Another one bites the dust. [ Games ]
Posted on: 2005-07-22 11:04:42, by talam
I had read a couple of weeks ago that Valve, the creators of Half-Life and Counter Strike, had finally gotten out of their contract with Vivendi Universal Games. I also read somewhere about them having issues with VU over cyber cafes, but was not all that interrested. I have my copy of Half-Life 2, the new expansion set for release later this year is probably going to be digital only, so who cares? Right? Well, maybe.
This would be a good time to mention my views of Electronic Arts, or EA. I am not sure if I have even mentioned them here before. They are evil. I had been fine disliking them, but still playing some of their games for awhile. I am sure you can understand as most people hate Microsoft but still use Windows. In many ways EA is like Microsoft in that they buy some companies who have innovative products and do their best to crush the rest. But it was not until they went after Sega Sports that I realized how evil they were. Sega had released the 2005 series of their sports lineup, all with Franchise rights, for $20 a pop. All were solid games, all got good reviews, and all were supposedly as good as their EA counterparts. Seeing an equivilant product for less than half the price of their own games, dropped the price of their games to match. But they did not like having to drop it and lose all the extra cash they would have been pocketing, so they started buying sole rights to the professional sports franchises to make sure it would never happen again. (I don't think the NBA signed up, but I know the NHL and NFL did.) Sega sold off their Sports division to a Take-Two subsidy and will never make sports games again...because of EA.
Now, back to Valve. They have now signed a multi year contract with EA for distribution of the future releases of their games. It is only a matter of time before EA assimilates Valve into its collective of over marketed crap. I don't buy or play EA games. Hell, I can't even fire up Half-Life 2 now without getting a bitter taste in my mouth so bad I have to stop. Oh well, guess I can't play games all the time.
Um... [ Humor ]
Posted on: 2005-07-14 15:08:51, by talam
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I don't know. I just don't know. [ Humor ]
Posted on: 2005-07-12 21:55:58, by talam
Ok, crisis averted. I am not even sure how to go about explaining it, but we had to kill the cat. She just lost it. All evening she had us at knife point talking about how we have been "keeping her down" and persecuting her religion. It was nuts. I had never heard some of the stuff she was saying...hell, I did not even know our cat could talk. I still don't quite understand it all, but I will try and go through what I can remember. I am still a little shaken up, so bear with me.
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No one died. [ Misc ]
Posted on: 2005-07-06 01:11:59, by talam
Well, the trip to Deleware is over. On the trip down, we drove through a big storm, saw Tom, nearly died (at least twice), and learned to sleep in the car at a moments notice (so I could avoid seeing all the near rear ending going on).
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Damn this takes forever... [ Site News ]
Posted on: 2005-06-28 02:59:24, by talam
- Edit script via ssh session to old server.
- Copy script from old server to my machine via Samba and windows explorer.
- ftp script to new server.
- log on to new servers admin pages to set permissions (toying with ftp client eliminates this step...wish I would have seen the option earlier).
- log on to MY admin pages to test script.
- if failure, pour over code again and repeat steps.
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Random links of the moment...ie, I am clearing out shit from my bookmark list. [ Computer ]
Posted on: 2005-06-24 21:53:33, by talam
Every once in awhile I run through my bookmarks and realize that I have a huge amount of shit in my bookmarks and decide I need to clean it out. And everytime I run into a couple of gems that I think my loser listeners would like, so here we go.
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One down, way too many to go... [ Games ]
Posted on: 2005-06-23 15:06:54, by talam
They say timing is everything, so lets see if they are right. I jumped on the 14 day trial of City of Heroes (CoH) a few days ago. Since playing, I have of course become very addicted to it. Addicted to the point of no even logging on SWG to check my harvesters and do maintainance on the houses. So today I canceled my SWG account...Erin's will follow as soon as I finish this post. I pulled all the harvesters, cleared out all the houses, and somehow managed to fit everything in the free space provided to the two chars. My account dies either tomorrow or the day after, and Erin's will die in about a week. I still have a little moving to do between the chars, but that should only take another hour or so.
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MMO crazy. [ Games ]
Posted on: 2005-06-20 05:03:39, by talam
I ran over to mmorpg.com to see where StarWars Galaxies ranked with other MMOs. I knew it was not in the top five anymore or even in the top 10, but I had no idea where it was. It came in 15th, which is not too bad giving the fact that it is really dying and we just came out of the CU where I would guess 30% of the accounts were dropped. I was insanely amused that Puzzle Pirates came in 6 spots higher than the the Matrix Online. It is funny that a kids MMO puzzle game ranks that much higher than a more adult game that was based off a fairly successful movie series.
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The shaving cycle. [ Photoshop ]
Posted on: 2005-06-16 03:48:12, by talam
I got a message around 2:30 this morning from
Jamie. Oddly, this is kinda early for our little chats, but no complaints. She has recently discovered the joys of Photoshop and all its wonder, but had a question about ImageReady, the little animation program that comes with Photoshop. Now, I have not played with ImageReady since IUPUI and only briefly then, but I remember it being easy. So, I am like, sure, that is easy. Then we both spend about an hour figuring it out on our own. I only did one, because I hate gifs. And I refuse to having it showing all the time, because I have standards about how I display things. Anyways, I took the face I normally have displayed on the site, and modified it to show the shaving cycle. I would not expect more, but I thought it was funny enough to show.
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There we go... [ Site News ]
Posted on: 2005-06-14 16:07:53, by talam
So yes, another layout. This is a generic "hey look, I am a blogger" look, which normally means I hate it, but I think it will work for now. It was kinda fun coding, and believe it or not, presented a couple of challanges to get things looking similar between IE and Opera. There is a little pixel shifting between the two, but overall it is all good. I am curious to see what it looks like on other OSs and resolutions. I run at 11582x864 on XP, but I know I am not the average user. Also, Opera and FireFox users will get some hover stuff your IE counterparts won't...at least not until hopefully IE7.
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