Man! Gears of War is tough. It doesn't help that there is no manual save and you have to keep playing the same section over and over and over again. I'm going to restart the game on the easy setting in a minute because I am rapidly losing interest. I might take a break from this and go play Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that I also received for Christmas.
It is interesting how on our Time Warner Cable DVR I have the parental lock on for mature content and the box will block movies on Disney Channel but in the on demand section a couple of clicks away from Cartoon Network's Boomerang shows is Fear.Net with movies like Midnight Meat Train and Last House on the Left that feature graphic violence, language and extreme gore and the parental locks don't apply to that.
Woohoo! I moved up to Recruit on Combat Arms! This would be a good LAN game if I could set up a server locally. It reminds me of the days when the Deathcon clan was all gaming together every night on Soldier of Fortune 2.
I have been realizing the last couple of days how messy my site is coding-wise. There are a lot of pieces of code that should be broken out into one external javascript and one stylesheet. It's slow going trying to make it all global but it is worth it in the end when a global change to the site only requires changing one or two files.
I received the PC version of Gears of War for Christmas. Chingow!This game is hard. I set it to the highest skill level available. Luckily the last skill level was not clickable or I wouldn't have been able to get out of the menu. It is probably going to take a couple of hours to get use to the controls and abilities in the game. It looks great so far. I can't wait to get into the thick of battle once I know what I am doing. Too bad Microsoft won't allow anybody to create a Linux server port. I would run a server if one was available. One problem I noticed when creating my character. I skipped the Live registration part figuring I could come back later but then the game said my awards wouldn't be saved unless I was a Live user and I couldn't find a way to hook my character to live and I couldn't delete the character to start over.
Thanks to Eric Dietz' Rubik's Cube Solver I was finally able to solve Half Pint's Rubik's Cube. The only problem is it has the faces of Disney characters on it and three of the centers are wrong so the faces aren't right. Ah well. Maybe I will mess it up again another day and see if I can really solve it.
I was inspired over the weekend by DairyQueen's cookie making to work on some cookies of my own on the website and the new project is coming along nicely. At the moment it is not IE6 compatible and maybe I will fix that one day but I'm too jazzed by how well it is working in IE7 and Firefox so I am building new features for those browsers first. Keep checking back to be the first to cjheck out the app when it goes live.
I noticed since I blocked Asia from sending me spam using IPs from BlockACountry.com that I am getting a lot more traffic coming to my site from China! To all my Chinese fans out there, welcome to the DOH! Network!
I was hoping to get in a little Combat Arms tonight but time has slipped by too quickly today. Maybe tomorrow. I wish I could run my own server so people would know where to find me but ah well. What can ya do? I run an Unreal Tournament 2004 server, an Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory server and a Trackmania Nations Forever server and nobody plays on any of them.
UPDATE: I just checked the server stats and people are actually playing on my UT2004 and Trackmania Nations Forever servers right now.
Stupid spam! DairyQueen got onto some spammer lists and is getting every kind of spam known to man. One good thing to come out of it is I have been messing with the access file on the server and figured out how to block IPs from sending email to my server. Only problem is I usually end up taking out most of North America when I try to block some third world country. I have to be more careful how deep I go when blocking IPs. I found BlockACountry.com this morning. BlockACountry.com will spit out a bunch of IPs for the selected country that you can add to your .htaccess file to block these countries from even viewing your page but with a little cut and paste I stuck the IPs in the access file for mail. I was telling egrep I should just reject all and then allow the US but you never know. I may actually have a fan in some other country that wants to send me an email. If you do find your mail being rejected you could probably still use the contact me link in the left nav to reach me.
I finally got an official invite to the Quake Live beta. I was kinda bummed to see I only get two friend invites. It use to be you got five but I guess id is getting millions of requests. I need to try it out today and see what tweaks they have done since I last played. Also need to check out Combat Arms one of these days.
I've been addicted to the logic game on the Hero Rising beta site. It's kinda like Pipe Dream. I don't care for the other games too much but I heard there is a Tower Defence game coming soon. Mmmmmm... Tower Defence.
And now it's time for Johnny Leche's Holiday Shopping Tips
Order every thing online. If you can avoid going to stores, do it. If you are going through a site like Amazon.com, make sure the item you are buying is from a reputable seller. You don't want to be rushing around at the last minute because the seller didn't notify you until you filed a complaint with Amazon that 'The Shop Pros' were out of stock on the item you ordered but still took your money.
If you can't order it online and have to go to a store, take the first space you can find even if it's way out in the middle of nowhere. It's much less stressful to walk a little bit extra than try to get the front spot.
If you have to go to a store, see if you can find it at smaller stores that aren't part of a large mall. If you can go to a store next to a hardware store, there's
onna be a lot less people there than if you have to go to a mall.
If you are going after work, try to go shopping on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Avoid going on Fridays because the
ids are more likely to be hanging out and taking all the parking spaces.
Thanks to BluJay for letting me try Quake Live. After playing it a couple of times I can see why it's still in beat as id Software irons out the issues and gets everything fine tuned. From my time playing this weekend I think I remembered why the Deathcon crew stopped playing Quake 3 in the first place. Cheaters and trash talkers. Don't get me wrong. I don't think I'm a great player and should be ownerzing the servers but some of the kills these guys were were making were a little hard to believe. I would spawn and run two steps to a ledge to drop down to a weapon and right as a reach the ledge I am greeted by a rocket to the face? Looks like a wall hack to me. And then they go and yell obscenities at you every five seconds. At least voice chat is not enabled but I can't play Quake Live with half pint around because she can read the comments. If they ever do get around to sending me a key or the game finally comes out of beta, I probably won't be playing.
My big two projects at work have finally launched. Now there is just minor maintenance to do on Disney XD with adding new logos and a bunch of new games to add over the next couple of weeks on Hero Rising. Next up is a new site using our in-house content management software so the business unit can update a blog themselves. This will be the biggest task I have ever had to do with the content management system so it should be interesting.