Displaying Category: Pondering

I am swiftly growing annoyed by the increasing flow of "tweetshaking" that I see going 'round. Or maybe it's a "tweetconomy?" Wherin, some person or company says "Tweet about me and you can download something cool!" or "People who tweet about us can win something great!" And I have nothing against Imogen Heap or EVGA, quite the contrary, but when the people/companies I like the most are now jumping on this bandwagon I start to see the pervasiveness of these trends that, to my eyes, seem to be fleeting. By fleeting I mean evolving. I am sure tweeting will evolve into some new social networking trend within the next two years, bringing about the gradual decline of "tweets" as we know them. I'd say that's good, but I shudder to think about what comes next...

After the WoW client crashed twice trying to fly back to Orgrimmar, I gave up and tried playing some Ultima Online, connecting to a new player-run shard. I had been in a couple nights before, but the client had crashed moments after getting in game (I guess fullscreen doesn't work so well). This time things seemed to hold a little longer and I was able to hit some skill gates and pick up some equipment to get me set up. I talked with one of the GMs and met up with some guildmates.

So here's the thing, while some things are different since I played in the late '90s, most is the same... and that's not a good thing. Most of all, the interface is seriously problematic. I often find myself having to click very small objects or drag objects onto small hot spots with very little feedback as to whether I've hit my target. The interface is also sluggish, so any sort of click or drag action takes a beat or so to display any sort of acknowledgment that I've attempted an action. Keep in mind, when I was playing this game more than ten years ago I was playing on a Pentium 500 (I think). Now I'm playing on a Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz. Apparently, local CPU speed has no impact on client performance. There are also the replication issues where a player will try to move somewhere and you'll see a delay or stuttered attempt. I could see this as a problem with the bandwidth or processing power of the player-run shard, but these exact issues existed with the regular commercial version as well.

I make these same sorts of discoveries every time I go back to play an "old" game. While the original gameplay might be sound, trying to adapt to and accept old and broken interfaces from days of yore is generally just too much. I don't care how much fun I used to have with this game, I simply can't put up with this crappy interface long enough to enjoy the game. Unfortunately, I really can't see myself sticking with UO much, if at all. The crappy interface simply detracts from the experience and makes me feel like I am wasting my time fighting the interface instead of enjoying the game.

I haven't figured out if I should feel bad about that or not...

I love the word "scrunchie." It's a fun word to say. I don't really feel anything for what the word represents. Then I saw this banner ad and I wasn't entirely sure how to react...

So I just patched Vista up to Service Pack 2 and after the required reboot I get this dialog telling me it may be possible to fix some problem with a Logitech device that I never knew was a problem. So I say sure, go ahead and fix it and I click the big Fix It button and it opens a tab in Firefox and tells me that this problem cannot be fixed automatically because this isn't one of the supported browsers. Fine, whatever, I copy the URL and past it into IE8 and I get the same message, which follows:

You'll note this is IE8, the final release version, that is apparently not good enough to be supported for such important fixes... that I didn't know the machine needed... Clearly Microsoft needs to fix their system for fixing user's systems.

On my drive into the office this morning I finally remembered what Pixar's Up reminded me of...

Watch this video of Nightwish's The Islander and let me know if you catch any similarities.

Help me out here, if I schedule an appointment with my GP for 9:45am, and he doesn't walk into the exam room till a little after 11:00am, why did I go to the trouble of scheduling the appointment in the first place?

I lie down a bit anxiously and see it spreading overhead. Long slender web-like limbs, spanning the spaces where the clouds once swam in beautiful blue seas. It's not a sad tree, or an angry tree. There's no spite or malice. Well, maybe a little. It simply finds fertile soil and grows. Its roots burrow deep seeking nourishment, it's leaves unfurl to capture fuel. I watch all this happening from my rocky bed and ask what everyone must ask: "Why grow over my friendly skies? Why obscure my view?" The tree doesn't answer because the tree doesn't care. It's living here... over me... and that's all that matters.

Interesting fact about stress trees, they hate yoga. It's a shame I never took yoga.

Updates in the ongoing saga of my car...

I have a 2001 Acura CL Type-S. It is currently at the dealership getting a third transmission installed. The original transmission was replaced under warranty at ~78k miles. This factory rebuilt transmission is now being replaced after ~59k miles. Apparently, these replacement transmissions only have a warranty of something like 37k miles. That seems obscenely ridiculous to me. On top of this, my car has had all sorts of really unusual repairs, like the replacement of a sensor in the throttle body (or something like that), the rear view mirror that nearly blew up, a couple engine mounts that needed replacement, all of the injectors were replaced because, in the service advisor's words, "the seals are all gone," and the manifold gasket was replaced. On top of all that, I still occasionally get combustion fumes leaking into the cabin, which they haven't been able to solve.

The topper on all this is that my car is probably only worth about $5000. I have REALLY been wanting to get a new car these last couple years, largely because I am tired of dropping $2000/year on repairs for my car. So I've been saving up for a down payment... now this repair work is going to cut into that potential down payment significantly.

My Normal Car is seriously complicating My Normal Life.

I came across Jeremy Clarkson's review of the new Honda Insight and found it both delightfully entertaining and, well, insightful. To summarize, Mr. Clarkson found the car to be not so good:

It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

I highly recommend reading the article just for all the new and interesting ways Clarkson expresses his dislike for the vehicle. Part of me, though, is bothered not by the review, but by the really terrible car Honda seems to have produced. I've owned Acuras for the last twelve years and I rather like Honda's vehicles (and Clarkson does indicate that Honda doesn't usually produce cars this bad), so it's kind of sad to hear about the company slipping this badly.

With all the fun stuff out of the way, though, I think there's a more important message on the second and third pages of the review. What I get out of this and something I've felt since the introduction of hybrid vehicles, is that hybrid really isn't the way to go. We need to abandon the internal combustion engine and move on to something that just makes sense, and whatever that is, it must be better than what we have now with our gasoline powered engines.

I've never really been interested in hybrid vehicles. It seems so half-assed, like, "yeah, we recognize there's a problem, but we really don't want to solve it. So, for those of you who feel guilty, we'll sell you this over-priced, environmentally negative car so you can at least feel better about yourself... even if that feeling is entirely unjustified."

I may not be part of the solution, but I am perfectly fine with waiting for the next revolution in engineering to switch away from the internal combustion engine. I also feel the only reasonable path that we can see from where we're standing now are hydrogen powered vehicles. The biggest trick to hydrogen is making it in some way that doesn't cost us more energy to generate than we get from it, and distribution. I'm not a rocket surgeon, but these seem like solvable problems to me...

Also, the Insight really looks way too much like a Prius... Seriously, can we get some innovation here? kthx

I've been using Ubuntu on my EeePC 901 since I got it last summer. I started out with Hoary and soon migrated to Intrepid. It's served me well for my limited needs on this little machine. A couple days ago I upgraded to 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope and first wanted to point out something that immediately caught my attention right there on their homepage. You see, the copy says "Desktop Edition" except they are showing an image of a laptop. This may seem like nit-picking, but there is a difference. I actually see this more as evidence of how the perception of what a PC is has changed. I don't have the stats, but I expect we're getting to that point where more people have laptops than desktops, so now the "desktop" is actually a laptop. Crazy.

Anyway, after the upgrade to Jaunty, things were pretty solid. Boot time has been improved and everything that I care about seems to work out of the box... EXCEPT for the graphics driver. I use compiz effects and I like them. The problem is, the performance in Jaunty is completely unacceptable. After searching around I discovered several reports and bugs posted about this horrid performance in the pre-release versions. Now keeping in mind that one of the major selling points of this release is its excellent usability on netbooks (like the 901), except that most of these netbooks use some form of the Intel integrated graphics chipset, and performance in Jaunty on these chipsets is unusable. So yes, Ubuntu works wonderfully on netbooks as long as you don't use it on netbooks. They need to add that to the copy. People don't really read this crap anyway...

This little rant wouldn't be complete without a way to actually fix the problem, which I have found. You can find instructions in the wiki on how to install the Intel graphics driver from 8.10 Intrepid, which I have tested and seem to work just fine. Go get'em!