Kotaku, with all the talent for hyperbole that they are known for, are reporting that there is a rumour that a third-installment of the System Shock franchise is in the works at EA. It will be interesting to see what they’re going to make of it, but I do have my doubts. Game design, like all software fields, has gods and wannabes. Good games are made by good people.
Personally, I’m currently looking forward to BioShock. (warning: link contains spoilers.)
So the family tried to go to the AMC in Kanata to watch X-Men 3. We did actually get to start to watch it, but about half an hour in the lights went up, and a theatre employee told us we had to evacuate the building.
We were asked to leave by one of the rear exits. When we got around to the side of the building we saw this:
The entire front of the building was cordoned off with crime tape and police were directing us away from the area.
(Apologies for the image quality — I just snapped a picture as I was walking by, in the hopes that I would not attract the attention of the constabulary.)
What I heard from someone in front of me (i.e. this is an unsubstantiated rumour) was that a suspicious package — a brief case(?) — had been found.
Update: According to The Citizen, it was a black briefcase with a black wire sticking out of it. The bomb squad “detonated” it around 23h00, but the article doesn’t indicate whether it was actually a bomb or not.
That’s it.
On a separate note, the current sweet spot for HDs is 250Gig, 16Meg ram cache, 7200rpm for $100.00. Unbelievable.
I had a chat with Todd this morning about the high-end game in WoW. Basically, I believe WoW is really two completely different games:
In any case, I’m not a big fan of the level 60 game in WoW. To me it feels like the rules changed just to keep the powergamers occupied. I realize that most MMO’s have this problem, and it’s not clear what they could do about it, other than release expansions. Here’s hoping that Burning Crusade gives me back the game I like to play for at least another 10 levels.
To preempt at least some of the flames: Yes, I know I can start a new character. Since I’ve played essentially every race/character class combination into the late teens — some into the late 40’s — and had characters on regular, rp and pvp servers, that’s starting to get old. I suspect I will start new characters in both of the races that come with BC, just to see the newbie area content, but given that it all funnels into the same stuff at around level 15, we’ll have to see how far I take them.
Anyway, here’s how the conversation with Todd went…
- Todd — 9:13
- Will you be joining us again tonight for another run on the Baron?
- McQ — 9:14
- Sadly, I will not. I am headed to the arts center to see the (second to) last performance by the current concert master.
- Todd — 9:15
- too bad… you realize that means the rogue leggings will drop
- McQ — 9:17
- absolutely. I am still not completely sold on the idea of doing “45 minute baron runs”. I would like to see all the content in the zone, but after about my third time through, I start to get bored. I really think that the WoW high end content is just for the uber-optimizing, power gamer crowd, and as I’ve said before, that’s really not my thing.
- Todd — 9:19
- the 45 minute baron run is for 1 quest. I understand that you are not keen on the repeated runs through an instance. I want the quest as I want the items that come from completing it. I try to think of it as a test of skill… can we complete it in the manner specified.
- McQ — 9:21
- yes, I get that. I believe what I was trying to say was a) I’m not particularly fussed about the gear I have, since what I’m already using works for everything I’ve done with it (and I’ll likely never get into a 40 man raid), and b) If I wanted a task of skill, I’d play Q3 Arena or Tetris. Having said that, I enjoy the social aspects of getting together on Thursdays.
- Todd — 9:22
- Well at least you are consistent
For some reason, the e-book community looks at Cory Doctorow’s use of free electronic versions of his books as loss leaders for his p-book versions as a success story.
As far as I can see, the fact that this actually works is proof that e-books are a failure. After all, if we were all regularly reading them, then giving away the electronic version would just be mean that Cory wasn’t getting paid. Since no one can make money of e-books anyway, of course you can give them away.
On my Windows box, it runs some funky “welcome screen” thing each time it wakes from the screensaver. I suppose that’s a feature, but what bugs me about it is if I click the “shutdown the computer” button, it says “There are people logged onto this computer. Do you really want to shut down.”
The thing is, there aren’t “people” logged on. There’s just one, and it’s me. So instead of checking who is logged on, noticing there’s only one, and saying “McQ is logged onto this computer…” so I can shutdown without stress, I end up worrying if someone has rshell’ed in from somewhere and is hacking my machine.
It’s a perfect example of the design ethic at Microsoft.
(Ok, so I’m slow, but I get there eventually.)
If you haven’t heard them yet, they’re definitely worth a listen. As always, here’s the best way to get a taste:
I solved my color noise problem.
The company called AKVIS makes a product called Noise Buster, which is a plug-in for Photoshop that removes color noise. The filtering it does is quite flexible, but it has a fully automatic mode as well. Here are a couple of images that provide an example of the results you can get by letting it choose the settings:
Take a look at Vicky’s blue shirt and the wall behind her in particular. As you can see, the before shot is filled with random colored dots, while the after shot is completely acceptable (or at least is good enough for me).
For some reason, one of the folders inside my Applications folder keeps getting hidden. I’m not sure why this happens, but I suspect it’s a side-effect of updating one of the standard applications that I use.
In case this happens to you, and you want to make a hidden file visible again, then the simplest way to do it is to do:
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v YourFileOrDirectory
Obviously, you must have the developer tools installed to have this command available.
I created a gallery of test photos with the new camera. Take a look at them here and tell me what you think. In the interest of making them vaguely more downloadable, I reduced them from 3072×2304 to 1280×1024, but that should still give you the right idea.
I’m not particularly happy with them, to tell you the truth. You would think having more megapixels would mean that the size of the dots of color noise would be smaller but that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. In all honesty, I think Deb’s 4 megapixel camera takes better shots.
Now I have to decide, whether I can live with that picture quality, or whether I should take it back to the store.
One other oddity: Take a look at the sheet music in this shot. Do you see the circular areas where it looks “smudged” on the right hand sheet? (There’s another one visible on the side of the grey filing cabinet.) Those areas are not in the original images! However, anything that displays or manipulates them on the Mac causes them to appear. If I use my PC to look at them instead, they’re gone. I can’t imagine what would cause that behavior, but it’s totally bogus.
