dot/Hack//Chocobo
The registration / software update process to get Final Fantasy XI Online running took 2 hours last night. We were afraid no one was going to wait for us, and I don’t want to look at another License Agreement screen for a long time – there must have been a dozen of them.
The dot/Hack PS2 game begins with the player registering for a (simulated) online RPG, going to meet the friend who got them to play, trying some simple actions and battles with that friend, then being attacked by a mysterious force hiding in the game which puts said friend in a coma.
Last night raininva registered for an online RPG, went to meet kittenchan, and tried some simple actions and battles with with her help. Rain and I both couldn’t help thinking, “If Skeith attacks now, vond will never forgive us.”
I am clearing the personal effects from my desk and this machine’s hard drive, on my last day of work here. Everyone’s saying how much they’ll miss me, and meaning it, which is nice. I’m just refusing to think too much about all this change; it’ll probably hit me hard Sunday night. Monday morning, hello Decipher!
I just love scanning for pixels
Junkyard Geek got his old Umax SCSI scanner to work on his G4 tonight – a desktop machine that doesn’t approve of third-party SCSI cards, and certainly doesn’t want to talk to obsolete Umax stuff. Luckily, other hackers insist on writing *nix drivers for their obsolete hardware, and some among them are amused by tweaking said drivers to work on Panther (with a little fiddling).
Thanks very much to those who contributed to Rain’s early birthday present. She got an almost unwilling smile on her face, saying, “how dare our friends make my day like that!” Good job, guys 🙂
It was an odd feeling leaving work early on a Tuesday, This may be the first time in 5 years that I arrived home from a Tuesday session while the sun still shone. I’m gonna miss some of my co-workers; at least I know I’ll still get to catch up with VTSFFC and Starfleet folks from time to time.
A botanical hero arises
Many friends have asked for a copy of Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe:
I know, too small to read, but I don’t want to pollute people’s friends pages with the full-size version.
Live-action After Dark desktop
You know you’re hopelessly geek when you catch yourself referring to a fish tank as “Nature’s screensaver.”
Yard Sale!
Just a note to people living in the Roanoke and New River valleys – we’re having a yard sale all day today at the Arthur residence in Christiansburg.
Used Macs and PCs, books, DVDs, clothes, mugs, new toys, and all sorts of other odds and ends.
For directions, call Rain at 540-819-6661.
Yeah, sometimes I’m no fun.
Saw “The Matrix Reloaded” again last night. Like a lot of modern action movies, there’s parts of it I just can’t enjoy as much as the filmmakers intended me to.
In the Matrix trilogy, both the good guys and the bad go through a lot of bystanders. We do get a pious little speech from Morpheus in the first film discussing that some of the village may have to be burned down to save it, but I don’t think that improves the freedom fighters’ moral ground much. From the perspective of the ordinary, unknowing inhabitant of the Matrix, those from Zion would indeed seem like terrorists in a lot of their actions.
But the freeway scene is the bit that always gets me. True, most of the random destruction in that scene is caused by the “bad guys”, but it doesn’t make it much better for me. Live though one near-fatal car accident in real life, and one’s attention moves from the cool kung-fu move that Agent did off the hood of a car, to the poor driver who was just trying to get home from work and is now chunky salsa all over the road. Boom – the sequence is not fun for me anymore, and now I just want it over. 🙁
You know, the Machines seem disorganized and barely in control of their own creation in these movies. We saw in Mouse’s death how the Machines can hack the Matrix for their own use. Why not just make the small tweak [set ZION_VEHICLE_GAS to “0”] in that sequence? There’d be a lot less mass destruction, ghostly apparitions, and Agent possessions to explain away later.
Even better – don’t want to fight Morpheus and Trinity, who’ve gone through a lot of your Agents as it is? [set ZION_VEHICLE_FUEL_TYPE to “fighter aircraft fuel”] – as soon as a little of that hits the spark plugs, the KeyMaker and the Zion rebels won’t be a problem. Maybe the Machines just aren’t very creative on their own.
