One of my most delightful discoveries over the past year was craigslist. I had heard about it for several years but never really checked it out. When there came a time to buy and sell large furniture and workout equipment, I knew where to go.
These days I check CL periodically: the electronics, the computer stuff, and of course the free section. Today, however, I took a random jaunt onto the 'best of' section. That is where I found this little gem.
Godspeed ...
I'm now calling my summary posts 'Burrito's instead of 'TwitterWrap's, because they really don't have anything do with Twitter. Why "burrito" instead of something more exotic like "gyro"? Well, the site is called Don Juan's Romantic Mexican Food, not Theo's Mediterranean Cafe, now isn't it?
Now that we've gotten that trivial clarification out of the way ...
Sports
My throat is sore and my body exhausted from attending my first Stars game of the (pre)season. Both Wife and myself had a lot of fun, but not quite to the level of a regular season game. I think during the preseason there should be a general admission cost of $10, and seats should be FCFS. It's stupid to have the lower bowl almost completely empty, with the upper bowl sparse. Let the upper-deck people move down and see what they're missing, and build a stronger atmosphere in the building. A variant of this would be to allow people to sit in any available seat after the second period.
Ian 'Lappy' Laperriere, in a totally classless act, cross-checked Jussi Jokinen in the face after play had stopped late in the third period. I seriously hope that the league is reviewing the incident and hands down a 1-2 game suspension.
Baby
Tuesday night we went to this huge consignment sale for babies / expectant parents. It started at 9:00pm, which means we didn't get out of there until near midnight. We got some good deals on furniture and clothes, but I have been pretty exhausted ever since.
We've been looking at names, using a Google Spreadsheet to consolidate names we've found from NameVoyager and Nymbler. I'm hoping we can negotiate a deal during the off-season so that we don't have to take the name selection issue to binding arbitration.
Title: Dungeon Runners
Publisher: NCSoft
Genre: MMORPG
Price: $0.00 USD *
Rating: B
Sometime last week I caught a link to a review of NCSoft's new MMO, Tabula Rasa, on Ars Technica. Inside that review was a link to another review, for Dungeon Runners. If not for this fortunate clicking, I may never have even heard of this game. I know that my readership is slightly smaller than Ars, but I figure it can't hurt to put out my own opinion.
Acquiring the game was as simple as downloading and running the installer from the website. The installer downloads the modules needed for Dungeon Runner and the PlayNC launcher. The entire process took about 10 minutes on my ridiculously fast Internet connection -- your mileage may vary.
The most luring feature of this game is it's price: zero; goose-egg; nada. It costs no money to start nor continue playing for as long as you like, but of course there's always a catch. You do need a PlayNC account, so you can either create one or enable Dungeon Runners using your old City of Heroes login. I chose the latter, and was soon building my very own Dungeon Runner.
The character creation is lacking quite a bit. The male models all look the same, except for their facial expression. The hair colors and styles add only a slight bit more variety. You can chose to start as one of three classes: Ranger, Fighter, Mage. This selection is only significant in that it determines your starting attributes and skills. Once in the game, you can purchase skills from any of the class trainers to become a "hybrid" character.
After creating your character you will be taken to the server selection screen. Dungeon Runners is different from many MMOs in that you can play your character on any server. On a Friday night, which is usually a "peak" time, each of their 6 PvE servers had between 100 and 150 players logged in, and the single PvP server had less than 50. I have not played on the PvP server, as it's never really been my cup o' tea.
Upon selecting a server, you appear in Dew Valley, the newbie zone, with all of your fellow "n00bs". After walking around for just a few seconds you find NPCs with big yellow exclamation points ! over their heads, exactly like World of Warcraft. The quest system is intuitive if you've played any MMO since EverQuest, and by your interactions you will soon observe that this game is more about humor and fun than seriousness.
After obtaining a few quests, it's time for your first jaunt into a "dungeon", your very own instance of Dew Valley Forest. With your cardboard sword and paper armor you set out to fight - you guessed it - wolves and rats. From this point, you will notice striking similarities between Dungeon Runners and Diablo - the "click-oriented" combat system, the square grid inventory, and your increasing dependence on health and mana potions. Dungeon Runners also expands upon Diablo's multi-level item rarity system, with "rainbow colored" items being the pinnacle of loot achievement.
By this point you've probably noticed, either on the website or in rainbow-colored text on the game UI, something about "membership". This is the "catch" that I mentioned earlier in this review. To become a "member" costs $4.99US per month. Membership benefits include: login queue priority, access to a bank vault, ability to use stackable potions, and "access to the highest quality in-game items".
While it is optional, soon you begin to realize how limiting it is to not be a member. The login queue priority is insignificant, since even at peak times you can easily find a server on which to play. The bank access and potions may be much more significant at higher levels, but not right away. However, what the website means by "highest quality" items, it really means that if you do not join, you can't use anything beyond the equivalent of common loot. By level 4 I was already acquiring items that were "membership only", and it must only get worse from there.
Overall this game is fun, and I find humorous the amount of parody this game plays against other MMOs. The environment feels like a graphical MUD, in which you can have "World Chat" enabled and not be completely spammed. I would enjoy getting together with friends once or twice a month for some "Dungeon Running", but I don't think it's worth five bucks a month to me.
Didn't quite have time to post last Friday, I know you all have been waiting in eager anticipation.
Sports
It's finally sports season again. The Cowboys have been posting up the big points for their first two games, and tonight is the first pre-season game for the Stars. Wife and myself are actually going to the hockey game on Thursday night against the Avs. I'm not going to follow hockey quite so intently this year ( i.e. I may opt to not watch a few games on TV, specifically west-coast weeknight games), but I'm still looking forward to it.
Games
I got in a little bit of game time over the weekend, though I should have been working on homework. I tried a new game by NCSoft called Dungeon Runners , and I plan to post a review soon. I am also wanting to have a look at Tabula Rasa, but haven't gotten to that yet.
Random
I spent an unreasonable amount of time on Amazon's Mechanical Turk trying to find that idiot Steve Fossett. I'm disappointed that he hasn't been found, and is probably distributed amongst the stomachs of several large buzzards now, but he really should have requested a radar follow.Critters
Friday morning we had an uninvited guest sneak into our house. Wife called around 10am to let me know there was a rat in the computer room ... but it has large eyes like a racoon, so maybe it isn't a rat. Oh by the way, it's hanging by its tail on a desk beam. "It is a Opossum?" I asked. "Yes, that's it, a Opossum!"
She had to leave for work, so I told her I'd look for it when I got home. After several minutes I couldn't find the little bugger, so I gave up trying. A little while later I found him tucked up inside one of our bookshelves. I grabbed him by the tail and dropped him into the waiting pet carrier. Not being park rangers, we had no idea what to feed it so we dropped in some string cheese and headed out to dinner.
We contacted a wildlife rehabilitator for relocation, which is when we found out that apples, not cheese, was probably better for its diet. It wasn't until Monday that we were able to transfer our little marsupial to a better home.
Speaking of critters, FatCat is finally back from his hospital stay and seems to be slowly recovering. He's on meds currently, and will possibly be put on a special diet next week.
Sports
Saturday night I attended my first ever professional soccer game, FC Dallas vs DC United, thanks to free tickets supplied by The Captain. The company was excellent, the environment was fun, and the game was awful. The keeper, "Super Dario", was quite the opposite of super and gave up 4 weak goals. The team was demoralized after the second goal went in during stoppage time of the first half.
I went walking all three mornings of the long weekend, and played tennis with Smurf and Fabio on Sunday evening. My feet, calves, and butt were all quite sore Tuesday morning. I didn't get in a full workout at the gym on Wednesday due to insufficient H 20 resources.
School
There was only one class this week due to the holiday, and my professor was out of town. So instead of a substitute lecturer this time she put together a 75 minute vlog lecture for us to watch. I've got homework due on Monday which has progressed very little but I don't anticipate having much trouble with it.
iHype
Wednsday, of course, Apple revealed its new iPod / iPhone line-up and pricing, much to the dismay of all the suckers that spent $599 on a telephone, only to have the price drop $200 less than 2 months later. The only iPod I've ever really been interested in is the nano, and I am not yet sold on the widescreen edition. The iTouch looks neat, but not within my reasonable price range. After all of the pricing announcements there was a huge wave of Apple products on Craigslist trying to sell to other suckers before the new pricing was well known.
Random
This is the most beat up vehicle I've ever seen. It's hard to tell from the picture (camera phones suck), but it has no doors, no windshield, and looks like it's been rolled a few times. It definitely caught quite a few stares from people traversing the parking lot. It was gone after lunch - we theorize that it was either towed or simply disintegrated on the spot.
As stated before, I'm going to start compiling weekly wrap-ups, with elaboration, on my twitter posts (which are apparently called tweets) into almost useful blog posts.
Technology
First, I want to express my frustration with Twitter, because it appears to be flaky as hell. I've subscribed to several news and technology feeds and I am not getting IM notifications when they update, despite having all of my notifications enabled. Furthermore I am having problems completely removing feeds; instead I have just been disabling notifications. Boo, Twitter.
I've been working on my sister-in-law's PC over this week. I think I've finally narrowed the problem down to a hard drive failure, but it's taking a really long time to transfer all of their files so that I can reinstall Windows and all of that crap. I'm hoping that this is the last time someone asks me to work on a Windows PC for them. There are people who get paid full time salaries to work on this stuff, and I'm not one of them. I don't mind working on linux systems since I can do that remotely and they don't break very often.
Ignorance
My favorite technical bookstore, nerdbooks.com, happens to be located about 1/2 mile from work. Not only are their books always cheaper than on Amazon, but being able to walk into the store to browse and examine the merchandise is an extreme bonus. Recently, however, they've been forced to close their doors to the public because some people are "afraid of dogs", even though the two dogs in question are extremely well behaved and docile Labrador Retrievers. Nothing bothers me more than when I'm affected by the ignorance of other people. Luckily they are allowing existing customers to still enter through the side shipping entrance.
With regard to ignorance, I can't say that I'm surprised to hear this week that SAT scores are dropping. "No child left behind" my ass. I've got about 6 years to figure out how I'm going to finance at least one private school education.
School
Speaking of school, my class so far has covered no material that I'm not already extremely familiar with (depth-first tree search, queues, etc). I know at some point things will get interesting, but I'm glad things are simple for now. I should be using this lull to work on my independent development project.
Health
I've started going to the gym now that school has fired back up. I awoke at 6:00am on Wednesday to go secure a locker at the facility. I was able to procure a medium-sized locker; I wanted a large but they had only one available and The Captain was in line before me. Even if I had arrived before him I'd have surrendered my spot to him; he needs a large locker more than I do. The Smurf was mysteriously absent from the gym on both Wednesday and Friday morning.
Life Ambitions
This week's moon eclipse was fantastic even though it was way too early to be awake. Neither me nor my wife were able to get great pictures. It also got me thinking about solar eclipses, and I've determined that I must see one before I die. Unless I make a special international trip, the next most likely opportunity will be on Monday, August 21, 2017. I figure we can drive to the middle-of-nowhere Nebraska, set up a tent, and get in some great viewing / photos. Even better will be the event on Monday, May 8, 2024 in which the path of totality includes my house.
Friday
I haven't been productive since about 2:00pm today; it's been a long week and I'm out of GAFF ("Give a Fark Factor"). We had our monthly cake today , but not after we resisted their feeble attempts to move the cake up to the third floor. Our company split has been finalized (their keys are deactivated after today), yet they still had the nerve to try and steal our sugary goodness. My cake, damnit ... it's a good thing I worked out this morning. Finally going to see HP5 tonight; better late than on DVD.
I want to briefly place a spotlight on a couple of applications that I've recently begun to utilize. Both applications are fairly popular, with several thousand people bookmarking each on del.icio.us . Neither of these are sponsored ads, and I hope they don't read as such.
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/ )
When I first saw Twitter, it seemed like nothing more than a MySpace with ADHD. The Twitter home page features the public timeline, a continuous feed of what everyone is "twittering" right now. A few examples (names censored):
XXXX: watching yankees/red sux game
XXXX: 今日も早くから仕事。外は思いのほか涼しかった。
XXXX: A wise man once told me to go home and have a gin and tonic.
XXXX: Time to head home...I can do no more good here!
This is mostly a follow-up to the post here regarding beta level software with regards to a particular application at VoidSlime. In the general case, I still stand by the assertion that the term beta is overused in the current market of software applications.
However, I also want to give credit to the proprietor of the above mentioned application, VoidSlime. He? actually did read and take the time to respond to my harsh critique in a professional manner. From what I gather the website was never intended for wide distribution, and it was not expected that outsiders would be signing up. Eadz has stated that a feedback link will be provided and that possibly sign-ups will be closed until it is ready for more extensive testing or release.
This class looks like it's going to be a bit different in composition. The first thing that strikes me is the amount of "Fast Track" (undergraduate) students in the course. The combination of those students plus all of the PhD students preparing for the qualifier fill the room pretty well.
There are two students with the first name of 'Jasper' in this class. I haven't derived any conclusions from that, just an observation.
The professor that has this room before us went way late on the first day. Hopefully he can either adjust his watch or content to fit better in his given 75 minutes.
I want to talk a little bit about the word Beta this morning. The letter Beta (β) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet, coming immediately after Alpha (α). According to Wikipedia, the Beta is used throughout mathematics and science, but it is the usage in reference to software releases that has caught my ire today.
It seems to me that the word beta, or the implied phrase beta testing has been completely thrown out the window in the Web 2.0 age. I'm pretty sure that Google, with its perpetually-beta GMail, Google Calendar, and menagerie of other web services has changed the definition of the term. It no longer means "Software that is in testing in preparation for release." Beta now means "Released software that may not be production quality."
This is a subtle but important distinction. The first phrase implies that the company is actively seeking to purge the bugs from their system and create a production quality program. The second is simply a CYA, removing any kind of perceived liability from the developer in case it doesn't work right.
I ran into a Type 2 beta website last night, and I am still pretty aggravated about my experience. I have a bunch of MTG cards and I want a way to organize them electronically. I can use the MTGO client, but it's graphical only and proprietary. A few weeks ago I saw a link to this site, VoidSlime, which is supposed to be a trading marketplace for MTG cards. It's in Beta, of course, but I figured I would give it a shot.
During my "testing" of their site, I found a show-stopper bug: You can't have a regular card and a foil card of the same type. They obviously are only keying on the card ID, instead of both the card ID and all of the special flags (foil, promotional, etc). Moreover, the software doesn't tell you that it failed to add the card ... it simply adds it to the fancy Web 2.0 auto-list and keeps going. It's not until you refresh the page that you realize your cards are missing from the database.
As a developer, I understand that software has bugs, and while I was frustrated by 'losing' some of the cards I'd just input, it's not that big of a deal. What is a big deal, however, is that there is no way to report bugs on this site.
No email address
No message boards
No "contact us" web form
Since there is no way to report feedback, it can't be in testing, and thus the word Beta on the VoidSlime home page simply means, "This software sucks. " I would write the website owners to have them add an email address, but that is kind of paradoxical. Instead I'll just publish this post and maybe someday they'll see it.
- Anyone can write a web page but it takes someone special to build an application.
