I normally order a small helping of Viral Carrier for 2 days with Minimal Annoyance. Clearly the Chef at Resto-disease got my order wrong as I seem to have been given the full 14-course degustation replete with painful coughing between courses to clear the palette. Actually sleeping last night and a nap already today while reinstalling stuff has helped immensely. I’m down to slightly painful coughing and headache.
I’m not gonna start the party just yet but it looks like I’m up and running again, simply because I’m gonna scream if I see that kernel crash again.
Butcher’s bill: Not as bad as I thought, but total losses unknown.
I got my email back and is backed up to DVD. My most recent desktop sort pile was saved as well. Going through old back up discs and the hard drive from the Sicarius I discovered that alot of stuff I thought I had recently downloaded was actually older than I thought. I also found some older desktop sort piles scattered about. I’ll never really know just what I’ve lost in those piles as that’s quite literally what they were, piles of stuff. I accumulate misc files, txt notes, downloads etc. on my desktop until I get annoyed and throw them all in a sort folder. Sooner or later it gets backed up or gone through. I had a few of these piles in the larger chunk of lost data and I don’t know if I lost anything (if anything). I found a sort folder still left on the Sicarius drive so I might not have lost anything there, but I’ll never know as some stuff I was looking for IS gone as I had deleted it after copying it to… whatever I had christened this new PC. I’ve actually forgotten (it’s now the Phoenix). Reason for deleting said data was because I was originally going to sell the Sicarius to my brother but that fell through. I found an older back up at least. There was also about 150gb of misc downloads I had waiting to be backed up to DVD and hell if I know what was in that mess.
Total time lost recovering: 20 hours and counting. Still need to update video drivers, dust off the Extigy (Realteck audio SUCKS!) get the support software fro the Nostromo and my mouse reinstalled. WoW and EVE need reinstallation now *cringe*…
Shopping list: DVDs (got some more back ups to make), 3 SATA hard drives. The 80gb from the Sicarius is ATA, therefore slower. 1 main, 1 will serve as a mirror. The third is for Linux testing.
Yeah, you read that right. EVE went Mac and Linux at the beginning of November. Tiem to kick the tires.
Hard drive. It’s gotta be the hard drive. Just crashed to an error I was getting before that I chalked up to an installation issue with XP not having SP1 when I formatted the drive to begin with. Burning backups of what I can now. If I can retrieve the bad section of the hard drive I’ll grab up what I can from there too. Fing hell.
I’m still not sure if it was a security patch or what but something Tuesday night caused a complete loss or corruption of the file allocation tables. By Midnight I had succeeded in securing software to find the lost partitions. I made a copy of the old c: partition so I could retrieve stuff like email which has next to no backups as well as my desktop which is a general dumping ground fro everything from silly pictures to mission critical data. XP install was still seeing nothing but an unknown 131gb partition. The last attempt I made to get around this seems to have aggravated the situation as going back to verify the partitions wound up showing one mystery partition at 131gb and the remaining 170gb as unallocated. 4 hours of HD scanning recovered the c: backup I made (thank the gods) but the larger 170gb partition that held my music, as well as the backups from the previous computer seems to be gone for the time being. It’s still unallocated and I’m gonna try a few more things to hopefully get that data back as I think some of the stuff I pulled form the old computer got deleted after I carried it over.
Yes, the time stamp is right. I also picked up a cold sometime Sunday or Monday and it’s been making life even more miserable.
Advance posting for our Veterans. Watch it now. Watch it on Sunday. Watch it whenever.
Just remember. It’s A Pittance of of Time
*Edit: the previous title was a reference to me that I was likely to forget to post this on the actual 11t and not that I would forget them*
Heh, sometimes I just forget. Actually. I pre-made my last batch of posts during a quiet day at the office and then just pasted one in from time to time. I suspect I’d do that more often but in between this post and the time I made most of my others we got a new controller at work and since I’m the one with the largest grasp of everything going on I’m the one that has to constantly go over everything so he gets the right idea of what needs to be implemented into the new system we’re setting up.
Got one confirmation letter back on Friday confirming that I took and passed the restricted portion. I knew the non-restricted portion had to be mailed in a week later so I should be getting that later in the week or early next.
Got a bunch of games on tap right now, some new, some old. Playing through Deus Ex again with a demo version of a high texture pack (found here). They have a lot done but the demo is from last year so not all that much has change. I’m hoping that final version gets done soon, even if they have to forgo new character models on the cinematics. Also playing through Rune Factory, Pokemon Pearl, and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (all for DS).
Should be headed to Ikea later today too so I can get the legs and frame for my desk finally. Looking forward to getting it. Not looking forward to ripping apart the mess of cables behind my desk to be abel to set it up.
Well, this and Halo 3 are probably going to have to cage fight for the over hyped game of the year. My money is going to be on Bioshock being the winner though because we pretty much all knew that Halo 3 single player would be short and suck, but have badass (subjective) multi-player whereas Bioshock had such high hopes that fell so short of the mark that there are probably a few people wondering if the game had it’s released pushed back.
I knew I was going to play this back when I heard that (at the time I could have sworn it was EA but I could have been wrong it changed hands) the name Bioshock had been registered for trademark and that some group that had wanted to do a commercial re-make of System Shock 2 had been shot down by whoever had secured the Bioshock trademark. Word then got out that a spiritual sequel was being made and to sit back and wait. Somewhere in all this people either ignored or overlooked the original dev teams acquisition by 2K and their muffled cries that the game was no longer really a sequel in any sense and only had a few odd similarities in game play. The warning signs were there, they were just hopelessly drowned out by the cries of “ZOMG SS3 (kinda)!” which of course were picked up by a bandwagon of people rooting for an underdog they likely hadn’t played, let alone heard of, prior to this.
The end result, which everyone thought would be a great FPS RPG wound up being nothing more than yet another FPS on the pile of mediocrity.
The setting is an underwater city where people can supposedly get away from the existing world regimes and live life in a completely free economy where they rise or fall on their own. Obviously this doesn’t work out for all sorts of reasons which are touched on though the various plot delivery devices scattered about.
The good: It’s nice to look at.
The bad: It’s nice to look at, the game is pretty damn dark at times (lighting-wise) so you can’t get a good look at the early 20th century look and feel so you can’t always look at it :/
Difficulty is a joke. I did the first run through on easy just to have it move fast which was probably a mistake. Retarded might be a more accurate description of the difficulty, and by that I mean you need to be suffering from some kind of inability to acknowledge that you are in fact being attacked and respond accordingly within a few minutes. Yeah, it’s that bad. The Big Daddies can smack you around for a good while if you have a full load of medkits (which is pretty much all the time) and you have time to go make coffee since your character will auto use a medkit without fail if your health hits 0. Wee. My second run through is on hard, and other than a couple of swarm events, it’s still pretty easy.
Replay is a must as there are 2 (3) endings based on how you decide to play and this stems from the afore mentioned Big Daddies, or rather, their charges. Plasmids are the ”magic” gimmick in this game. Some sort of concoction that you inject that allows you to do all sorts of fun things like psychokinesis, telekinesis, etc. These came about by the use of Adam, something the little girls following the big daddies harvest from dead people (I’m trying to avoid major spoilers here). Anyway the ending you get is based on how you choose to deal with these girls. You can either harvest the Adam in them (which kills them) which is used to acquire new abilities or you can save them (gets you only half the amount of Adam, further offset by bonuses for being nice form time to time, bringing the total return to something like ¾). You get the good ending for saving the girls, the bad ending for harvesting them and the same bad ending for harvesting some of them, although in the partial harvest ending the voice over is sad sounding vs. the angry one from the bad ending. It’s the same script though. Unfortunately both these endings combined are very short and leave you feeling cheated.
The game itself is very short. My run through on easy was somewhere around 7 hours with hard clocking in around 10 due to me being a little more careful, trying a few new things, looking for nooks I may have missed, and chasing after a Big Daddy and his Little Sister that refused to spawn.
The only plasmids you really need in the game (if memory serves) are the fire and telekinesis ones. Fire for certain as it melts ice in a few places to progress the game. Telekinesis for getting a key in one location I remember (might have been optional to boot). Might have been one other. The game has about 20 or so different plasmids beyond these. Stuff like bug swarm, freeze, something to make a ghost of yourself, etc. Most of these rarely, if ever get use. Other then when the plot requires it, you can very much get through the game without their use. Their effects are also generally mediocre at best, resulting in your guns being the better choice anyway.
The plot is pretty evident once you get past the big revelation scene, which means anyone with basic sleuthing skills will either have seen it a mile away, or simply nod as it happens thinking “right, makes sense” instead of the “OMG! NO WAY!” the designers probably had in mind. I’m not accepting the age argument here. You really shouldn’t be playing this if you’re under 16 anyway and if you are mature enough to play it you probably fall into the first group anyway.
The last nail in the coffin for this game is it’s copy protection system. A few sites were screaming about rootkits, which seems to be partially correct. The game needs to dial home to complete installation (legitimately) so net connection means no game for you (on the PC anyway). There’s also some mess about not being able to install it more than five times or something. It was rather unclear on both sides of the fight. End result as far as I care is if installation gives normal customers grief then you fucked up royally. Their copy prevention system is easily circumvented (yarr!) so what was the point? This further bugs me because 2K is also the publisher for the Civilization series these days and since I won’t support a company that screws you over that’s less of my money to support a developer that should be getting support.
My final take on this one is skip it. If you really want to play it, pirate it.
Aced the writtens. 50 questions, 35 t/f and 15 multiple choice. You have 15 minutes. I did both and double checked them in under ten. Lost a couple of points for minor technicalities on the practical but nothing detrimental. Now I just wait wait for the results certificates to arrive and then the application process begins.
Well, tomorrow I challenge the non-restricted exam as well as course plus test for restricted. While I’m told by many that common-sense alone is enough to pass these things I’ve been studying nonetheless as I’ve never handled anything beyond an airgun. Correction, I handled a lever action something once, unloaded, in my uncles basement when he brought out his collection to show to some of the family. I was smart enough even then (I think I was 14 or so) to keep my finger away from the trigger but didn’t uncock it after testing the lever. He praised my smarts on the trigger bit, and corrected me on the lever bit. Not in a you screwed up way, but in a you do it like this way. I think if we weren’t trying to get him packed he would have gone on and showed me all sorts of things. He was a great guy and I think the only person on my father’s side I genuinely miss. My sister described him to me once as one of the few genuine people she had met. When he invited you into his home you felt it. Not that other people I know aren’t, he just, well, extended a warmth I don’t think I’ve ever seen from anyone else. Good times.
Anyway, most of my studying has been focused on the non-restricted as this is the one I’m challenging and am at a disadvantage since I haven’t really handled anything before. Alot of it is repeated in the restricted segment so I’ve been focusing on things unique to long guns, namely stances and carry procedure. It should be easy for me, but again, better prepared then not. This is not the kind of thing I want to have take twice (nor have to carry the knowledge that I had to)
Need to bring ID, was flipping in my passport to double check exp date and what do I find? Last year I had to go to Wisconsin for a training class and we drove down to Burlington to get a flight from there as it was way cheaper. I didn’t notice then but I found a Lacolle stamp from the return trip. WTF.
Yeah, I know, I was cheering the day I heard we hit parity. Now that we seem to be sitting there I have a new problem to contend with. PC games in the US are cheaper. Sometimes a lot cheaper, but on average that game for $49.99 is going for $39.99 in the Southern Wastes, or even $34.99. Factor in the taxes we get hit with at the register and it’s pretty painful. It’s even worse for the console market where A-title releases generally run for $59.99 or even $69.99 in some cases vs the $49.99 or at worst $59.99 for the same games on the PC market. I try to remember back when Final Fantasy 3 (now 6), Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, etc ran me $99.99 plus taxes back in the early ‘90s but it doesn’t really help. On the flip side, the par dollar means most MMO’s are a better deal than ever really. I’m looking around and seeing that I can often get a game shipped up for less than the tag price here. I just have to deal with the shipping time. The only downside of that approach is that I might get hit with some kind of customs charge (it happened to me once on some stuff I got on ebay, so it is possible). The digital delivery option, be it Steam or some other direct to drive system, is probably the way to go if you want to save as much as possible since you’ll pretty much pay the price you see and not have to worry about shipping. I wonder if and how long it would take the dollar at par to force retailers to adjust prices. On the one hand I’m sure there’s plenty of people that either can’t be bothered, or just don’t know how to go about getting their games from a different source. Especially now that we have both EB and Gamebuzz in most major malls being the most evident source. Higher prices to make up the loss, or lower prices to try and bring back clients? Something to watch and see.