My dinner last night. My culinarily-inclined girlfriend prepared scalloped potatoes, short ribs, and fresh, buttery asparagus. I'd tell you exactly how good this was, but this is a family-oriented website.

Is an awesome game. It's really not like DoWI at all, and many people won't even call it an RTS. There's no base-building. In the single-player campaign, your men are just dropped off from a space-pod to complete their mission and that's it. There are control points around the map that can be captured that can beam down reinforcements to replace guys that have been killed. In multiplayer, you are given one building, an HQ, and you make every unit and every upgrade from that one building.

So it's really less about resource management and building structures, and more about the tactical movement and placement and skillset and loudout of your squads (a bit like the tabletop game, I suspect, I've never played it.) And the game has a little bit of World of Warcraft/Diablo on it, in the sense that sometimes the bad guys drop random pieces of "loot" on the battlefield, and when the mission is over you can go and equip this loot on your squad commanders. Like better guns, armor, etc. It's got a very WoW-ish feel to it. (Like "Heavy Bolter of Purgation, 11.5 damage per second" etc.) And each squad commander has 4 different stats to increase, and they gain XP and level, so right there the game has a ton of replay value, because you have to decide if you want your dudes to use their XP points in specializing in guns or melee weapons or HP, etc.

The game makes very heavy use of cover. You can go inside of buildings, and every little wall and tree will block enemy bullets from hitting you. And the physics is done in real-time, so when a grenade comes and blows away that wall you were using for cover, it looks awesome.

In the campaign, you fight Orks and Eldar and Tyranids. There are side missions and choices that you have to make, and in each mission you have to make a choice of which strategic asset on the map you want to secure... there are tons of choices to make, thus tons of replay value.

Oh yeah, and aside from the normal multiplayer, there's a co-op mode for you and an online friend to go through the singleplayer campaign together.

Just broke 1MB/s steady download speed from Steam. Just thought I'd brag. :)

I finally finished Farcry 2. It wasn't great, but it was at least not so terrible that I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Played through it on "Hardcore," no cheating. It was a bit too easy. But the next difficulty setting up was ridiculous. The graphics were pretty, but the voice acting was terrible, and it had a weird volume/directional problem where you couldn't really tell where the voice was coming from much of the time. Like a plot character would be right in front of your face talking to you, but sound distant... but sometimes you'd be fighting guys in the jungle and someone would say something 50 yards away but sound like he was right next to you. But overall the AI was pretty cool. Bad guys seemed to make semi-intelligent use of cover, sometimes, and one cool thing they would do is rescue their buddies if you shot one of them and they were lying on the ground writhing, one of their buddies might come out from behind his cover, pick up his wounded friend and try to drag him back to cover. Which would of course give you the opportunity to mow them both down. The ability to start fires and watch them spread was pretty cool. And there was always a generous amount of exploding barrels and propane tanks around, which was nice. The gun-jamming thing and the gun-exploding thing was an interesting gimmick, but way too overused. Guns that you pick up off of dead bad guys are "used" and they look all dirty and rusty. They're more prone to jamming and/or exploding. The guns that you pay for and get from the store are new, they look better, and are supposed to be reliable. But they still jam all the fucking time. To the point where it gets extremely annoying because your shit jams on you every single firefight it seems. The guns (especially the ones that blow stuff up) are actually pretty fun. Except when your M79 grenade launcher spits out a dud and the grenade just sort of rolls out of the barrel and lands at your feet. And explodes. And you die. And I didn't realize until the very last mission of the game that the new and hopefully more reliable guns that you got at the "store" actually degrade and make themselves "used" automatically if you keep them long enough.

And oh yeah, did I mention you're stuck with malaria the entire game? There's no way to cure it. You have random attacks and have to pop pills to keep it at bay. Note: These malaria attacks will always occur while bad guys are shooting at you. And then your gun will jam. (Seriously sometimes they jam every single magazine.) And then the plot advancement will be interrupted because you "run out of pills" and have to run a special mission to go get more.

That's one way to extend play-time.

The ending was semi-interesting. You end up killing all your friends after they betray you, and end up cooperating with the one guy that was the main bad guy all along. Together you concoct a plan to allow the African refugees escape. One of you has to go blow up a cliff with a stash of dynamite. Only there's no detcord, you have to haul a car battery up there yourself and detonate it right there, killing yourself. The other option is to take a briefcase full of diamonds to the border agents to secure the safe passage of the refugees, and then shoot yourself in the head, because you're about to die of malaria anyway. The main bad guy spouted a Nietzsche quote at the beginning of the game... you know, the "will to power" one. It was so hammy I cringed. But hey... suicide is the ultimate will to power, so I thought it was actually kind of cool.

My new desk at work. I'm TS'ed into a different server on each one of those screens except the big one. That metal box off to the very right is a Hyper-V server with 20GB of RAM and 2 quad-core processors, waiting to be racked. Also, I just formatted and installed an operating system on a machine 10 miles away. I'm loving it. Now if I can just get them to pay me more... ><

Finally, I have an official IT job now. Server technician... or something. I build servers and keep them running. Also, I just got a 24" widescreen monitor. The first DVI monitor I've ever had. It's pretty sweet.

Well I said I would do this, so here it is. This is some hardcore nerd crap that I'm about to write here. But I love this kind of stuff.

As we learned in class, a "bus" networking configuration is where we have several computers hooked up to and sharing a single line.



The terminators for 10BaseT bus networks are typically 50 ohms. An ohm is a measure of resistance. (Resistance is also known as impedance when applied to an alternating current.) 1 ohm is equal to the resistance in a circuit where an electromotive pressure of 1 volt will carry 1 amp of current. I other words, 1 volt per amp.

Any substance can conduct electricity if you apply enough voltage to it. Metal is just a particularly good one (and rubber a really bad one) because of its atomic structure.

In grade-school science classes, we're taught that electricity is the "flow of negatively charged electrons" and that it can only happen if there's a "circuit." Well, that's... kind of wrong. The crap printed in a lot of textbooks kids read to this day about electricity is flat-out wrong.

"Electricity" doesn't necessarily need a "circuit" to work. It just needs a potential difference (which means an opposite charge) between point A and point B, and if that exists, current will flow.

Electricity is not just electrons. The positively-charged particles and the negatively-charged particles are equally important and both have an equal amount of "charge." These particles are the electrons and protons supplied by the conductor itself. Sometimes current can even flow in both directions at once through the same conductor! And in certain cases, you can even have proton-flow, which drags the entire atom with it! Electricity is not a single particle traveling at or near light-speed all the way from one end of a wire to the other. A typical metal conductor, on the atomic level, is a bunch of large atoms floating in a sea of tiny movable electrons. When an electromotive force (voltage, or potential difference) exists across this wire, a current is created, and the electrons lurch forward, but they can't get very far without bumping into more electrons. They just transfer their momentum - their energy - to neighboring electrons. And so in a way, the "electric current" flows very very slowly, literally slower than pancake-syrup inside the wires. And in AC currents it doesn't move at all - it just sits in one place and vibrates. The energy however, flows very fast. Like almost light speed.

So let's go back to the bus network topology. If you take the terminator off of the end of the bus cable, would electricity, energy, or data just "spray" out of the end of the wire as if it were a water hose? No. Just like electricity is not just "spraying" out of your wall sockets right now that have nothing plugged into them. The network cards on each of the computers sends out little modulations or perturbances in the current that represent bits of data. Like ripples in that "sea" of electrons we were talking about. So one computer on a bus network cannot send a signal to just one other computer on the network. Because you can't just tell electricity where to go. (Unless you use resistors, incidentally.) So every signal sent by every computer is picked up by every other computer on the bus. It's just that the NICs are programmed to ignore all the chatter except for the signals that have their name (MAC or IP address) on them.

Said another way, when one computer sends out a signal, because of the very nature of electricity itself and because it can't just be told where exactly to go, the signal is going to propagate throughout the entire cable, and every computer will be able to hear it.

Now here's where the terminators come in. What they do is absorb that excess energy (their resistance converts the energy to heat) that makes it to the ends of the line... think like the signals sent out by the NICs are waves in a system of canals, and the terminators (resistors) prevent the waves from bouncing back in the opposite direction. Because if we let the waves just bounce back in the opposite direction, they would interfere with the signals still coming down the wire.

So there you have it.

I'm finally taking the one class in my entire degree that I knew I would truly love: Computer Networking. Not only do we get to sit in class 3 hours a week and just ramble on about awesome nerd-shit like length specifications for different categories of twisted pair ethernet cables and load balancers, but we also have a lab that's a big playground of computers that we get to hook up and configure in different types of network topologies for a grade. It's nerd-heaven for me.

Also, I deactivated my Facebook account because I just didn't really see the point in it, so if you know me, don't be offended if it appears as though I de-friended you or whatever, because I didn't.

Just got this installed yesterday. I've had cable Internet since I moved away from my parent's house and dial-up modems, about 10 years ago now. Of course the name of the cable company changes from year to year as the assets get traded like Pogs or baseball cards... @home, ATTBI, Comcast, Road Runner, Time Warner. Whatever you want to call it. But I finally got tired of their pricing, their unreliability, their inbred customer service reps... it was time to start looking for something new.

So I signed up for AT&T U-Verse. They had a nice and simple website that let me choose exactly what package/bundle I wanted to sign up for, exactly what speed of Internet I wanted to pay for, how many channels I wanted... turns out it would be $20/month less than what I was paying Time Warner. And it comes with a DVR. And more channels. And the same Internet speed. And a 21st century HUD on the TV so you can read descriptions of what you're watching and what's coming on next and all that. Time Warner didn't have any of that. It was just a piece of coax coming out of the wall that spit out a plain old analog signal, a la 1970's era technology.

From what I understand, it's fiber-optics up to the neighborhood node, and then they use whatever existing copper is available to get it the rest of the way into your house. (I think they can do it over coax or phone lines, or even a combination.)

The installation was sort of intrusive, as the installation guy had to check for phone cords or whatever all throughout the house, despite the only television being in the living room. But it was pretty quick. Got a big modem/router thingy, which they call a "Residential Gateway." It has a built in wireless router in it, which replaced my old WRT54GL modified with DD-WRT... which made me sort of sad. But my PC now gets better wireless reception than I ever did with my old router, which really shocked me. And now I realize what all those "2WIRE624" wireless networks are that you tend to see when you're looking for a wireless network to connect to. (And yes you can reconfigure the AT&T router however you want, that's just the default SSID.)

This is just another test post so I can make sure things are running smoothly. Here's a picture of my childhood dog, Molly. R.I.P.

So here we are. Another pointless website. But hey, a lot of fun coding goes on behind the scenes here, and I really enjoy coding. I wrote all this shit from scratch. Including my own post-submission system so that I'm not just doing something as stupid as manually editing the index file and uploading it via FTP every time I want to make a new blog post. I can do it from the web now. And I've implemented a system where this blog page only displays a certain number of posts, so that the size of this page never gets out of control. Self-sufficiency is one of my biggest goals this time around. As in, I'm trying to build this page so that it could operate with practically no divine intervention from me. But there's still a ton of work to be done. To wrap up this little test submission, I'll include a quotation:

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

-- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting