Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Metroid Prime continues to take up almost all of my free time. The game gets better and better as you progress. It also gets quite challenging. I'm at 40% completion right now, after about 11 hours of gameplay. It'll be a while yet I guess. I'll post more thoughts on the game once I've completed it.
"It is the soldier, not the reporter who has given us the freedom
of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom
of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the
freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves
beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the
protester to burn the flag."
-- Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, Sergeant, USMC
Few antiwar protesters, cowards and pacifists realize where their freedom comes from.
Found a copy of Metroid Prime today, so I've been playing it most of the night.
Wow.
Recently I've noticed that my eyes are quite strained at the end of the day. It's probably safe to say that the cause of this are those deadly CRT monitors. I have to look at them at work all day, but I used to have one at home too, which could mean up to 16 hours of low intensity radiation cooking my eyes to a warm, golden brown. No more!
I picked up a 19" LCD monitor from my local computer shop, since they had a good deal. It's an analogue monitor, so the picture isn't technically as good as it could be, but looking at both models I found it hard to tell the difference between analogue and digital. There was one difference I could see however, the $500 difference.
I'm still getting used to the look of the LCD. There's still some image ghosting, or trailing, on LCD monitors but it really does start to go away after you've been looking at the screen for a while. I don't even notice it anymore, even in games, which have traditionally been the bane of LCD displays. I'll have to see how the eyes deal with the new flat panel in time. Should be okay though.
I couldn't pick up Metroid today, probably because no one had it. They're all saying tomorrow or Wednesday. I always forget that a "release date" only means "it'll be in stores sometime after..." Oh well.
Metroid Prime is out today. My favourite game of all time is Super Metroid, so this being the first Metroid game to be released in over 8 years, I'm understandably excited.
I only hope I can find a copy.
Well, not exactly, but this news doesn't seem to promising:
Sun's rays to roast Earth as poles flip
So sometime in the next thousand years the Earth's magnetic field is going to disappear before coming back in a reversed state. This means that for an unknown amount of time, the Earth will be without a magnetic shield to protect it from solar radiation. Radiation from the Sun will impact the Earth's atmosphere directly, which is probably going to suck.
This is by no means the end of the world however, as magnetic field reversals have happened many times in our planet's past. They say that on average they occur every 250,000 years, but that the last one was about 1,000,000 years ago. We're definitely overdue. Clearly plant and animal life has managed to survive just fine without the magnetic field on several occasions. The big difference now is the Human factor. How will the Earth withstand the radiation with it's weakened ozone layer? Will Human pollutants have an effect on how the radiation affects the climate? I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Lucky for us, scientists have recently created new radiation-proof fabrics, so we should be able to weather the storm for a couple hundred years until the magnetic field reappears.
Nothing to worry about, right?
National Post article: "Terror tape lists Canada as target"
Really? Gee, I didn't realize they were after Canadians too. I mean they attacked the evil American Christians, not the Canadian ones, right? If you honestly think that there's a western nation in existence that Islamic terrorists aren't targeting, please raise you hand so I'll know who to stop listening to. People try to rationalize the attacks on America as being reactive attacks. "The Americans pushed around too many people in the Middle East" and all that. I'll admit it may have started that way, but today these extremists have declared War on anyone who isn't a Muslim, not just Western Christians. Canada has always been a target, so I don't know what the big deal is. Of course, I would feel more comfortable if my military was a little more capable, which brings me to this:
National Post article: "Pull troops back from abroad, say Senators"
Now there's a real good idea. Where do they find morons like these? Oh wait, "they're" all morons. Despite Canada's extremely small military budget, we continue to produce some of the best soldiers in the world. Canadian training must be doing something right, because our soldiers seem to rank very well when it comes to international military competition, such as sniper tournaments and air combat competitions. Canadian troops are respected in the international community despite the fact that the Canadian government is not.
There's only one problem with the Canadian military: funding. There's no need to recall a single soldier, but there is a need to send that soldier better equipment. Everything from fighter aircraft to tanks, assault rifles to boots; all of it needs to be replaced with stuff the rest of the world will actually recognize. Even if a country doesn't use its military, simply having a respectable one gives that country greater economic power and respect from its peers. The great Pierre Trudeau started the systematic castration of the Canadian Armed Forces, and if Jean Chretien really wants to leave a legacy, he'll be the one to undo it.
The rebuild of my computer is going slower than I expected, mostly because I'm coming across things I forgot to backup. This happens every time, so I think I'll make some kind of list of what I need to backup when I do a backup.
New Enterprise tonight. I've stopped holding out hope that a good episode will come along. Maybe this way, if and when a good installment airs, I'll be able to enjoy it instead of saying "it's about time".
I've been screwing around with my computer for the last few days, which is the reason for the lack of posts. Installed a new hard drive, which somehow messed up my RAID array and prevented me from booting Windows. I'm in the process of rebuilding the system, so my website application is one of the first things back on.
I hope everyone has a good remembrance day, and doesn't forget the reason they aren't working today. Do yourself a favour and watch a war movie today, so long as it's not The Dirty Dozen. Try and catch Band of Brothers, or go out and rent Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line or the surprisingly good tv movie All Quiet on the Western Front. Do something that forces you to remember.
It's a little scary that soon the last of the veterans will be dead. There won't be anyone left who was actually there. Most people today already seem to treat the world wars as "things that happened in first half of last century, or something". Try not to think of them that way, at least not for today.
Well it's voting day today in the US midterm elections. With so many of the races being so close, and the fate of the country literally hanging in the balance, I hope people actually get out there and vote.
Watching Larry King Live last night I was disappointed when CBS' Dan Rather said he "wouldn't be surprised" if the turnout was less than 40%. It'll probably turn out that way. Given all that's happened in the past year and a half, and after the Presidential election of 2000, one would think that Americans would be busting down the voting station doors. The fact that such a thing won't happen is utterly pathetic. As Dan Rather said last night, America has sent thousands of it's young Men and Women off to Afghanistan (among other places) to "defend" democracy, but the lowly American citizen can't take a couple hours out of one day of their busy lives to walk down the fucking street and punch a card.
Give me a break people! There is no excuse. Get out there and vote!
Unless of course, you're a Republican ;)
Yeah, so Chris Wren missed his deadline. Everyone at the office knew it would happen, and teasing him about it on Friday was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. His site is up now though, and despite some very questionable web design choices, his new pieces look fantastic.
Check it out here: Haunted Planet
If you're ever going to design a website, there's one thing you have to keep saying to yourself: "I have no idea who is going to look at this". The Internet moves so quickly that even the smallest annoyance on a website can mean the person has already gone somewhere else. First things first, and this is where I take issue with Chris' site; ideal resolution. I can't be sure, but I think most people still have their display resolution at 800x600, which is why that tends to be the standard for web design. Designing a site for 1024x768 is risky, but chances are you're still going to reach most people without horizontal scroll bars popping up on thousands of monitors across the world. Any higher than that is lunacy, since the percentage of people running 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 is almost the same as the percentage of billionaires compared with the world's entire population.
Of course I'm sure Chris will argue that the people he is marketing his site to are artists, and artists tend to run high-res monitors. Trouble is, most artists don't do the hiring, and it's unlikely that a company manager is going to be sitting at a graphics quality monitor. They'll either be on a fifteen inch, 800x600 display or if you're lucky, a laptop LCD screen running 1024x768. This is of course if the viewer is even looking at your page from their own machine. They could be at a friend's house, a library, or on the road, stopping to check their web-based email in some forgotten Internet cafe on a machine that may or may not have all of the fancy plugins installed. I think we all know the quality of display you'll find in any of those locations.
Of course, all of that assumes that the person looking at your site has their browser window maximized. Some people like to have it small, so they can browse while chatting through a messaging program, playing music while organizing their playlists, or browsing several sites at once. I know I never browse with the window open all the way, as I like to keep an eye on a few things at a time. Bottom line is, make your page accessible to everyone, or at least the greatest number of people you can. People get pissed off at websites that demand the viewer to conform to the site, when it should be the other way around. The irony of Chris' site, and I'm going to be quite frank here Chris, is that the design of the site doesn't merit a 1600x1200 requirement. The exact same site could exist in a 800x600 format, with low-res images for quick browsing, and high-res ones that pop up in separate windows with scroll bars. I know the scroll bar thing seems contradictory, but when people click an image link that says "1600x1200", they expect scroll bars.
Don't worry Chris, it's still a nice enough site.
Well I suppose Enterprise was ok, but that's about all the praise I can bestow. The episode was simply boring. There were no interesting ideas, the plot was stolen from another film and they couldn't even get a battle with Klingons to wake me from my slumber. I would rather watch TNG's "Code of Honor" than sit through this episode of Enterpris again.
The big day has finally arrived. Chris Wren should have his new site up today. I'm going to post a link, and if it's not up you can complain to him, not to me. Here is the link. I'll try and post a review of his new stuff sometime, maybe Monday. In the mean time, check it out.
I've added a counter to the bottom of the main page. I have no idea how acurate it is, but I was tired of looking at web stats which didn't reflect the amount of people who actually click through my front door. It's shown me that the number isn't very high. That's ok though, I really don't expect anyone to care about what I think.