This is Tiresome

Just posting this to say, I’m leaving WordPress. Nothing against the software, I just think it’s pointless to have a second blog. Instead of this blog, I will be posting in my other blog, Tentative Name. Head on over there and have a read. I just feel that having a blog to do bantering and talk about my life (which we all know no one is interested in) is pointless. And besides, I’m coming to like Habari a lot. WordPress has a lot of features, but this interface is a clusterfuck.

Call of Duty: World at War != Call of Duty 5

I have been really annoyed lately that everyone has been calling CoD: WaW “CoD5.” World at War IS NOT Call of Duty 5.  Several articles have been referring to it as CoD5, and it’s quite annoying. At least learn enough about the game to refer to it by its proper name.

First off, unless a game is referred to by developers, or the number is specifically in the title of the game, it is not the next increment of the series.

I am not making this up either, the developers of CoD: WaW said that the title “Call of Duty 5″ could be used for another game in the series, as their game is not tied with a number.

Video with interview here.

Alright, I’m done now. CoD: WaW is really fun by the way. Definitely worth a buy.

NOTE: The token “!=” is syntax from the C Programming language that means “not equal to.”

DigiPen Experience: Update 2

Update:

Hey! I actually have something to say. Well, not really the lack of something to say, just the time to say it. So much has been going on as of late.

Math:
Hell of a lot easier now that my brother is tutoring me. My math teacher leaves you more confused, if anything else, when you leave.  We’re on to matrices now.

Programming:
My C programming class is a piece of cake. Mostly learning the language. Real easy sauce.

CS100:
I like to call this class “electronics” for some reason. Anyhow, this class is teaching us Assembly. More specifically PIC Assembly. In this class we are currently using a board that uses the PIC18F452 microcontroller. With said board, we must get it to make noise on a speaker with certain periods and pulse widths depending on which button we push. Next week we will start working on our autonomous cars, which also use the PIC18F452 microcontroller. Basically we have to get the car to navigate an obstacle course using the on-board sensors to detect said obstacles. Easy right?

Game:
In my game class we are going to make a game using the ProjectFUN engine. Don’t ask about it, because you don’t want to know. It’s not very good and riddled with bugs, but it works for the most part. If you must know about ProjectFUN, go here. I’m going to attempt to make a momentum based platformer.

I also hope that this explains some of my absence.

Summary: Awesome, but I’m really tired … a lot.

Azathoth Got Owned

Played some Arkham Horror over at my buddy Cal’s place. Me, Cal, and two other friends played with no expansions against Azethoth. In case you didn’t know, if Azathoth wakes up, you instantly lose the game. Unlike the other Ancient Ones in the game, you don’t get a chance to fight him. You just lose. We, however, were able to win without him waking up! I feel so awesome right now. :Þ

Also, I have posted my first tutorial on my other dev-style blog. Head on over to Tentative Name and check it out.

DigiPen Experience: Weeks 1-3

As some of you may know, I am now a student at DigiPen: Institute of Technology.

PDF with full class descriptions can be found here.

Week 1:
Was bloody awesome! To put it shortly. To start, here are the classes I am taking:

CS100 Computer Environment – Teaches us about how the computer actually works.
CS120 High-Level Programming I – The C Programming Language – Pretty self explanatory.
GAM100 Project Introduction – Learning how to do game projects and learn about how the industry “works.”
MAT140 Linear Algebra and Geometry – Goes over some Calculus and Trigonometry as well.
ART210 Art Appreciation – As the title says. Not a very good class though.

Aside from ART210, my week was an incredibly awesome experience. Unlike my community college teachers, every one of the teachers I’ve encountered at DigiPen comes across as very intelligent. My CS100 teacher is pretty cool too. He grew up in Lebanon and English is his third language. My week was going great. I loved the 4 out of my 5 classes that I took. Then Thursday comes around. A lot of people were falling asleep in ART210. The teacher reminded me a lot of my community college teachers. In short, the class is what you make of it. Personally, I’m going to find something to do while listening to what the teacher says. I was getting really tired in the class.

Summary: DigiPen is awesome. :Þ

Weeks 2-3:

Kind of flew by. Nothing particularly spectacular happened. Linear Algebra/Geometry/Trigonometry is really hard. Especially since I haven’t really taken a pre-calc course. After reviewing pre-calc material on the internet, I pretty much know it, it’s just the trig and geometry that’s really killing me.

Nothing much to say about those weeks. It’s the second day of Week 4 now and my CS100 class just got a lot more awesome. We’re actually creating real electronic circuits now.

Tentative Name

I’ve been learning how to set up a webserver as of late, and I figured I give a quick mention as to one of the many things I have done.

I have set up an open-source blogging software on my webserver called Habari. The blog I have set up is called Tentative Name. This blog will be more oriented towards posting useful tips/tricks/tutorials that I find useful. I will also post information about any cool projects I am currently working on. I will still be keeping this blog for personal stuff.

It’s Been A While

Well, it has been a while since I last posted. And believe me, a lot has happened.

To start, a lot of shit has been going down at work and a few really awesome co-workers of mine have had to leave. I’d describe what’s going on, but I don’t want to risk losing my job and avoid any of the other possible consequences. So I will keep quiet for now.

So, I re-discovered the awesomeness of Arkham Horror while I was at my good friend Cal’s house last night. The game is really complicated for a boardgame. Even though I’ve never played D&D, I say Arkham Horror is like a smaller scale D&D in boardgame form. Whether that is a good comparison though is beyond me. Since the rulebook is quite complicated to read, I’ve been writing a less wordy version of the rules. I’ve also re-ordered what I can to follow the flow of the game. However, this is the game rules without any of the 3 currently available expansions. I am going to buy the released expansions as soon as I update my finincial records. :Þ

Anime news! Well, I’m sure I’ve watched a lot more than three shows since I last talked about anime, but I’ll just write about what I’ve recently watched. First off, I finished watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Was bloody amazing. I recommend it to any anime watcher. After that I watched a show called Myself; Yourself. It’s a school anime. It’s a decent show. They actually develop all the main characters. So you know all eight of the protagonists backstories, so you understand why they feel the way they do and why they take certain courses of action. And finally, I just finished watching today, KimiKiss Pure Rouge. Sweet mother of all things holy is this show awesome. I loved everything about the show. The drawing style was great, the story was amazing, and, well, everything about it is awesome. I HIGHLY recommend this show. I’m just sad that there isn’t more made/being made. It was just finished this year, so there might be more to come. To see a nearly complete list of all the anime I have watched, check out my profile at My Anime List.

Ah yes, I almost forgot two of the most important events that have happend over the months. The first is the acquisition of a laptop. I bought a nice Dell laptop for $670. Here are the specs:

Dell Studio 1535
15.4″ display Res: 1280×800
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5750 (2.00GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)
3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2
320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450
Dell 1510 Wireless-N Card
Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition SP1

Of course, I have ditched Vista and installed XP. It was difficult to find XP drivers for this laptop, since Dell doesn’t officially support XP on this model. I have archived all the drivers for this laptop model on my computer, so if anyone acquires this model and wishes to install XP, just ask and I’ll send you the files.

Now, the second piece of big news is … that I have been accepted into the DigiPen Institute of Technology! My good friend Game Mogul and his girlfriend helped me out a lot with proofreading my personal statement and giving me lots of inside information. The result was a phone call with a very nice lady who said that I was accepted! Classes start this Tuesday! One of the things I learned from this experience was, always get a second opinion. The first guy I talked to basically said I had no chance of getting in because I didn’t take a pre-calculus class. I thought this was strange because their website do not say that having pre-calc on your transcript was required to get in. There was also another situation that could hinder me getting in, but I won’t talk about that, as it is unimportant. So, I decided to come back a couple days later. Originally I was going to the Open House after work on Friday, but it turned out that it was a special one that ended at 3PM. Normally they start at 4PM. So, I basically got another one-on-one session with a very nice lady. She was much more informative than the guy I had talked to previously. She basically said almost the exact opposite of the last person. With my newfound hope, I submitted all my material and got in! So, in short get a second opinion if the first one isn’t a good one.

I’m actually playing Power Grid whilst writing this. I really should be paying more attention to what’s going on. So, until next time.

PS: I will post my re-written rules for Arkham Horror when I finish them. Also, should you need website consulting, development, or marketing services, you should check out my buddy Cal’s business website.

Pictures and Video!

NOTE: Since I took these pictures I have replaced SotA (Server of the Ancients) with a much more powerful one. And even that one is going to be replaced very soon. However, I’ll post the pictures anyways. Click on the images for the full sized ones.

Below is a link to a video I made to show Widdershins what I had salvaged. For some reason the video wouldn’t encode with audio, so you’ll have to make do without it.

And now, onto the pictures.

The first one here is a picture of my main desktop (left) next to SotA (right). And my Wii is in there also. And if you look to the left of my main desktop you’ll see the box for Assassin’s Creed, which crashed numerous times (around 20 – 30 times) before I beat it.

Next we see a side view of SotA.

Another view of SotA from a different angle.

And now, I will post images of my main desktop. NOTE: Since I took these images, I have added a fourth hard drive. It is a 1TB Seagate drive. Linky.
I like having disk space. :Þ

And there’s my baby. Yes, she is quite dusty. For rough specs, it has 2GB of RAM, an eVGA nVidia 8800GT, and an AMD Athlon X2 6000+. It’s late at night and I’m too lazy to look up the exact specs right now.

Now, onto pics of the TV I acquired.

This first shot is a full shot of the TV and roller stand-thingy.

This second shot is a closer look at the storage area underneath. In case you’re wondering, the bag in the back is a Wii carrying case.

And now a closer look at my SNES games. Do note that I have both the SNES Battletoads games, which are awesome. Just in case you were wondering.

Now a closer look at the other side, which houses my PS2 games and whatever anime I am currently watching that is not downloaded. At the time I was finishing up Last Exile.

Since this is an old RF TV, I had to buy a signal converter. For $10, it’s a pretty damn good unit.

And there you have it. Expect more news soon! … maybe.

So … Tired

Just a quick post to say, I’m not dead. I’m just really tired. I got my old job back at Nintendo (aka the big N). I’ve just been really tired after work lately. I’ve been coming home and I fall asleep an hour later. Maybe I’ll write something on the weekend.

Moving Onward!

Okay, well, I’m gonna get back to my original way of things. I wish there was a Widget for Polls. So I could ask random questions and get answers from people without them needing to leave comments. I was considering doing audio versions, or at least portions, of my posts.

Anyhow, on to progress! This time I have game progress! I’ve been playing a crapload of games lately. Well, maybe not a crapload, but I’ve spent a lot of times on games as of late. On the PC front, I played through Mass Effect, and man is that game awesome. I looks great and runs smooth. Now I gotta play through with a Renegade character. The only gameplay problems with Mass Effect is the sometimes lengthy elevators and slow running speed in non-combat. For non-gameplay problems, the game would randomly crash the first two days I played it. After a while it stopped crashing. Very strange. I have now moved on to playing Assassin’s Creed. While it’s not as hi-res as most other modern day games, it’s still looks pretty good. It’s enough to be called “next-gen” and still run fast on most machines. The HumanIK Middleware used for the “freestyling”, or more formerly called “parkour”, is amazing. Very fluid. I would love to see what other developers could do with this technology. Sad to say, I would be enjoying this game more if it wasn’t for the PC version being really unstable. It crashes randomly every 15 – 30 minutes and doesn’t give any error reports (kind of like it was just closing). As I write this, I have launched the game four times and have only been able to climb one tower and synchronize pat of the map. The game has successfully BSODed my computer three times, at least I’m assuming three. The first and third time I was actually there, the second time I was downstairs getting food and when I came back up my computer was in the boot cycle. I’ve heard random crap about how you have to underclock your video card to fix it, but that’s pure bullshit (Not that I’ve tried underclocking it. The concept of that being a fix makes no sense.). Hopefully Ubisoft will put out a patch sometime soon to fix this. If not, I’m gonna be taking twice as long to beat this game. Well then, out of spite I did a NoDVD crack on the game. The game still crashes, but at least now it handles it properly. Well, after playing the game for a week, it is now running much more stable. Strange.

On top of Assassin’s Creed, I am also playing GrimGrimoire for the PS2, now that my new TV is all hooked up and ready to go. GrimGrimoire is a very enjoyable RTS game. It’s not a conventional top-down view, but a side view. The art and animation are amazing. I really love the style style of Vanillaware’s art team. GrimGrimoire and Odin Sphere are two games any PS2 owner should get. Speaking of which, from what I hear, both those games are pretty hard to find. So I’m glad I was able to get GrimGrimoire cheap on eBay.

I have now acquired the old Panasonic RF TV from the room my brother is staying in. Since the only input to the TV is RF, I had to buy a Composite adapter. So I got this puppy from Newegg.com. It’s pretty spiffy. Like, it only powers on when it is receiving a signal. Albeit, it does take some power to detect whether it is receiving a signal, but that’s just arguing semantics.

For anime related news, I finished watching Saikano. The idea of a schoolgirl being turned into the ultimate weapon by the military is highly unrealistic, but it gets much better as the show goes on. While the setting is unrealistic, the way it portrays how reality sets in in war stricken cities is done very well. A couple weeks ago I spent the night at Widder’s place and we watch some Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I gotta say, it’s pretty awesome. I’ve only seen the first 3 episodes, but it was very entertaining. I also watched one episode of Welcome to the NHK!, which was also very entertaining. To top the day off we watched Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo. To that, I’m just gonna say, watch it. Watch it, and love it. I am currently watching Last Exile, currently on episode 10.

I have currently set up what I have dubbed “The Server of the Ancients”. It is a computer that is made up of ancient parts that I salvaged together from computers that my school was giving away. Here are the system specs:

Operating System:
Windows 2000 Advanced Server

Hardware:
Unknown Motherboard
Unknown Power Supply
Pentium III 600Mhz Processor
128mb of RAM (brand unknown)
ATI RageXL PCI Graphics Card
Western Digital 10GB Hard Drive

Now that is what I call old school. I am currently hosting Natural Selection on it right now. My school was giving out a huge stack of REALLY old laptops, but I waited too long and didn’t have a chance to get to look at them. I would have loved to slap MS-DOS on them or something.

Speaking of Natural Selection. I am currently stress testing the server to see how much it can handle. So join my NS server! Just put ckushhhia.kicks-ass.net into your server browser and enjoy! You can report any findings or bad players to ckushhhia@gmail.com or post on the forums!

Well, I’m out of things to say now. Currently trying to install Exchange Server 2003 on the old beast. Anyhow, some pics and hopefully a video of the computer will come soon. Man I’m tired. Enjoy.