of the developers wound up with 1 check, a couple got 2, and, well, I wound up with 4 and the other QA guy did pretty well too.  🙂

So, not fired AND a nice bonus to offset the fact that I got a little silly at Newegg last weekend after my hard drive died.

Also, about the milestones thing:  This is the 400th post here.  It’s not a significant number in any way and the 2 year anniversary of this blog isn’t coming up for a couple of weeks, but it’s a big, round number, so it’s kind of a milestone.  I choose to think of it that way, anyway.

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I am become death, apparently

Posted on February 19, 2009 by baudattitude

I’m not sure how to feel about this.

I’m a believer, personally, in staying the hell home when I’m sick instead of going in to work.

I meet a lot of other people who feel the same way, and I see lots of articles saying that bosses would rather you stay home.

In practice, however, I have only ever been told to go home when I’m sick once, and it turned out I had pneumonia.  Usually, when I HAVE gone in to work when I was visibly sick, I’ve been praised for it, and when I’ve taken more than, say, a single day off sick, I tend to catch flack for it.

So reality differs from ideal. Big surprise, right?

Anyway, I was tremendously sick for over a week recently.  I even missed a day of school, and it marked the first time in three years that I have missed a class for any reason.  I was honestly, earnestly, sick, worse off than I have been in a very long time, to the point where I couldn’t stand or sit upright for more than a few minutes without wanting to throw up.

On the other hand, I had a project due last Friday, and guess what, was the only guy available to finish it up.

So, I took Monday off, went in to work and coughed my way through Tuesday and Wednesday, couldn’t make it in on Thursday, and then made it in on Friday to finish the project, after which I missed the aforementioned class on Saturday.

I got considerable praise for coming in and getting the project out, by the way.

Then, on Monday, two people I work reasonably closely with – one of our vice presidents and our chief architect – were out.

I’m reasonably sure that I am responsible for the godawful weekend both had and their subsequent absences.

They’re both really NICE people, so I feel bad for this on a personal level.

On a smug bastard level, I’m calculating the difference between their salary and mine and how many important decisions they make on a daily basis and – any way I look at it – the three days of working-while-sick the company got out of me last week were pretty much dwarfed by the overall productivity hit of these two power players being down.

There’s a point in there somewhere but I’m not coming to it cleanly, so I’ll leave it unsettled and move on.

We have – and this is back to work, but not at all related to my status as a Typhoid Mary – we have an all-company lunch on Friday.

Friday is a payday, mind you, and the week before last was marked by a full week of executive meetings behind closed doors with our corporate consultant.

I’m not saying that anything’s going to happen at this lunch.  It might be a jovial all-hands-let’s-talk-about-corporate direction meeting.  It’s not that I’m writing down a list of the top five people most likely to be let go and putting it in an envelope that I will bring to the meeting or anything.  Cause that would be, you know, pessimistic.  🙂

(And, yes, I’m on the list; my boss knows that I’m leaving in June so if they are looking at doing staff reductions they’d be idiots to keep me.)

Update: I took out a product manager as well, so I’m up to three.

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Media Transfer Progression

Posted on February 18, 2009 by baudattitude

Things are humming along nicely.  In the 3 days since I finished transferring the last of the audiocassettes, I’ve gotten ten out of the thirty minidiscs – the thirty minidiscs that actually have content unique to them, that is, content that wasn’t just copied off CDs that have already been encoded – recorded to the PC.

It shouldn’t be long now.

Of course, at some point – probably a long time from now – I’ll need to go through the set of massive WAV files this is all creating and think about removing noise, chopping them into tracks, so on and so forth.  That’s for the future; for now it’s all about preservation.

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