By Ben, on October 21st, 2009 Whenever I go to bed at a reasonable hour lately I somtimes have very vivid dreams. They’re not vivid in a way that everything looks real, it’s more that everything feels real to me emotionally. Unfortunately most of my dreams are incredibly depressing and even though when I wake up I know they’re not real, the subject matter leaves me depressed for the next day or two.
This has lead me to staying awake so late that when I eventually do sleep I’m so exhausted that I either don’t dream or don’t remember them. The side effect being that I constantly have red eyes, causing people to sometimes think I’m a drug addict.
Does anyone else have sleep problems?
By Ben, on October 19th, 2009 I haven’t posted about my television viewing lately, so here’s an update:
Fringe
Remains awesome and loving every moment. Everything seems to be heading to Peter finding out he is actually from an alternate universe and that Walter kidnapped him. I really like that they don’t mess about in this show. Other shows feel like they are dragging the story out because there isn’t much of it to go around, but Fringe feels like they are desparetely trying to fit as much in as possible.
Heroes
Someone wake me up when this becomes interesting. I’m only still watching in the vain hope that things will turn around and the show will be good once more. The story is proceeding at an absolute snails pace so far. At least we’re past the requisite lesbian kiss.
Flash Forward
The premise is interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that it will end up being lame. This show is also an extremely slow mover. I’m sort of irritated that they’re dwelling so much on the individual character stories rather than exploring the shows mythos more.
Stargate Universe
I’m trying to like this, but the snails-pace story progress and the characters aren’t making it easy. The whole stargate premise is already a stretch, but some chubby ‘MIT drop-out’ being recruited to save them all is pushing it. It also doesn’t help that the show has many parallels to Stargate Atlantis which started promising but devolved into complete rubbish.
By Ben, on October 19th, 2009 While I play WoW, I also play Lord of the Rings Online and once upon a time I also played Age of Conan (I stopped because the game itself isn’t very interesting). If you’re like me and have stepped outside the confines of WoW you will have found quite a lot of animosty and derision directed at it from the wannabe MMO’s, and when I say that I mean they wish they were as successful as WoW.
WoW has it’s shortcomings, as do other MMO’s, but it is said to be cartoony, childish, too easy, the playerbase is full of kids, the graphics suck, etc. The list of insults is endless and they generally serve to highlight the inherent insecurity of players, similar to the console wars (ie PS3 vs Xbox360 vs Wii), but occasionally someone will say something that’s true. Unfortunately I can’t think of any examples right now so I’m instead going to mention a few things about LotRO.
Continue reading MMO Rivalry
By Ben, on October 14th, 2009 In this day and age of Google and friends there are certain things you expect when software says it includes search functionality. At the most basic level you expect that if you type in ‘elephant’ it will find all instances of the word ‘elephant’. The next step is that typing ‘free’ would return all instances of ‘free’, ‘freedom’, ‘freely’, ‘freed’, or any other variation of the word. The final, most complex step is that search itself becomes a query language allowing infinitely complex searches to be performed.
Yesterday I discovered that the search functionality included with Drupal is capable of whole word searching only.
I really hate discovering huge failings like this myself and wish they’d be clear from the beginning on such limitations. As a result of this revelation I’ve been reading through discussions on drupal.org about how the search can be improved that have been going on for a disappointingly long time, which unfortunately is quite common with Drupal (a curse of being open source), mainly because certain decision-makers in the Drupal heirarchy feel that full-text search would incur too great a performance hit. This, rather than making it possible for people to find content on your site without explicity knowing what it is called.
This even affects site administrators because when sites get large enough that admins have to search to find a certain node (article/post in Drupal-talk) they must know exatly what they’re looking for to be able to find it.
Luckily there are modules available to replace the built-in search module, but now I am required to manually search through them to find the right solution.
By Ben, on October 6th, 2009 Did I ever mention that I despise insurance companies? Insurance companies exist to promote fear of what might happen which they then use to sell you ‘peace of mind’. Should you ever need to make use of your insurance you are penalised by higher rates or denial of your claim.
Insurance companies employ a lot of staff who exist for the sole purpose of finding a reason to deny your claim. Said another way, they do not want to approve your claim unless they absolutely cannot avoid it. They will also drag the claim process out to the point where any benefit eventually provided arrives too late.
If you’re lucky and your claim is approved one of two things will occur when your renewal comes up:
- The cost of your insurance will increase because you had the audacity to make use of the service you have been pumping money into.
- If your insurance company sees you as a liability they will price your insurance at a level they know you cannot afford to get rid of you as their customer.
This is why I have no insurance. I am willing to live a life not knowing what the future holds and usually do not allow myself to get caught up in the hysteria that insurance companies survive off.
By Ben, on September 30th, 2009 In my junk mail yesterday:
From: wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com <wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com>
Subject: World of Warcraft Account Management
Greetings!
It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell/trade your personal World of Warcraft account(s).
As you may or may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of Agreement.
If this proves to be true, your account can and will be disabled. It will be ongoing for further investigation by Blizzard Entertainment’s employees.
If you wish to not get your account suspended you should immediately verify your account ownership. If the information is deemed accurate, the investigation will be dropped.
This action is taken because we at Blizzard Entertainment take these sales quite seriouly. We need to confirm you are the original owner of the account.
This is easiet done by confirmung your person information along with concealed information about your account.
You can confirm you are the original owner of the account by replying to this email with:
Use the following template below to verify your account and information via email.
* First and Surname
* Date of birth
* Address
* Zip code
* Phone number
* Country
* Account e-mail
* Account name
* Account password
* Secret Question and Answer
-Or-
WoW CD-Key
Show * Please enter the correct information
If you ignore this mail your account can and will be closed permanently. Once we verify your account, we will reply to your e-mail informing you that we have dropped the investigation.
We ask you to NOT change password until the investigation is fully completed.
Blizzard Entertainment Inc
Account Administration Team
P.O. Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623
Regards,
Account Administration Team
Blizzard Entertainment
Mistake #1
The reply-to address is wowaccountadmin@accountadmin-blizzard.com.
Mistake #2
The mailed-by is hotmail.com.
Mistake #3
Lesson #1 for a WoW player who wants to avoid having their account compromised: A Blizzard representative will never ask for your password.
By Ben, on September 29th, 2009 Did you know that if you link more than 30 css stylesheets Internet Explorer won’t recognise anything past the 30th? Neither did I and what a waste of time disocvering that was.
Luckily Drupal has a feature where it can take all of your css files and make them into a single on to save file access time.
By Ben, on September 17th, 2009 Shh! I just ordered Katamari Forever from the US and Oui doesn’t know.
Luckily he never visits ‘our’ blog.
By Ben, on September 14th, 2009 District 9 is finally coming out in Thailand this week. Usually films come out here when they’re released in the US, but there are odd cases such as this one where they release later. We happened to be at Central World on Saturday with a friend visiting from Sydney and saw they had a couple advance screenings of it on that very night so quickly grabbed some tickets for the last session.
The entire film is shot incredibly well. The special effects were seamlessly integrated and had I not known they weren’t using CG for the aliens I probably would have been thoroughly impressed with the animatronics/puppetry. The film serves as a huge fuck you to the film studios that canned the Halo film.
The entire beginning section of the film does a fantastic job of drawing parallels to existing society and the rest devolves into a spectacular series of bodies spontaneously exploding (not that I’m complaining at all). All of the questions you asked in the first 5 minutes of the film will still be with you at the end, along with a few new ones. The hook is made for the possibility of a sequel, but whether or not they’ll ever do a sequel is unknown.
The use of unknown actors has been a fantastic bonus for this and Inglorious Basterds. I’ve come to realise that I prefer watching films with actors I don’t know because I don’t have their previous roles muddying their current characters.
By Ben, on September 10th, 2009 This film has Quentin Tarantino written all over it and it was a lot of fun. The guy who played the ‘Jew Hunter’ was exceptional and I don’t even know who he was (yes, I could look it up on IMDB but I’m too lazy). You could tell he was having a lot of fun playing the role.
Brad Pitt was Brad Pitt and it honestly would have been so much better without him. He brought nothing in particular to the role, though I did like that he somehow thought his Italian was better than the rest of the team’s.
The thing I loved about the entire package was that for each scene you never quite knew what was going to happen and he did a good job of ratcheting up the tension, especially in the bar scene. In each scene you could never tell who the red-shirts would be, which is always a nice change. Of course, the gore was present throughout.
Edit: I’ve just now being wondering why it is I didn’t like Brad Pitt in this film and I think I may be onto something. In all of his roles (including this one) he is a constant and his character has no development at all, other than saying different lines. Nothing he does is nuanced. His characters act the same at the start, middle and end of every single film he’s been in. For most of his films that’s suited the role well, but I’m a bit tired of it myself.
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