Author: Jason

Earth Day

Random Thoughts

Today is Earth Day.

So, being that that is what today is, I figured it was time for another edition of what I will from now on refer to as “Probably Not Saving The World!”

Previously on the blog, I’ve mentioned my efforts to reduce my junk mail. The first couple of steps I took helped, but it always seemed to be a momentary slackening of the flood, not a stoppage. Then I was pointed at GreenDimes. I signed up for their $20 premium package, and the junk mail has all but stopped. At this point, the only things I get that I consider junk are a few local items, which I can excuse because they are local advertisements of local businesses and not big chains. Its nice, and it makes me feel better about not wasting all that paper.  With the GreenDimes service, you can even get the names of previous tenants dropped from lists, which is great since at this point nearly a third of my junk was for people who don’t live at my house.

We still keep up on the recycling, but even more so, I recently suffered through caffeine withdrawal in order to stop drinking Cokes, and have pulled way back on the number of canned and bottled beverages I drink. With a decent filter, tap water is just as good, if not better, than anything you can buy at the store. Plus, the more things you buy at the store (like sodas and bottled water) are more things that need to be trucked around the country. While I haven’t gone totally for “buying local”, I am trying to cut back on all the things I buy where I can.

Next up, we are looking to have an energy audit done on the house. That’s where someone comes and inspects the house to find all the places where you can improve efficiency, mostly for heating and air conditioning, to cut back on usage. As it is, we are trying to let the house stay cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer if we can stand it.

I’m really hoping that within the next five years I can get solar panels put on the house. You can even get money from the government to help with that, and get a tax write off.

So anyway… Happy Earth Day! Even if you don’t believe in “Global Warming”, garbage is still garbage, and less garbage is good.

Burnout Paradise

Gaming

I have my Criterion Elite license, which means I have won every race, unlocked every car and ruled every road.  I have 350 out of 350 on the Freeburn Challenges.  I have all the achievements you can get without having a camera (and if I ever find a spare $40 laying around, I’ll get those too).  And now I’m spending my time chillin’ helping out other folks on their challenges or looking for races, so I think its fair to say I’ve seen the entire game… so here are my thoughts.

Overall, this is a fantastic addition to the Burnout series of games.  If you like the older Burnout games or like racing games, definitely think about picking this up.  It is worth it.  But instead of looking at the game as a whole, lets take a moment and look at a bunch of the design choices of the game, or missing features, and rate those either as a Pro (good idea) or a Con (bad idea). Read more

Alias

Reviews

12 out of 13 nots
for awesome spy stuff, characters I cared about, and actually having an ending

So, I managed to make my way through all five seasons of the TV show Alias.  Damn, that was some good television. Read more

… and Taxes

Site News

Each year, right around this time, I become a vocal advocate of a shift from income taxes to sales taxes.  Normally, I manage to keep it off the blog by scheduling posts in advance or through other great effort.  This year, I just couldn’t manage to keep from ranting about it, so rather than post daily diatribes on how I think the Income Tax system of this country is flawed and sucks, I refrained from hitting the publish button and the blog was dark for a week.  I would pay someone to do my taxes for me, but I feel that only perpetuates the system.

Anyway, the taxes are filed, I took a day off to regain my composure, and the blogging will continue.

Undead or Alive

Reviews

4 out of 13 nots.
for bad zombies, worse jokes and even worse music

So, a little over a week ago, I decided to sign back up with NetFlix, which I had canceled a while back just because the wife and I were watching so much TV and buying so many movies that we never had time to watch our rentals.  Now with TV in flux and not buying movies, we’ve got time… plus, since we use a PC to watch TV anyway, it gives us a great way to take advantage of the movie streaming available from NetFlix.  Furthermore, as I work from home most days, it also gives me an opportunity to stream movies I might otherwise never see to my other laptop while I slave away on program code.

And this is how I came to watch Undead or Alive, a zombie western comedy.  It was… bad.  The zombies were corny and goofy, the jokes were lame (in fact the movie never crossed the line from “mildly amusing” into “funny”), all in all not really a good film, or even a good bad film.  Don’t see it.

More after the break… Read more

The Edge of Disbelief

Reviews

The wife and I have been watching the show Alias lately, on DVD of course since its been off the air a couple of years. I must say that I am really enjoying it. Overall, J.J. Abrams proved that you can do incredibly complicated multi-season stories where each episode is also satisfying within the whole, something he would later lose during season three of Lost.

While the show includes many quasi-realistic gadgets and situations, its normally just right at that line of believability without going over into complete bull shit… at least until the last couple episodes of season three. This may not be exact, but the scene is that they’ve just put together this machine and slapped a container of goo in it, and it begins drawing out these wavy lines, which are determined to be a brain-wave pattern, and the dialog goes:

SLOANE: Each individual has a signature brain-wave pattern as unique as a fingerprint. So to exploit this, the DoD’s developed an experimental satellite network capable of remote encephalography.
SYDNEY: Reading brain-waves from orbit.

See… I’d buy that perhaps brain-waves are as unique as a fingerprint, but reading brain-waves from orbit? I had been comfortably standing at the edge of the ocean, happily watching the waves hit the beach, and this exchange was like stepping into the water to find out that despite the sunny day and warm winds the ocean water is so very very cold. I was snapped right out of the show to turn to the wife and say, “Did they just say reading brain-waves from orbit?” Luckily, they didn’t dwell on it, they didn’t show the team calling the brain-scanner office to track down the pattern in question, they just said “Found her” and moved on. In fact, its unclear if they even used the brain-waves at all as they may have just had a hit on one of the identities they knew the girl had been using. Of course, season three ended shortly there after with the girl in question being on the loose again, so its possible that the orbiting thought police might be utilized in season four to find her again. I hope they don’t…

Anyway, I’ve heard that season five wasn’t so hot, but I plan on watching the whole thing. I’ll post a review of the entire run once I’m finished.

The Best of Both Worlds

Gaming

In most fantasy based MMOs these days (and even in most non-fantasy based ones), there are only three functions a player performs at the root: take/absorb damage, deal damage, heal damage.  Most games also usually have one class that is designed to exclusively do one of those tasks.  A warrior tanks, a cleric heals, a wizard or rogue does damage.  Then we introduce the hybrids and controversy ensues.

In real life, at a real job, it is perfectly respectable to have people who specialize in small skill sets working alongside people who have two or three lesser specialties, not to the depth or quality of the single set specialist.  I’ve encountered this in my own life, worked with a guy who was aces at building databases and understanding database structure however his every attempt to ever do user interface work not only looked horrible but failed to function.  I’ve also worked with people who can build the most beautiful web pages but couldn’t properly lay out a database design to save their lives.  Personally, I live somewhere in the middle, I generally do all of programming work from UI to database with a decent degree of competency.  I’m not the best at any of it, but I do all of it well enough.  Usually in a work environment, its best to have a team built mostly of specialists with one or more generalists to support everyone else and to translate and transition work between the specialists.  See, when the UI guru and the DB savant get into a knock down drag out over design, I’m the guy who knows enough about both to be able to talk to both of them and make them see that they are actually agreeing with each other, but using different terms, or to make simple suggestions for both sides to bring them to a point where the work can get done.

In game design, this is where the hybrid should be.  He should be a mix of tanking, healing and damage dealing, any two or all three, to various levels but never as good as the single focus classes.  Hybrids should also be rare, and largely confined to group settings, because the whole point of the hybrid is that he supports other classes in doing their work by picking up slack or boosting just a little.  The problem, of course, is that hybrids are often more dynamic, by design, than the single focus classes, and so they attract more players.  While many people are content to be a specialist in real life, in gaming they want to be able to do everything, on one character.  So you end up with a bunch of people playing Paladins because they want to tank and heal, but then they complain when they do neither of them as well as warriors or priests.

So, what’s the solution?  Is there one?  Does it need one?

I’ve got no answer to those questions… but maybe other people do, and I would love to hear them.

Fool For A Day

Random Thoughts

In my opinion, there is comedy and there are April Fools’ jokes.  Comedy comes in all forms, any day of the year.  April Fools’ jokes come one day a year and the only good ones are immediate and physical, or slow gotchas.  The immediate ones are like putting tape on the water fountain with a pinhole in it, or whoopee cushions.  Timeless classics that make you want to punch someone in the face because the joke is retarded AND you fell for it like a giant dumb-ass.  The slow gotchas are the best though… present something that is just bordering on too far, plausible but not totally probable, and once you’ve hooked them with enough detail and spin, shove it over the edge and make people feel silly for believing you.

The problem with that second form is that you are literally getting people’s hopes up and then crushing them with comedy.  Strangely, people don’t like that.  So, most people who pull April Fools’ pranks usually just start over the edge and try to be funny from the get go.  While I don’t doubt that many people put a lot of effort into their creations for this particular day and I admit that many of them are in fact funny, the art of the April Fools’ con is lost to most.

Thanks to living in Atlanta for a number of years, I had the good fortune to experience some truly inspired April Fools’ pranks at the hands of the old 99x morning show.  A few examples:

  • Releasing information about a new theme park under construction in the Atlanta area called Magic Island, which was to be entirely underground.
  • A control room mishap that resulted in accidentally giving out Leonardo DiCaprio’s home phone number.
  • Firing one of the Morning X DJs because she wasn’t pretty enough to be on the new Web Cam that the station was setting up.

Each of these were well done because they did their homework… they got buy in from management, from sponsors, from actors, and they sold it to the audience, remaining in character even in the face of being called liars.  The joke wasn’t dumped on you in the space of a few seconds, it was slowly built over the course of two or three hours, the kind of investment into a prank you just don’t see that often.  Sadly, 99x is dead and the Morning X is long gone.  But I’ll always have my memories…

Anyway, I’m not going to link to any particular site for jokes today, but over at April Fools’ Day On The Web they keep a running list of all the jokes that people report.  Wikipedia will run a list also. Very few of them will really fool you, but some of them are funny.

An Upgrade Is Coming

Site News

At some point during this week, once I’m sure none of my needed plugins will be broken, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.5.  This is an apology in advance for when I screw it up…

It does certainly appear to have a number of new features and fixes (read about them here), and I’m excited for it.  However, in the past, while bug fix releases have always gone smoothly, full releases have always taken down some esoteric plugin I had built my site around causing me to have to redesign the whole damn thing.  I’m hoping that’s not going to happen this time.

Even if it does though, I’ll work through it.  WordPress has been the best blogging software I’ve come across, so unless someone just blows them out of the water with cool useful features, it is here to stay.

Casserole

Random Thoughts

According to the definition:

cas·se·role: kas–uh-rohl
noun, verb, -roled, -rol·ing.
–noun
1. a baking dish of glass, pottery, etc., usually with a cover.
2. any food, usually a mixture, cooked in such a dish.
3. a small dish with a handle, used in chemical laboratories.
–verb (used with object)
4. to bake or cook (food) in a casserole.

the sentence “I casserole a casserole in this casserole.” would be valid. But trying saying it ten times fast…