Monthly Archives: May 2008

Technology

Smart car my ass

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Recently I started driving an electric car.  I pay nothing for gas.  It has a range of around 25 miles, but round trip to work and back is only 15 miles, so I charge it exclusively at work.  It has a top speed of 35mph and is classified as a “neighborhood electric vehicle”, but I drive on the back roads to work anyways, so no big thing.  It is far from roomy, probably not very safe in an accident, but short of a box full of puppies trained to hug kittens, it is probably the best way to meet chicks I can think of.  Being so small, you don’t even need a “no fat chicks” bumper sticker, cuz they look at it and realize they would likely get stuck in the door if they were to even try to fit in the tiny little passenger seat.  Funny thing is, the hotties that flock to it whenever I park it assume I am some sort of environmentalist dipshit who wants to talk to them about how Hitlery should drop out of the race or how much money we are wasting in Iraq.  I don’t bother explaining to them that I agree completely, but that it would be best if Obama joined her, and that a few nukes would save us tons of money in Iraq.  They also all assume it is a “smart car”… sigh.

smartnotsmart.jpg 

 

See, my little electric car looks like a shrunk down smart car to people who haven’t seen either one in person before.  That isn’t a bad thing, but seriously, what is the point of the “smart car”.  Yes, it can drive at freeway speeds, but who would want to fight with semi for a lane in that thing?  The real issue though is that the little coffin only gets  a tad bit better milage than a normal sized car, and it isn’t exactly cheap.  Really, the only reason to buy it in my book would be for the chick magnet appeal.  

My plastic deathtrap uses no gas, and did I mention that I don’t pay to charge it!  If you want a new vehicle to combat the crazy gas prices, wait until they at least get 60mpg, or buy a motorcylce, because if you are going to be unsafe and you insist on still using gas like a cave man, you can at least look cool doing it.  Trust me, nobody looks cool in these micro cars.  If you are normal sized, you will look huge in them.  If you are above average in size you will look like Andre the Giant in them.  If you are a tiny little person that is comfortably scaled to something that size, everyone will just assume you are far away and always yell to talk to you!

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Technology

Metal Gear Solid PS3 Bundle

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It looks like I may finally get my PS3 in less than a month. I was waiting around for the rumored 120GB version, since the 80GB is out of production. Well, I’ve decided I won’t wait past June 12th, when the MGS PS3 Bundle comes out. It will have:

The whole thing is $500, so it’s like you get the upgraded controller and video game for free; that’s probably a $100 value. I will be putting that towards an extra controller and, if I feel like spending ridiculous money on (what most would call) a minor convenience, the infrared to bluetooth converter and the Harmony One remote.1

  1. I really love my Universal Automator, but there seems to be no way to support the IR2BT. [↩]
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Technology

Age of Conan (on my Mac Pro)

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I was not expecting AoC [ Amazon ] to live up to the hype, but it did.

I was not expecting it to be so gorgeous, and not just because you can see boobies. The youtube clips don’t do this game justice.

I was expecting it to be buggy and to have that “new game” feel, but the content I have seen so far is kicking butt. I have not yet gotten stuck, had a buggy quest, or had the game crash.

I was not expecting AoC to run as smoothly as it did, considering I am playing it on a Mac using Bootcamp, but the only thing limiting it is the steaming load that is Windows XP. I have 8 cores and 16gb of ram running on a 64 bit bus, most of which just sits there unused. I went with a slower processor and dumped the savings into upgrading the machine, but I have never used more than 35% of the CPU. The 8800GT is doing all the work, and all I can say is WOW (no, not WoW, not anything like WoW).

The fighting mechanics are still growing on me. I was one of those rare people that will admit to liking Oblivion, especially compared to the click on target mash buttons lameness that most classes in WoW utilize (sure, in raids they are now forcing you to move around to avoid hot lava, but the only reason this is hard is because many people don’t have the skills to actually watch their cast bar AND the screen). So far I have only played a barbarian, and the casting time for longer combo moves seems a bit off. Many times I think I initiated a combo, but my toon is just standing there getting beat on. Finally, the combo will pop up, and like some tard at the fair playing whack-a-mole, I excitedly mash the buttons in the order shown. Sure, I could have gone with the dance dance revolution comparison, but that would give away my winning idea of using a dance mat for controlling my toon!

Things I am not digging as part of the Early Access include the craptacular server maintenance schedules and lack of voice acting for the quests past the starting area, but maybe those will be fixed with the official launch. Of course, they are european, and expecting even half-assed customer support would be purely naive. Don’t believe me? Go try to find their phone support number…. nope, they don’t have one. Hopefully they can make up for it with adequate online GM support.

Should Blizzard be worried? Yes, they should. Not because everyone will be leaving WoW to play AoC,though some will, just for something new to do. Personally, I am not yet to the point where I am hooked, and I fully expect to go back to WoW some time before the next expansion. AoC may just delay my return for a few months. The real reason Bizzard should be worried though is that a bunch of weird Norwegians showed that WoW did not set the bar too high, and they are no longer the only real option for people wanting to get their MMO on. Two days ago I was still resigned to WoW being the best option for the foreseeable future, but now I can see that providing them competition is not only possible, but likely. This is good for gaming in general, and I look forward to seeing how the competition drives the genre in the future.

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BTW, Everything Else

The (Former) Paper of Record

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My grandfather had to drop out of high school during the Great Depression. He eventually got his GED, but said that most people he spoke with assumed he had a college degree. He was a very bright man, but he credited this to reading The New York Times every day, cover to cover.

Seth Godin writes about how business is poor at The New York Times, while standards and focus are slipping. Recent articles include two stories on Barbara Walters and her new book, and a review of The Olive Garden. Yes, The Olive Garden. After reading this, I have serious doubts as to whether someone could repeat what my grandfather did.

I remember growing up hearing that The New York Times was “the paper of record“. I looked up that term in Wikipedia and found there is resistance to that venerable term by Western newspaper editors, especially those at NYT:

Daniel Okrent, at the time the public editor of The New York Times, wrote on April 25, 2004 that his paper is no longer a newspaper of record, and that this change is to be welcomed. In his view, the journalism of a “newspaper of record” is “as much stenography as reporting, as much virtual reprinting of handouts (in the form of verbatim transcripts of unexceptional speeches) as provocative journalism.” John Geddes, the managing editor of The New York Times, expressed this even more strongly: “I don’t think there can be a ‘paper of record’. The term implies an omniscient chronicler of events, an arbiter that perfectly captures the significance and import of a day in our lives. I don’t work at that place.”

I think we’ve lost something good here.

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Film

Iron Man is Solid

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I got a chance to take a break from school and took a look at Iron Man over the weekend. I thought it was awesome. I don’t know much, if anything, about the comic book so I don’t know how faithful the story was, but the plot was good, the action was great, the CG was great, and I thought Robert Downey Jr. was great.

Just be sure to sit through the end of the credits!

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Books

Orson Scott Card Slams J.K. Rowling

Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, slams J.K. Rowling for suing a small publisher for copyright infringement. The book, Harry Potter Lexicon, is based on info from a website that Rowling herself awarded in 2004.

Card is right on several points. He does an excellent job pointing out the similarities between Ender’s Game and Harry Potter, which reminded me of Harry Potter vs. Star Wars.

However, he seems so upset about JKR’s actions that he undermines his own agenda. Bringing up the Stouffer lawsuit diminishes his case, as 2 minutes of research shows it is without much merit. For one, the character Larry Potter is not, as he claims, in the Muggles book.

He also speculates on her motives rather unfavorably. I’m wondering if he had space to fill, or was just pissed off and rambling. If he kept his tone a bit more civil it would have made a more convincing argument. If I were to speculate, I’d say that as a literature snob himself (OSC almost got a doctorate in English lit.), he’s a tad peeved that JKR was so successful with her “subliterature”.

What he doesn’t bring up is that Rowling has stated that she wants to do a Harry Potter encyclopedia1. If the Lexicon was done well enough, it could potentially cut into her sales (although with a 10K print run it’d be like a fly buzzing around a cow). I agree that for publicity’s sake, she shouldn’t have sued. She does look rather greedy given her target.

For the record, I think Ender’s Game is one of the best sci fi books in the last 30 years, and the Harry Potter series is pure joy.

  1. Which I wrote about here, but it does contain Book 7 spoilers [↩]
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