Just another useless personal blog
Got an exercise route? Need to work one out? Use this little tool based on Google maps to calculate the actual distance of a route and calories burned walking it.
Apparently my two usual routes are 2.13 miles starting from home, and 3.21 miles starting from the office.
I’m starting to get a little sick of this Linksys router (a BEFWS11). Functionally, it has pretty much all of the features I need; the problem is that it’s horribly unstable in certain cases.
The main source of trouble seems to be the wireless support. If I enable the wireless interface, it’s only a matter of time (anywhere from a few hours to a week or so) before the router just freezes up and has to be power cycled. It’s annoying to have to manually enable it whenever I want to take the iBook away from the desk and have to remember to disable it again afterwards.
It also seems to fall apart under heavy data streaming. I went to a site to watch some streaming music videos, and as soon as each one ended, the router would go dead and have to be rebooted.
The latest firmware updates seem to have reduced the frequency of the problems, but it still happens more often than I like. I can live with it for now, but the next time I buy one I suspect it won’t be the same brand…
So Longhorn finally has an official name, and…I’m finding it difficult to care. What’s supposed to be so great about it?
– A new OS interface. Whoop-dee-do. I spend most of the time within some game’s own interface anyways.
– The WinFS filesystem and its better organizational structure. Oh wait, they pulled that one out…
– The WinFX APIs. This really only affects us at the office, but since we want maximum compatibility and Win32 isn’t going away, we won’t be switching over to these anytime soon.
– More DRM ‘features.’ Oh yeah, I always wanted more restrictions placed on how I can use my computer…
XP was decent because it was the first NT-based Windows that was officially supported as a gaming platform, and it’s actually been fairly stable. Vista seems like a fairly minor bump and just doesn’t offer me anything interesting enough to make it worth upgrading.
I’ve just written the last bit of new code that I’m responsible for on our current seemingly-neverending project. For the last, uh, 6 days or so it’ll be just bugfixes from here on.
As a special treat, I’ll let you in on a bit of secret, proprietary knowledge and show you exactly what the very last line of code was.
Are you ready?!
Continue reading “Ugh, Finally”
I’m horrible about seeing doctors.
Last night I couldn’t sleep because of some abdominal pain that started in the mid-evening, peaked around 3am, and finally subsided around 4am. This isn’t the first time though, and I usually write it off as indigestion or acid reflux or such, as it never gets too serious and seems to correlate with overeating (I had some sunflower seeds late in the day).
After finally getting to sleep last night though, I woke up and was once again struck with abdominal pain around 5:30am. It felt slightly different and I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I started considering calling in sick and hoofing it down to a nearby clinic. But, as usual, I managed to plague myself with all sorts of doubts and concerns (Is it really serious enough? Would I just be another hypochondriac clogging the system? Would they resent some fat weirdo just wandering in and whining?) and convinced myself not to go.
Fortunately, after a nice, hot shower it has subsided again, and on the theory that something really serious doesn’t just go away, I think I’ll be fine. But if it flares up again today, I’ll hopefully be able to convince myself… :-P
The last thing to be completed in the floor construction after our company moved in was the washrooms, apparently due to some kind of difficulty tracking down bowls with the correct mounting points or something.
Unfortunately, they’re low-flow toilets, and true to the cliche, they often require two or three flushes where the high-powered ones on the other floors only require one. And, as an added bonus, they’ve got the automatic sensors on them, which will often go off and invoke unnecessary flushes as you’re just entering or after you’ve already left.
But at least it’s, like, high-tech ‘n stuff.
A game sure to annoy mothers and girlfriends everywhere: Dream Stripper
Based on targeting like this you’d think gamers were largely desperate, lonely, immature men who…
Oh.
*sob*
aipbot, you are a *bad robot*. Not only do you fetch the same URL multiple times unnecessarily, but you ignore robots.txt, and continue to repeatedly fetch URLs even after being 403ed.
Not that they’re draining all of my bandwidth or anything like that, but it’s annoying to see this kind of behaviour filling my logs on a very low-traffic site like this.
Bad robot! Go sit in the corner…
I just had a brainfart and completely forgot one character in my password, and am now locked out of my own work account. I’m still logged in on one other machine, but I’ll lose that as soon as the screen saver lock kicks in.
I think it’s time to go home…
I haven’t played Asheron’s Call much lately, just logging in to refresh my house once a month.
As an older game, it’s natural for its playerbase to dwindle over time. It’s not a fresh, new, good-looking game, so it doesn’t attract many new players, and old players eventually stop and move on to other games. I had no idea just how much AC’s population had fallen until during this month’s refresh, when I stopped and took a brief look around at the housing market.
The most common type of house in AC is the cottage, and most of them are organized into communities of eight houses. There’s a finite number of cottages, and all of them were snapped up very quickly after the housing feature was activated and they remained in high demand for a very long time thereafter. It was feared that the only way you’d be able to get a cottage was to trade one on eBay from someone who got lucky and wanted to turn a real-life profit.
It was thus quite a surprise when I logged in yesterday and saw that within the community my cottage is in, there were only two others that were occupied, and the other five were abandoned and up for sale. I did a ‘@house available’ command, which gives you a list of how many houses of each type are available and where they’re located. Nearly every other time in the past it had simply said ‘Cottages: 0 available/ Villas: 0 available / Mansions: 0 available’, but this time it gave me a list of coordinates so long that I couldn’t even see the start of the list. I had to capture it to a file in order to see the ‘Cottages: 805 available’ at the start.
If so many cottages are abandoned now, there’ve got to be damn few people left playing…
Woohoo, I finally got around to getting a replacement power supply for my XP box, and things are finally back to normal — I no longer have to underclock the CPU by 25% and I can take the GeForce 2 out and put the Radeon 9700 Pro back in.
Those two factors alone had been making quite a difference. After the power supply started deteriorating, I had to cut the resolution of a lot of games down to 800×600 and had to go from having every advanced graphics option in World of Warcraft turned on, to turning almost all of them off just to make it playable. I installed GTR while it was crippled and was getting 15-25 FPS, but after restoring it, it shot up to 90-100+ FPS, enabling me to turn on higher levels of detail.
I keep getting tempted to put together a nice, new Athlon 64 / PCI-Express system, but now that I’ve got this one fixed up again, I think it’ll last me at least another year or two.
