Well, I finally got my hands on Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. I’ve played it for a few days, and I have to say that right now, gameplay-wise, I consider it the best game since Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The fighting engine feels more like Mortal Kombat II than anything else, and not dealing with only dial-a-combos makes a nice change. I’m also liking the story mode; it’s not as flexible/non-linear as the Konquest modes from Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, but on the other hand the story is better (and does a decent job of explaining why the worlds are merging), and the voice acting is far better. (There’s also nothing as ridiculous as in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, where Baraka impales a monk through the chest and head, and tosses him to Liu Kang and Kung Lao, where Liu asks him if he’s all right.) I haven’t played much online, though, but I’ve been consistently getting my ass kicked. Obviously I need more practice. If I had one major gripe about the game, it’s the fact that in Freefall Kombat, if you build up the damage meter enough to do a super attack, if your opponent counters they have access to that full damage bar instead of starting over. It’s annoying. Now we just need for some DLC to come out for it…

Also, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (wow, that’s a mouthful) was released this week on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. I’ve already downloaded it and installed it. The game looks and sounds GREAT, and the controls seem to be good. I just don’t recall ever being this bloody BAD at the game. Even on the easy difficulty in single player, I started getting my ass beat after the third opponent or so. Maybe I’m just out of practice, but I don’t recall doing so poorly at this game. Either that or I just need a more appropriate controller. Ah, well… I’ll keep plugging away and practicing. I haven’t even tried to play online, nor will I unless I play someone I know.

I’ve also been playing some LEGO Batman. I have to admit, it’s a pretty cute game. I haven’t gotten to the point where I can unlock the villain chapters of the game, but I’ve been having fun so far. There’s just something innately quirky about playing as Batman and Robin in the form of LEGO characters… it’s got some definite comedy moments, but more of as a previously mentioned cute feel, and not the deadpan absurdity of the 1960’s TV series. I’m going to keep on with this, but so far I like it.

Finally, I leave you with something Maxim posted. I’ve met Hernan Sanchez at E3 before. If you don’t know who he is, you’ve probably heard him. He’s been the announcer for every Mortal Kombat fighting game since Mortal Kombat 4. Well, Maxim got him to come by and do some more announcer-type phrases, but not the kind you would normally hear in a Mortal Kombat game…

I realize I haven’t posted in a while. Really, it’s because I really haven’t had much to talk about on this front. Things have been more or less the same old same old, so there hasn’t been much to post about. Still, it’s been more or less an interesting week for me… not always in a good way, though.

This past weekend, for example, would have been rather uneventful except for one slight problem: the hard drive in Mom’s laptop decided to die on her. Fortunately there was very little actual data loss outside of programs and bookmarks; her documents and mail were actually stored on the server. It was also fortunate that getting access to the actual hard drive in the laptop was pretty simple. We ordered a new drive from Newegg, and once it came in, I got to work reinstalling from the restore CDs and downloading the essentials for her laptop. The only questionable part was MS Office; all she had were Word 97 and Excel 97. She wanted something more up to date, but didn’t want to actually PAY for MS Office. I went ahead and downloaded OpenOffice.org for her, and if she doesn’t like I’ll switch her to something else a bit later down the road. Otherwise, her machine is pretty much up and running now.

I also got put on the spot, so to speak, on Wednesday evening. I needed to deliver a laptop to one of my coworkers who was in town from Houma. She and another coworker told me they were eating at the Cheesecake Factory for dinner and that I was welcome to join them so that I could drop off the laptop. So, I joined them and ended up talking shop for a while. For a change, I had the seared tuna tataki salad, which was damn good. Tiff and Tashia got salads as well, and were understandably shocked by the size of them. A woman at the table next to us asked Tiff what her salad was, and she replied, “The luau salad. Want half of it?” At the end of the meal, when the waitress asked us if we wanted to see the dessert menu, I said I was going to have the low carb cheesecake. Tiff piped up with, “It’s his birthday. He can have whatever he wants.” In retrospect I should have seen it coming, but a few minutes later the waitress came back with another one, and had my cheesecake slice… with a candle on it. They, Tiff, and Tashia then proceeded to sing “Happy Birthday” to me. I swear I’ll get Tiff for that one…

As for this weekend, well… in a couple of hours I’ll be going out to meet Dave and Louie for lunch, gaming, dinner, drinks, and the usual types of fun. As for tomorrow, I’ve got work stuff to do during the day, and then during the evening Mom and Dad are taking me to PF Chang’s for my birthday dinner. I hadn’t planned on doing anything yesterday, but late last night Sean and Jinny invited me out for coffee, and I joined them over at Denny’s. (In retrospect, I should have stuck with the coffee. The food’s not agreeing too much with my stomach.)

Ah, well… it should be a good weekend, all told.

Well, I finally took the time to get my main PC operational this weekend. Unfortunately, I did have a delay in that the Windows XP Professional CD I made was slightly defective. I ended up needing to create a new CD, and only then did the install work properly. I spent most of Saturday reinstalling the operating system, drivers, and applications. That of course excludes games; I figure I’ll install the games on an as-needed basis. About the only program I didn’t install was WindowBlinds, and that was because I mainly used that for putting a black theme on my desktop. Finding the Royal Noir theme made it unnecessary. Of course, now I have Sinc asking me if I want to play Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath. I don’t even HAVE the game yet… heh. Still, all in all, I’m getting more or less back to normal. I’ve even managed to pull my movies off of the iPod.

The funny thing is that I’m not entirely sure the “dead” 320 GB SATA hard drive that I pulled out of the PC is actually dead. I think the two drives may have become desynched, though I don’t know for certain. What I’ll probably end up doing is buying an external enclosure for the drive and use it as an external drive with the main PC. If it doesn’t work, well, I can go buy a new drive easily enough.

On the other hand, I apparently did something foolish with the PowerBook. While the main PC was offline I was using it as my main computer, and had it on almost a week 24/7. I put it in sleep mode while I was at work the last couple of days, but apparently the damage was done. On Friday, I noticed that the video was corrupted. I turned the PowerBook off and let it rest overnight, but it didn’t help. The video chipset is apparently FUBARed, with lots of corruption and artifacting going on. *sigh* It’s a shame, because that laptop has served me extremely well for over five years. Unfortunately, I can’t justify the cost of a new MacBook, as I still use my work laptop for anything work related and take that with me on most trips (as it has the VPN software to connect to the office and has a built-in cellular broadband card). That’s especially annoying as I used the PowerBook for video editing. Then again, I only did video editing when out at events for Mortal Kombat Online. *sigh* I’m sure I’ll think of something, though.

Ah, well. At least my main PC is pretty much operational. I’ll deal with any other problems as they come.

http://kotaku.com/5062303/invade-stormwind-you-and-what-arm++-oh-that-one

When you can’t convince 35 other people of your master plan to attack two Alliance capital cities, you really only have one alternative: Do it yourself. “Bradster” does. He owns that rig above — 11 computers that run 36 World of WarCraft account simultaneously. His infrastructure costs (to say nothing of his utility bill) weren’t itemized, but he unashamedly admits he pays $5,711 per year in subscription fees to keep together his one-man raiding party (family photo of that on the jump).

The more I look at that pic, the sadder it seems. For example, the majority of machines shown in the pic are laptops. They’re most likely not low-end laptops, either, because each appears to be running a minimum of two instances of World of WarCraft. In addition, the mice are actually medium-to-higher-end trackballs, and not the kind of mice you’d get by default with PCs. Also, not only is the internet bill going to be insane (due to the needed bandwidth for thirty-six concurrent sessions), the electricity bill has to be pretty nuts too. I’m not talking about just the power needed to run those machines. I’m also talking about the power needed for the A/C to keep that room at a bearable temperature. Speaking as someone who’s been in a room full of computers running off of standard A/C, it tends to get pretty hot pretty damn quickly.

Normally I wouldn’t begrudge someone their hobby, but at this cost, this just screams “overkill” to me. I keep thinking that at this amount of money, it’d be much better spent travelling the REAL world instead of getting yourself lost in a virtual world.

Well, I know I said in my previous post that I was going to do a post that night. I lied. I’ve been tied up with a bunch of different stuff and haven’t had the chance (or inclination) to do a post. I’m rectifying that now, of course.

All in all, we were without power for a few hours short of two weeks. By the end of that time, we were about at the end of our ropes. Fortunately my friend Josh had a coworker who needed to sell his generator, so my parents got a bit of relief. For me, my relief came when I had to travel to Oklahoma City on business. My trip there was more or less uneventful, though I did get to meet up with Jeff and Malinda. Thursday night we had dinner at Victoria’s, which was a local Italian restaurant on the campus of OU. On Friday night, Malinda cooked dinner at their house, and then the three of us and their friend Karen played a boardgame called Twilight Imperium. Twilight Imperium was fun, and I did a lot better at it than I expected. The game lasted until 2 AM, and the fact that Jeff won at the end was a fluke; we had agreed to end then anyway because we were getting tired. Malinda for one was probably glad we ended at that point, as my space fleet was getting pretty massive and was lining up on her borders for a probable invasion. The game also got me more interested in the 4X genre of gaming; I may give it a try sometime in the near future.

However, when I got home, I suffered a couple of setbacks. The first setback was relatively minor. Apparently my car’s toll tag will not work for airport parking. When I tried to leave the economy lot, none of the gates would open for my car. What struck me as odd was that the lot let me in without needing to get a ticket, as if the tag reader had read my tag. I ended up paying the tag in cash. However, the really weird thing was that when I called the county toll road authority, they were stumped too. My tag is activated for airport parking, and they confirmed that the standard toll booths are reading my tag. If this keeps up, I may need to get a new tag.

The other setback was more serious. I got home from the airport and switched on my main PC, only to find that the two week long downtime had killed one of my two SATA hard drives. The problem is that I had the drives in RAID 0, which meant the data was striped between the two drives so they appeared as one large drive. In other words, I lost one drive but also lost the data in both. Fortunately, the only data I didn’t have backed up are the movies on my iPod, and I’ve found a way to get the movies off it. Still, it’ll be an annoyance, as once the replacement hard drive arrives, I’ll have to reinstall Windows XP and all of my applications again. Joy. That’ll probably happen this weekend. In the meantime, I’m using my PowerBook as my main workstation at the house.

Ah, well. As far as the rest of this week goes, I’m just going to catch up on work and make sure everything that needs to get done gets done. I’ve also been catching back up on the evening exercise missed thanks to the lack of power for two weeks. Otherwise, it’s back to the same old grind. Fun fun…

It’s officially day nine without power. According to the maps CenterPoint has drawn up concerning restoration of power, our area is not promised to have power back before tomorrow. As some of you might imagine, I’ve been more or less going insane without power here. I’ve taken a few steps to mitigate the misery, as it were, but it’s all I can do at this point.

For example, as stated before, I’ve moved the darquecathedral.org servers to the office so that I and others wouldn’t lose mail. I think stuff sent Saturday or Sunday may have been lost anyway, but this was the best I could do. Unfortunately, AT&T’s cellular service’s DNS servers have the hostnames for my server cached, so the servers are inaccessible in some ways. The main website is inconsistently available. My mail services, on the other hand, are ALWAYS stuck on the old IP, so I can’t check my mail from my iPhone, nor can Sean check his from his Blackberry. It’s rather frustrating, as you might imagine.

I’ve also been using my iPhone for Internet usage more and more. I had given myself an hour or so of net time on my work laptop a night, seeing as it has a built-in cell broadband card. I’ve already just about exhausted the battery this weekend, so now I’m using the iPhone. Its web browser is very usable, I have AIM installed for instant messaging, and I downloaded and installed TouchTerm last night so that I could have SSH capability. The only disadvantage (other than the soft keyboard) is that I can only use one app at a time. It’s annoying, but not something that I can’t stand. Then again, unlike the laptop, I have access to a car charger for the iPhone.

Ah, well. It also helps when I have all those movies loaded into my iPod. I watched Enter the Dragon last night, and might watch either Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children or Krull tonight, provided power doesn’t come back on. I’ll just have to remember to charge the iPod this afternoon too.

Ah, well. I’m surviving here. I’m just glad that I’ll get a respite from this sooner or later.

This is a wonderful way to start a Sunday morning.

I have three servers here at the house. One is the main server that hosts my (and others’) websites and email. One is my DNS server. The third is a test server I use for various projects. I knew the secondary hard drive on the test server was going bad and needed to be replaced, but I didn’t realize how bad off the server was until this morning. I had noticed that I hadn’t gotten a system status email from it in a day or two, so I decided to check on it. The system wasn’t responding to keyboard input and the screen was blank (I don’t run a GUI on my servers), so I forcibly powered the server down, and then powered it back up.

It responded by giving a series of long beeps. Crap.

I’m going to have to buy a new server or salvage an older machine and get it operational. I have a couple of projects coming up that will require that server to be up and running, so having it die on me now is not a good thing. I’ll probably snag a replacement machine later this week. For now, though, I’m just going to work around it until such time as the replacement is operational.

Late Friday night, my friend Josh alerted me to the fact that Team Fortress 2 was available to play for free through Steam this weekend. I hadn’t taken the time to play it before, so I went ahead and downloaded it. Last night, after consulting with Josh on a couple of servers to try, I went ahead and played it for a couple of hours.

Damn, that was fun.

The end result was that this afternoon I bit the bullet and bought the game off Steam. It definitely makes for a good game for releasing pent-up frustration. I have to say that this may end up being my PC game of choice for a while, as well as Quake Live… as soon as that one is released, that is. (I signed up for the beta and didn’t get accepted. Damn.)

However, Team Fortress 2 may very well be my final PC game purchase. I had also considered purchasing Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, as I know Sinc will likely get it and would be playing it online. However, I was looking at the released technical specs for the Windows version of the game, and on the ATI side of video cards, the minimum card supported is the X1800. My main PC has an X800. In other words, I would need to upgrade the video card in order to play the game on my PC.

I’m not doing that again. I have an Xbox 360, and the game is coming out for it as well. I’m tired of the constant upgrade cycle needed for a PC to be, well, competitive in the gaming scene. It’s sad but true: consoles have a slower cycle time and cost less to boot. Not only that, my 360 is on a better gaming setup, so to speak: I have it plugged into a 27″ LCD HDTV and a Dolby 5.1 surround sound system. I’d rather play on that than on the PC’s 19″ LCD monitor and 2.1 speaker setup.

So, here I am. I used to do PC gaming, but I’ve pretty much migrated over to console gaming. I knew this day would come, but I’m not really feeling bad about it. In the long run it’ll cost me less and be less headache. By less headache, I mean dealing with building and upgrading machines. It’s a pain in the ass and I’m happy to be done with it… if only until such time as I do need to rebuild a machine. Being able to play the latest games isn’t a “need” situation.

We’ll see how it goes.

Well, it was bound to happen.

At the office, we’re in the process of testing the iPhone for possible inclusion into our corporate environment. A few employees like the system administrator, the network administrator, and the CIO already have iPhones. Yesterday, the boss (CIO) decided to assign the last of the spare devices (a 16 GB iPhone 3G) to me. I’ve had it for about 24 hours now, and am getting a handle on it.

So, what do I think, you might ask? The answer is complicated, as you might imagine.

As far as email goes, it’s a damn nice device. The Exchange support seems to be working fine, and I’ve also got it linked to my Gmail and personal “professional” account. The latter is the real big thing, as Windows Mobile (what my previous three phones ran) didn’t support the IMAP specification correctly. What it meant for me was that those phones couldn’t see the right folders for drafts and sent items. This phone implements the IMAP specification much better, and actually works much better for it. I’ll end up setting my personal email and my MK Online email accounts on them later this weekend.

The interface on the device is damn nice, too. It’s very intuitive and easy to use, and looks slick to boot. Say what you want about Apple, but the one thing they seem to consistently get right is making user interfaces that are intuitive, easy to use, and powerful. I haven’t had any issues with finding stuff and information on the device, and have already loaded a couple of extra applications onto it. I’ll probably end up loading Apple’s Texas Hold Em on it at some point, too, but that may end up waiting until my next trip out of town. I’d considered loading Galaga and Pac-Man on it (which are my cell phone mainstays), but I’m a bit hesitant about spending $10 each on them. Buying and loading apps is dead simple too, thanks to both the iTunes Store and the built-in app store on the phone.

So, what problems DO I have, you may ask? I have two problems right now… one minor and one major. The minor problem isn’t even really Apple’s fault. I loaded the official AIM client onto the iPhone and attempted to sign in through it. It wouldn’t accept my screen name and password. I’ve done some troubleshooting and learned what I think the problem is. I seem to vaguely remember having to change my AOL password some years back but I have no idea what it could be. I can sign into AIM using unofficial clients like Pidgin and the IM client that came with the AT&T Tilt using my old password. However, official clients like the AIM program for iPhone and AIM Express won’t allow me to sign in. I’ll have to talk to Mom for help; my AIM screen name was originally a sub-account of her AOL account, which is still active. We’ll need to talk to AOL and get it reset.

The major problem is the one that REALLY irks me. As I found out the hard way, ever since the 2.0 software was released, the iPhone will not work properly with uConnect, which is the in-car Bluetooth system used by Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep vehicles. They’ll pair, but won’t communicate outside of that. That annoys the living hell out of me, as I use the Bluetooth in my car extensively. It’s a known problem, as a lot of people are commenting on it on Apple’s discussion forums. Until a fix is provided by either Apple or Dodge, however, I’ll have to start wearing my Plantronics Bluetooth earpiece in the car again. I’m sure as HELL not going to talk on the phone while holding the actual device when driving.

All in all, it’s a pretty nice device. Hopefully the uConnect issue will be fixed soon, and once that’s taken care of my main issue with the device will go away. We’ll see how it goes.

http://kotaku.com/397395/blizzard-announces-diablo-iii

Well it’s official folks! You can all scream like little girls and then pass out from complete exhaustion as Blizzard officially announces Diablo III at the 2008 Worldwide Invitational. Mike Morhaime told the audience at the opening ceremonies that they had a special announcement to make, the lights dimmed, and a guitar player took the stage, playing the unmistakable opening strains of the Diablo overworld theme. A trailer played, and Jay Wilson, lead designer of the game took the stage…to demo the game.

Interesting… so now Blizzard has upcoming games based on their two other big franchises (other meaning “other than Warcraft“). I was already planning on picking up StarCraft II when it comes out; I guess I can add this one to the queue as well. No matter… knowing Blizzard, it’ll be a while before either game is released.