SpaceRodent

I finished Shadow Complex last night. For those of you who don’t know Shadow Complex is a 2D Platformer in 3D that uses the Unreal Engine. It’s for the Xbox 360 and available via Xbox Live Arcade. It took me about 10 hours to finish it over three days on normal level.

This is the only game I can remember in a long time that as soon as I finished it I wanted to play it again! Luckily the game rewards this. When you start another game you continue at the level you finished at.

For my second play through I am playing on hardcore level. I am also striving for 100% completion. I had 68% completion on my first play through.

The game costs 1200 points which is about $15. The download size is 800MB. I guess the original 200MB limit is no more.

So if you have a Xbox 360 do yourself a favor and play this game!

My Favorite Machintosh Applications. In no particular order.

• Witch

  The task switcher that should have come with OSX.
  
  http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

• Path Finder

  Norton Commander for the modern age.
  
  http://www.cocoatech.com/

• Transmit/Candybar/Coda/Unison

  File transfer (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3), Icon management, Web development, News reader.
  
  http://www.panic.com/

• Adium

  Multiple IM provider.
  
  http://adium.im/

• OmniGraffle Professional

  Visio done right.
  
  http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

• Yojimbo

  Data management. Passwords, Notes, URLs – all at your finger tips.
  
  http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

• MacPorts

  Source based package managment system for OSX. Bringing a huge variety of UNIX/LINUX applications to the Mac.
  
  http://www.macports.org/

• Versions

  A beautiful Subversion client.
  
  http://versionsapp.com/

• VoodooPad Pro

  Personal Wiki with the ability to share on the network.
  
  http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/voodoopadpro.html

• Acorn

  Photoshop-lite.
  
  http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

• Scrivener

  Great note taking and thought organization. Virtual index cards.
  
  http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

• Snak

  IRC Client.
  
  http://www.snak.com/

• Marsedit

  Blog posting. I wrote this post in it.
  
  http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

• Disco

  Simple, fun CD burning.
  
  http://www.discoapp.com/

Well I did it. I quit Facebook today. Some of reasons are trite and some are well reasoned.

Let me first say that I like all my friends and love to hang out with them in the real world. Being connected to them on Facebook wasn’t really real to me. I didn’t feel any closer to them. I didn’t feel like I didn’t need to see them because we are connected on Facebook.

I also didn’t really care what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong I like my friends and am glad I have them but I don’t really want to know the minutia of their lives. When I finally do see them or talk to them there is nothing to say because I know everything!

From my perspective most folks were more interested in playing Mafia Wars and other games like it, taking quizzes or promoting their latest cause.

Things I am interested in:

• Marriages
• Divorces
• New Babies
• New Jobs
• New addresses, phone numbers and email addresses

Other than the list above; I just don’t care. Facebook did give me the above information but lost in a sea of crap.

Some of you might call me a hypocrite because I have a blog and I can accept that however I blog for myself; not caring if anyone else reads it. I think of my blog as a journal or diary. Something to look back on in the future and reflect.

Finally I am not saying Facebook is bad for everyone – just bad for me.

Today marked the third time I attempted to use the Facebook iPhone app to comment on someone else’s status only to have it fail due to an error and loose my comment.

Golden rule: Don’t lose data!

So I deleted it today. Not worth putting energy into it only to see it flushed. At the very least it should keep the comment around in some sort of draft state so it can be dealt with later but to just lose it is ridiculous.

I am very close to closing my Facebook account anyway since I get no value out of it at all. Zero.

I upgraded my Windows Vista Ultimate game system to Windows 7 Ultimate this weekend. Overall the system feels faster and I like the new taskbar. I really like the “snaps” feature that allows you easily tile two windows together.

What I didn’t like was they took away the Aurora screen saver – it was my favorite of any platform. Luckily I found it online.

My CPU doesn’t support hardware virtulization so I can’t run XP mode; oh well.

The upgrade took about four hours.

I have a Brother laser printer and it recently quit working. I tried everything I could but it just would not print. It was also just a week outside the one year warranty so I thought I was screwed.

I avoided calling tech. support because I have never had luck with it. I am a Linux System Administrator and self-confessed geek. I can certainly fix my own stuff! (XBOX 360 RROD not withstanding).

Well I am working from home today and finally decided to call and go through the process. I had too because I was considering buying another printer and wanted to make sure I explored all my options.

So I call and was talking to a human at Brother in about three minutes after telling the computer what model I had.

The nice lady had me turn off my firewall and print out the general settings. She asked me about one line on the sheet and I told her what it said. She then instructed me to the printer and changed that one setting.

All of a sudden my printer came to life spitting out test documents I had been throwing at it for the last hour.

Turns out somehow my printer got set to only listen to print requests on the parallel port and ignore the others. She just had me set it back to AUTO and all was well.

Total call time: seven minutes.

So not only am I relieved that my printer is working and I don’t have to buy another one but I am really happy I had such a great tech. support experience with Brother; makes me glad I chose them.

So sometimes the old dog can learn new tricks and sometimes tech. support can come through.

Tech Support: 1, Me: 0.

So today I removed some 50 Facebook friends and deleted my Twitter account. Feels good to reclaim my social graph. Honestly I only want to be connected to people I really care about and not people who are more of acquaintances. I will keep all my Linked in contacts because that is a perfect service for business type relationships.

So the other night I was playing Fallout 3 and the graphics started getting weird. There were red vertical bands where shading would be and when I went into VATS mode the highlighted body parts looked like TV static. I thought I would power cycle my XBOX and hopefully that would clear the problem – wrong!

Came back up with an error E74.

So I bought a new one last night and will ship the broken one off to Microsoft to get repaired.

Once I get it back I will sell it on craigslist.

So I have been hearing for years that this was one of the hardest movies to watch, a real horror show as Alex DeLarge would say. Well I finally watched it tonight and thought it was totally tame and stupid. The actors are not convincing and the music is horrible. I just don’t get what the big deal is.

I must be completely desensitized…wait, I am not the only one:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068833/board/nest/133875876?d=133875876&p=1#133875876

Movies that, for me, were harder to watch (but I still liked!):

• The Devil’s Rejects
• KatieBird *Certifiable Crazy Person
• Hellraiser
• High Tension

So over the weekend I got Duels of the Planeswalkers for the XBOX 360. I played Magic the Gathering a lot when it first came out. When I started playing “The Dark” expansion had just been released so I consider myself an old school player. I am rusty though and have been getting my butt kicked all weekend on Live. Tonight finally I am about to win my first ranked match and am feeling good when the host drops. Nice. Instead of loosing a match fair and square and affecting their rank they drop. I don’t know if this breed of jerk has a name so I am going to call them “live droppers”. I think they deserve their own level in hell right below traitors.

By the way the game is excellent! If you like Magic The Gathering or card games in general its worth picking up for 800 points.