I am a salaried employee for the government… Well, my employer is a government contractor, which pretty much translates to my checks coming from Uncle Sam, and the government wants a punch card for your labored hours.  It’s an old convention that likely spawned out of some kind of factory union, and has stayed the course for decades now.  For the same reason that it is illegal to drive with an un-caged bear in Missouri (caged is okay), or illegal to take a lion to the theater in Maryland, or why it’s illegal to serve wine in a tea cup if you live in Kansas; just because.  Sometimes old laws are like bad habits that you just can’t seem to get rid of.

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1. My router burns out, so I buy one from Amazon.
2. It’s defective, so I return it and purchase a Belkin from Best Buy.
3. Belkin sucks and I will never buy their stuff again.  I return it and get a Netgear router, which thankfully works.
4. The switch/hub in my home office insists on transmitting at 10Mbps even though it’s a 10/100 and I have nothing but 100Mbps cards.  So I bypass the switch and only have my server on a hard wire at the moment.
5. My Xbox 360 gets the read ring of death…
6. I sent it away and just got my Xbox 360 back from Microsoft, about 2 weeks later.  I had to uninstall and re-install all of my games and software, like Netflix.
7. My home server just burned a stick of RAM, corrupted a hard drive, and has an on-board video card that doesn’t seem to work anymore.  I suspect viruses at play, though I never download anything on that machine.  It’s strictly a media/data server with Apache for web access.

…looking for my boot disk to see how much damage has been done.  I am so tired of technology some days…

At least once a month, I get an email or feed about the growth potential of the gaming market.  Sometimes the market might be casual and other times it might be discussing the resurgence of PC games.  What I can’t stand however, is when these articles profess by example.

“Look at WoW, and how many users they have!”
“Look at Farmville!  They are swimming in hundred dollar bills!”
“Look at that 1 guy that made $1M from an iPhone Tetris clone!”

I can’t stand it when we just stare at the #1 spot like it is any kind of reflection on the genre, as a whole.  Okay, look at those successes; celebrate them, but don’t bet the farm on the fact that these companies happen to strike a lucky break or hit the market at a perfect time.  Once the momentum is in their favor, reaching #1 seems almost inevitable.  But what about the rest of the industry?  Take a peek at the #2 MMO on the market and you will see a stark difference in active users.  The same goes for casual developers other than Zynga; have a gander at those mildly impressive numbers.

I don’t mean to sound like a Debbie Downer here, but I think that it is important to look at the entire upper bracket, and not just the #1 success.  Obtaining a statistical Median is a better estimate of what to expect than a Max function.  When we look at the Median MMO only sustaining a hundred thousand users or so, it puts your success rate into more perspective.

I don’t follow soccer, but I did.  I used to love soccer as a child, and even as far as my high school days.  I never played it for my school, being too busy with work and football season, but I still had a love for the sport.  Somewhere along the way, I noticed something; had it been there all along?

I started seeing an inexcusable number of guys taking dives, crying on the floor over their bruised vagina; something didn’t add up.  Excuse my language, but nothing bothers me more in sports than watching grown men roll around, grabbing their leg like it must have been torn off 3 yard back, then standing and running after their opponent receives a yellow/red card.  I honestly don’t know how any player who takes a dive can call himself an athlete, and that is why soccer is not a sport.  Sports require athletes; individuals with the drive to be faster, strong, and more agile than their rival; not take acting lessons between their nail appointments.

I personally would like to see the addition of instant replay for referees and a transfer of penalty to the Hollywood hero on the ground.  I might start to care again.  Heck, I might even call soccer a sport when the players on the field focus more on scoring points, and less on driving their face into someones elbow for a quick yellow card.

It seems that each passing day is one where I read a blog, or an article about how our human rights are being taken away from us.  Some of these arguments really do cause me to take pause, whether it be the legalized robbery of a failing airline industry, the rising prices of video games and movies, or the more recent movement to exploit loopholes in the FCC jurisdiction.

The exploitations that I am referring to are the FCC and their efforts to continue the fight for net neutrality.  They have already lost a pinnacle battle in the courts and seem to be losing ground with every trial.  It’s only a matter of time before the power is shifted from the people and into the hands of major corporations.  If the battle for net neutrality is lost forever, we can all expect to see the same form of robbery that we complain about every time we step foot into an airport.  The nickel and dime charges,  the lack of support and quality regulations, and the arbitrary fees for the smallest of details like choosing an aisle seat.

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After 20 hours of “walk forward, kill something, cut scene, repeat”, and 30+ attempts to kill the same cheap boss, I have only this to say about Final Fantasy III….

Final Fantasy,
like digital razor blades.
I just want party control.

Windows Mobile 7 devices might be coming out in time for Christmas this year.  That’s good news since my Blackberry has a huge crack on the screen.  I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a newer smart phone, but I haven’t been very excited about any of them.  Apple can lick the bottom of my shoes, and only then I might think about an iPhone, but until that happens I am still looking for something to grab my attention.  My interest has been peaked by the mention of XNA support for Windows 7 phones, so it could be the first phone that I actually bother to buy games for.  I just hope that they deliver the phone on a service provider that has service.

There is something about this time of year that always depresses me.  We are at the height of many things (in gaming) over the next few months.  GDC, E3, Quake Con, and many other events that are filled with boundless information and jaw dropping news.  It’s even a time when many game developers are slowing down from their pre-holiday crunches and their blood pressure has lowered after hearing the good news of more work to come.

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I recently found myself backing up around 100GB of data.  I originally attempted to simply copy the folders onto my external harddrive, but quickly discovered how incredibly broken the Windows copy system is.  If Windows copy isn’t taking 12 hours to copy, it’s crashing and giving up on the first sign of failure.  This usually forces you to have to start from the beginning because you don’t know what files have been properly copied or which files are corrupted.  Enter TeraCopy.

WARNING: Don’t download from the creators homepage, it has a virus =(. This is a sad thing for such a great application.  Instead, try to find it on a safer site that scans their files for viruses.  I got mine from download.cnet.com.

I copied my content in a few minutes, not hours, and it never crapped out once.  This is a must-have for anyone who deals with massive amounts of data transfers.  One bad thing that I’d have to say about this freeware tool is that the interface is a little clunky and unorthodox, but it gets the job done.

There is something that has been bothering me for some time now and it’s due to get off my chest.  I really don’t like Apple, and everything they stand for. (more…)