Youtube recommendations…

…an automatic service that may need some tuning. Today, it offered for my review… “comedy” featuring Carrot Top.

I’d sooner walk around town in sandals, wearing socks that were fashioned of Cheez Wiz. I’d rather eat cigarette butts from a public ashtray. I’d be happier to live my days applying Chapstick to hoboes by lip-to-lip transfer, and I’m allergic to Chapstick.

Youtube, oh my Lord, what have you done?

Oblivion bugs: when is a poison not a poison?

…when it’s a poison of Silence, apparently. I’ve long noticed that such poisons often don’t tend to have the anticipated effect. I didn’t know why until just recently, when I stabbed a mage with a poisoned blade that included Silence… and was promptly Silenced, myself.

a small word about screen burn-in

It was supposed to be obsolete a good ten or fifteen years ago– screen burn-in, the kind of thing you prevented with a “screen saver”. A screen saver is usually just for grins, these days, with its original purpose long lost. That was the theory, anyway… and they wouldn’t save me, because the monitor is always turned off when I’m not directly working on the computer.

I’ve got a rather fancy LCD screen, a 24″ Syncmaster 244T. It cost me rather more than my computer and all other peripherals combined, when it was new, not so long ago. I’m not sure I’d call it a luxury, as one of the main tools I use every day, for most of the day, but it was perhaps extravagant.

Certain sections of the screen have gone noticeably dimmer, from hosting a bar of common icons. In two spots, you can actually see the minimize/maximize/close icons as ghosts from older days.

I love the big screen and the insane 1920×1200 resolution. It’s a beautiful display. It’s not lasting as well as I expected, however.

The latest WoW, because.

The guild goes on. Of course? Perhaps not of course, but I’m not one to give up. Some good people have gone. That was sad. But new good people come in. People come, people go. That’s pretty much how it is in life.

Today’s adventures found me spending most of my day helping guild members, which is not my usual priority. Oh, I help, to be sure, but I have my own things to do. Call it karma, perhaps, that a few guild members who have been absent for some months chose to reappear today. They are very welcome, and I hope they stay a while. They’re friends. I don’t know what they look like, but I know who they are.

It’s been a day for drama. What dreams may come… it’s going to be a weird night.

I’m responsible for these people. I make their home away from home, the place they can comfortably live online. It’s not quite a particular burden, it’s just a thing I do because I think I can do it right, and it ought to be done right. I’m still hoping for a new adjutant, if she’s in the mood for it… just in case. You always want a back-up plan.

Oblivion: hyper leveling tip

When you start a new character in Oblivion, you get a fair basic tour. The early dungeon lets you attack, cast spells, sneak, pick locks, set off traps, create potions, and so on.

The thing is, it’s not just a tour, it contributes towards your skills. And the starting monsters are incredibly feeble. So, you have a chance to start yourself off with some serious advantages.

The early critters aren’t going to be able to hurt you, very much. So, perhaps you could outfit yourself with the heavy armor that you find, and give them plenty of time to beat on you. Cast “heal” on yourself as needed. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your armor skills start leveling up…

The Amazing Logitech Mouse

…falls from grace.

In the beginning was the mouse. First popularized by Apple, which has sold many a million one-button rodents to customers apparently too stupid to be trusted with more; then “stolen” by Microsoft, with awkward two-button devices; and, for many years, brought to something approaching perfection by Logitech, which seemed to have some understanding of ergonomics and sturdiness.

dumb WoW groups

I’m a bit ticked off, because I went into SFK (Shadowfang Keep) with a really bad group. I like SFK, usually. Good loot, not too deadly for the younger folks. These guys had no idea what they were doing, though, and many of them were in my guild, so I couldn’t really just tell them to stuff it.

They charged right in, collected mobs, got party members killed repeatedly. It was a real “Leroy Jenkins” hour. Check youtube on that if you’re not familiar. And I apologized to the guy who kept getting killed the most, about the sloppy mission handling, and he responded by trying to weasel money out of me. Sheesh. Crowd of bloody stupid pissants.

Makes me grumpy. Not quite what I had in mind for a nice game. So it goes.

Master of Orion II

The first version was, really, very very good. The second version was something more than a classic. Call it a superhero. The third version, well… you can tell that none of the original programmers or managers were involved. MoO III was just awful. Clueless. Not worth squandering the time to install.

MoO2 is, now, about 13 years old, I expect. It was designed for Windows 95. It remains one of the best games ever created. Implausibly, it’s also one of the games that leads people to this site. I’ve been linked in from Wikipedia.

Those were the days that were

The year was, oh, about 1980, I guess. I was in high school. I didn’t have much idea about what I wanted to do with my life, but I was intrigued by these newfangled computer things. Nobody actually had one, of course. They were very new, and didn’t come with any useful applications, and they weren’t inexpensive. Still, the very image of Mad Science. “It’s ALIVE!”

I sent away for all sorts of information, and started saving my money. Pitiful bits from my allowance and the occasional odd job. Radio Shack had recently announced its very hot TRS-80 machine, and Apple was plugging its first commercial machine in family-friendly ads on the television. Those were way out of my league. I was hoping to get a terrible little 8080 device, with no more than a hex keypad and a segmented LED graphics readout that could display a few hexadecimal characters. The thought became depressing, even then, and I was on the verge of giving up on the dream.

Rise of the Machine: blue LEDs

When I was a young man, electronics toys started coming with LED lighting that stayed on even when the items were not in use. Why not? It was flashy, and cheap. LEDs use no power to speak of. I liked it.

Turn off the lights, and you were surrounded by a constellation of tiny stars. The phone, the TV, the radio, the answering machine, the VCR and, naturally, the clocks (stand-alone and built into everything else, including the microwave). It was oddly comforting. You were reminded of the technological age you lived in. Your own dad would have been baffled at the scene, so much more advanced than a mad scientist’s laboratory from a cheesy science fiction flick.