Other Side of the Stone

So I have managed to get some stuff done sooner than expected and time seems to be opening itself up to me. The problem with this is once I have free time I seem to be wasting it and not trying to get ahead of “the game” as it were. Not a whole lot that I find interesting going on at Digg this morning. To be expected though. So, in light of that, I am going to break what I reserved this morning update for, to complain.

First off, I am an extremely lucky person. Saying that, all my luck is bad. Not one bit of good. What started this all was yesterday evening when I find out my landlord came over and said he had found six people to rent the house I am currently living in for the summer and next semester, getting me out of my lease. Which was awesome. It would have saved me A LOT of money, because I am overpaying for this place in a huge way. Never a good idea to sign a lease in desperation. So, I was rather excited. Enter my luck stage right. He stops over again in the evening after getting in contact with the people again, two people backed out and dont want to sign. Either he didn’t ask if the rest wanted to still sign or they back out as well because the other two backed out, but now there is nobody and I still have to pay. So I am back to square one. Whatever.

I wake up this morning. It is pouring outside. Its about a five minute walk to work. I have no umbrella, but I have a rain coat. Still get soaked. Screw it. I will dry. I am an avid coffee drinker. I head over the perk in the building where I work to get my morning cup of coffee. Add creamer to the cup, add the coffee. Oh look, there is a leak in my cup, grab another one. Transfer. Another leak?! What the hell!? Grab a new cup, check the bottom. There a huge ass hole on the bottom, about 1/4th of the cup is just gone. Seriously, that is ridiculous. Transfer coffee to a new cup. No apparent leaks.  Set the cup down on th counter to pay, pick it up as I am about to leave. Coffee on the table. ANOTHER HOLE IN MY CUP! At this point I am only thinking about what sort of potent this is for the rest of the day. Transfered coffee again and I was lucky to have one free of holes this time. But really, 4 cups with holes? I see more than coincidence. Someone is out to get me. Until this really bad spell of the luck passes over I am sure the bulk of the posts will be regarding that. Or at least until there is some good stuff to keep you all up to date on.

Busy busy busy

Seems that I am overly busy for this week and have little time to bring any relevant posts to the table. I will be back towards the end of the week with something I hope to make up for it.

Weekend

Dont expect some lengthy post for the weekend(s) as it is my time to catch up on gaming and work.

The Other Side of the Stone

Wow. That is all I have to say about the amount of stuff I want to write about in relation to the volume of stuff I WILL write about. This is mostly due to crappy weather making me feel awfully lazy.

First, We have the 10 most underrated consoles. For me, I have only had my hands on several of them. For starters, the Sega Saturn. What a great system. Look at all those damned buttons! I remember playing Sonic on that thing and using maybe two buttons, yet there were six! Panzer Dragoon was another fun game. I vaguely remember using the majority of the buttons on that game. I would have more, but that was a long long time ago. Next on my list from theirs, we have the Sega handheld, Game Gear. I remember a bus trip to the Black Hills with my church where that was the most popular toy to pass around. That and the Trio CD with the song Da-Da-Da on it. Those were the days…On to the game cube. I never owned one but it was always fun when I played on it. Super Smash Brothers was certainly a great game. I played some others but nothing stands out in memory. I never touched the DreamCast. That was a period where I gave up on consoles, mainly because for a period of time I found sports and the like to be fun, because they were. Have a game and have fun. Then stuff changed and no longer were sports fun. Irrelevant in the end.

Now we have the 9 most difficult/bad-ass game villains. I don’t have much to say here as only two make my memory for having fought. Sephiroth – I hate you and love you. It didn’t get much better than him at that time. If you know what I am talking about, I need not explain. If you don’t know what I am talking about, no explanation would help. Go download and emulator and a rom and find out for yourself. Also, enjoy one of the top games of time. Moving on, everyone from Ninja Gaiden. What the hell! Everyone and their grandmother were Ninjas at some point and time. That or prostitutes. Or both. That would explain boss fights like Alma. More pale pasty demon ass in her entrance scene than, well…something. Anyone know where pale pasty demon ass might have happened or something comparable? For me, the game was bitter sweet because I believe I never actually got to the point where the credits rolled. I ended up saying good bye to the console before then. Such a shame. Especially with Ninja Gaiden 2 around the corner. GameStop here I come!

Now, Top 8 worst Microsoft Promo videos. I would love to comment, but as it seems, videos on the computer I am at will not play beyond 3 seconds so take a look and tell me what is going on. I may ammend this post once I can actually view them, but probably not. You do it for me!

Good stuff here as well but in the same boat as above. Anything that is pro games should be supported. I hope this video does that. Let me know how it goes! I will watch it eventually but still, view and post!

Finally, the saddest thing I saw, science bailing on what would be cool. Intelligent life out there. This guy basically says, no. No life. Nothing! You cant have it because I wanna be a prick! Its too complicated! BLAH BLAH BLAH. Personally, I still think there is something out there. Some people ask, why haven’t they made contact yet? I say look at it like this. You have seen all or a lot of what we have broad casted. What if they saw it too.? Would you want to meet us? I personally believe if there is life out there, after we shake hands, assuming they don’t want our resources (we have some left?), or they don’t seed our planet with their resource (Command & Conqueror series style(explained in 3)), we should challenge them to a game of Space Invaders!

The Other Side of The Stone

This morning is rather dry in the the world of entertainment news. Kind of a shame in one sense. Never fear though, I have found two nuggets of joy on this bleak oppressive Thursday ( its supposed to rain all day).

First we have what many people have been waiting for. Mass Effect on the PC! Hooray! YEAH! Woot!( or is it w00t!). I for the longest time had been waiting for this. This was and is my fix that replaces the possibility of KoTOR 3. I longed for the day that this title that seemed to offer everything I loved about the KOTOR games (minus Jedi ass kickery) made it to the PC. Then I bought a 360. PC version didn’t matter so much. Of course this game also falls into the same category Assassins Creed did for me. I want it on the PC! Gimme Gimme Gimme! Then by the time I would have had time to buy it or play it, I had a 360. So when I saw system requirements for Mass Effects PC debut, I was throughly pleased that I had just gone and get a 360 as I would need some upgrade to run this game at its best. And why wouldn’t I want to run this game as its best? It is simply gorgeous! Any fans of naked blue alien asses? I hope not. SPECIES PEOPLE, SPECIES! If you are looking at getting Mass Effect for the PC because you want to play it, I highly encourage it. If you are going to buy it and sacrifice graphics settings to play, don’t. Everything may seem the same but imagine playing Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell is poorly rendered PS One graphics. Better example, Oblivion in super low. You lose a lot of the beauty of the world and a lot of what, for me at least, makes a game worthy of praise. A link to system requirements here.

Next on our main stage is an interesting article regarding GTA player types. We have all deal with character types somewhere in our life. For most people it was in a high school English class or freshman English course in their college years. In the article it details several different types of players of the GTA series and some of their characteristics. It was a very good article because I can see exactly what they are talking about with the different types of players. I myself fit heavily into #3, The Storyteller. I never really got into the series. I rented GTA3 for a couple of days when I was sick and didn’t leave my room. It was fun, interrupted often by violent bouts of vomiting. Fun non the less. It certainly did not create a fan boy. The story was what I cared about. It made sense, for the most part, and it let me get away with being a contract killer. Vice city held little appeal to me and I never got out of the first area. Too bright of colors for me. So the guy wears a Hawaiian Shirt, no need to make everything else bright and colorful as well so when the sun is remotely in the sky your HUD vanishes as though it were a vampire. I downloaded San Andreas and pounded through the story just enough to get to be a pilot and that satiated my desire to play for a good long time then I hashed out the rest of the game. I will admit that I didn’t grid the main story line however. There were times when I opened a can on the unsuspecting masses of guilty civilians (My justice was the only Justice). Se the article here and let me know what type you fit into.

The Other Side of The Stone

Lots of interesting stuff happened recently. First we have DreamWorks Entertainment gaining the rights to “Ghost in the Shell“, an anime that certainly has some lasting power having started in 1989 as a manga, thats a Japanese style comic book. This has the potential to be a very good 3D animated film given that Spielberg is directing the charge. I would keep an eye on this project. If you want more information search out details of the series yourself and watch a few episodes.

Bejeweled is apparently a way to propose now. Bernie Peng had an interesting idea, hack the game your girl-friend loves. Bernie hacked Bejeweled so once his girl-friend reached a certain score it popped the question. I find this quite cool, I guess. Its original, creative, and it helped finance their wedding. The makers of Bejeweled have offered copies of Bejeweled as a wedding gift to all this in attendance and are flying the pair to Seattle for their honeymoon. While Seattle is not my first choice for a honeymoon location, they get it for free so who is to complain. Good job Bernie and a hand to the makers of Bejeweled for being so cool about it. They certainly could have pressed charges for violation of intellectual property and the like, but they didn’t and thats what counts.

The top story this morning is our first true step towards Virtual Reality. A helmet that reads your brainwaves. Emotiv Systems in California has created a helmet, at what I consider an extremely reasonable price, that will read your brainwaves and send commands to your computer. While this is not ready for purchase just yet and it will just be able to send emotion sorts of commands, it is certainly a giant leap in the right direction. Imagine playing a game such a KOTOR and certain brain signals triggering force powers, like force crush or force lightning. Add to this a pair of gloves that detect hand movement and you have some serious fun. You would probably have to make the hand gear have a gyro box either on the back side of the hand or the wrist area to detect the type of movement but we know its not that hard. Just look at the Wii Remote. This is certainly some technology to keep your eyes on if you are even the least bit interested in VR type equipment. If you are looking to invest in a company, I think you have at least one promising prospect.

The Other Side of The Stone

As I sit here this morning and catch up with the important news I find myself plastered with Obama/Clinton news. It is annoying at one point and humorous at another. I might write something about that later.

This mornings Other Side of The Stone we will look at two bits of info that stood out in my eyes.

First we have another show of too much free time, while I cannot complain because I would love to do something similar. Viewable here. With all that time you’d think that they would have fully functional giant transforming robots ready to combat those giant creatures that for years ravaged their cities. Inaccuracies at this point are all irrelevant.

Secondly, we have a great review of web browsers from PC World. Viewable Here. They touch on each of the main browsers, major and minor which really is just IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera and Flock. As a wise person said years ago, “Begun, the Browser Wars have.” At this stage I think that we have the final battle about to begin. Safari has the jump start with 3.1 and its Apple motto of clean cut software with metallic colors/surfaces and user-friendliness. Firefox will come out of the gates swinging when it officially releases 3. I am running the Beta 5 and I love it. IE8 will be that last to show its face in the war but may win because the others will be too tired to fight. Or the other might just ignore it till it goes away dejected. I tried out the first beta of IE 8 some time ago and I was immediately saddened when I saw something along the lines of Facebook integration. Some sort of live RSS feed for your Facebook account. That alone, for me at least, warranted an uninstall and permanent ignoring.

One browser that kind of fell of the grid, or out of the tubes, is Avant. I used it religiously for several years starting back in ‘02 until about ‘05 or ‘06. Then I went to IE7 when that was released and starting several months ago, about the time Firefox 3 Beta 3/4 was released I moved to that. For me when I started it was something that was far better than IE and if I looked into it I would probably say the same thing now. IE has always had small issues that never seemed to get resolved. The inability to play quicktime videos. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t get them to work.

Anyway, thats all for this mornings news update. If you ever find something you liked or a opinion you or someone you know could relate to, invite them to stop by.

WordPress and Blogger

I feel I have the right to make a comparison and comment. If you search google.com you will find a multitude of topic regarding this debate. I spent less than a day with blogger and less than a day with wordpress and have decided to give the short and narrow of these two blog hosting sites.

Blogger

Pros

• More customize-ability if you use their site for hosting
• Free template modifying
• FTPing posts

Cons

• Have to use their host to customize template
• No deeper pages unless you pay

WordPress

Pros

• Deep pages. Not all posted on main
• Easier to putz with sidebar/widgets

Cons

• No FTPing
• Pay to really customize layout(but its cheap)

Now my points may be brief and not say a lot but from my short time with both I have moved to WordPress because I want to be able to have pages dedicated to non front page material. If you want to form your own opinion use both. Search what the rest of the world says. I don’t give answers. I give people the means to ask the right questions.

Flow of Traffic

This post is in relation to the post from CB Oasis regarding the flow of traffic at a door. Every day a vast majority of people, especially in a college town get in their vehicles and drive. When in the US people drive on the right side of the road. When these same people were getting their licenses they were taught to keep to the right. With this being such a standard teaching what is it about people that make them defy this basic teaching.

What I am referring to however is not the driving abilities of people, but their walking abilities. Why doesn’t everyone stick to the right on sidewalks. Traffic moves well on the roads when this principle is followed, and it works well on the sidewalks. What is it that makes people go against this norm? I certainly have no answer but would love one.

On the the same topic of the flow of traffic, why do people stop near a door? I have lost count of the times in which people see something they know and they stop in the doorway to talk. Why? Is it so difficult to move a few feet to the left or right and remove yourself from the flow of traffic? Its not just doorways either, in the middle of the sidewalks too. Groups of people. You don’t do this in the middle of the road, why when you are walking. Everyone has some place to be, let them by. Don’t be the ass who disrupts the flow of traffic.

General Update Info

I plan to post at least once a day. I will be working on a non default template because it seems that blogger and its script does not always work as evidenced by the side bar for my web comic links. I have a feeling any updates towards the afternoon/evening hours will relate to video games of sorts and during the summer posts will be for cycling and fishing.