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November 30, 2004

Dear Steam... (you SUCK!)

Dear Steam,

I'm issuing a stop-payment request on my credit card for the purchase of Half-Life 2 from your servers.

The game has been a blast, after I figured out some hardware issues (thanks for not replying at all (within 5 days) to my requests for help).

Actually, I take it back. The game has been a major pain in the arse.

When it works it's a hoot. But it's spent more time broken in the past 5 days than I care to speak of.

Like tonight, for example. At 9:28PM I jumped on to play an hour or so. Only your servers told me they were too busy to let me on, and I needed to try back in a few minutes. At first I was pissed thinking this was your OVER THE TOP anti-piracy precautions (yeah, I realize you NEED to protect yourselves from piracy, but with all the precautions you've taken, I feel you're screwing me by charging me $50 -- we all know games cost that much to offset the cost of piracy -- since this game can't be pirated easily, stop sticking me with the price, especially when I have to jump through all your mickey-mouse-bull-crap to play the game I've paid for). Then I realized it was just a setting: keep this game updated. 3 minutes later I was downloading a patch. That downloaded/installed fairly well. Anger subsided...

Only now, the game won't launch on my machine. And I've rebooted.

Worked fine today. Downloaded and applied the patch, and now it's broken.

What's it doing Nothing. Not a damn thing. I launch. I Watch my CPU scale up to 100% utilization. I See the hour glass. The CPU dips to 50%... 10%... 3%. No more hour glass. No game either.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm just trying to say thanks for the totally CRAPPY experience. All this 'goodness' and the game was still a year late What gives i.e. you SUCK.

Happily my credit is good, so that screwing you by refusing payment (and forcing you to sick accountants, and customer service people, etc.) won't hurt me.

Oh, eventually I'll pay for the game, but not until you've paid for wasting MY time.

Posted on November 30, 2004 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 27, 2004

Valve \ STEAM = STUPID MORONS

Boy. I don't like calling people morons that often, but this one REQUIRES it.

I've been really enjoying Half Life 2. To the point where I started thinking... this is cool, maybe I should play Half Life: Source FIRST. (i.e. play the first game, ported over to this new engine).

So, I zip out to my steam account, pull up games, and right click on Half Life: Source. Sure enough, there's a button to purchase it. I'm thinking: the difference between a bronze, and silver 'subscription' is only $10... so I should be able to poney-up $10 and get Half Life: Source, then start playing it.

Only, I thought wrong. There's no way possible for me to purchase the game. And Steam says: "thanks for buying a package, but we'll only let you buy one package per account."

For people who made buying online so easy, I can't believe they're so STUPID as to not want my $10 right this second. Credit Card in my hot little hands....

That's why they're STUPID MORONS

(NOTE: I'll happily be the stupid moron, somebody just show ME how to order the $10 game.)

Posted on November 27, 2004 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Hulk + Half Life 2 vs Inspiron 8200 + GeForce4 440 GO

So. Hulk decides Half Life 2 looks good. Hulk sees buddies at work playing. Hulk LIKES. Lots of shooting, Hulk can smash things, blow things up, throw barrels and crates, and Hulk likes to stay up late at night in dark with headphones and get scared by games with evil aliens.

Hulk buys Half Life 2 - downloads from steam.

Hulk has decent laptop: Dell Inspiron 8200, 1.8GHz, 768MB Ram, 7200RPM Hard Drive, 32MB NVidia GeForce4 440 GO video card. This is no longer dream machine, but good enough for Hulk.

Hulk begins game. Intro with GMan video sequence so bad Hulk wants to smash something. Intro video sequence stutters and skips. Hulk decides to endure, seeing reports of stuttery video on steam's site. After enduring 10 minutes of a 2 minute opening video sequence Hulk is finally able to play. Hulk is amazed by how well game works, how gripping story line is...

Then Hulk's computer throws blue screen of death.

Hulk remembers that HL2 warned Hulk of outdated video drivers before launching. Hulk goes to NVidia site, gets unified drivers, installs. Hulk reboots. Hulk still gets outdated video drivers warning when launching HL2. Hulk checks. Sure enough, drivers still same version. Hmmmmm. Hulk tries again. Same sad story for Hulk.

Hulk tries Dell site. Hulk has latest drivers from Dell, but Hulk's drivers are almost 18 months old

Hulk tries to remove drivers from hardware manager. No worky. Goes to safe mode to remove drivers. Works. Tries to install Unified NVidia drivers. Reboots. Drivers not there

Hulk ANGRY now. Hulk knows Nvidia good. Dell good. But NVidia + Dell = EVIL. Hulk thinks: evil, proprietary drivers. Evil plot to stop Hulk from getting good drivers.

Hulk's brother tells Hulk to get haxored drivers made by l33t gamerz. Hulk looks on web (Hulk loves google). Hulk finds site, with stockpiles of forbidden drivers. After searching for 'laptop' and some other word, Hulk finds drivers written by new superhero: Omega Drivers.

Hulk happy, because drivers say they will go onto ANY NVidia card, even laptops.

Hulk gets Nvidia NastyFileRemover from guru3d.com, and removes all shreds of old, evil drivers supplied by Windows XP and Dell.

Then Hulk installs Omega Drivers.

Wohooo. New drivers take. Everything is good. No bad warning from HL2 when launching. Game plays great. No longer throws BSOD in the exact spot that it was ALWAYS throwing BSOD.

Posted on November 27, 2004 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 25, 2004

Setting Up NantContrib (or getting NantContrib to work)

If you don't know what Nant is... go check it out, over at SourceForge.

Once you check it out, it shouldn't take long for you to discover NantContrib -- a bunch of extra Tasks that extend Nant. Only there's problem: what the hell do you do with NantContrib once you download it

My first thought was to check the readme.txt, that would tell me what to do right Well, hmmm... not really... it had a bunch of gobblety-gook about building NantContrib and downloading source via CVS from Nant, and then having to compile NantContrib against that. That sounded way to bothersome, so I checked the /docs/ folder thinking there'd be a simpler way of getting at the 'extra goodness.'

Only, no dice. Nada, zip, zilch, rien. Not one LICK of info about how to get to the extra goodness.

So, it was back to trying to build it. Only that's a complete exercise in absolute futility. From what I've seen on google, compiling it is an absolute pain-in-the-butt -- that doesn't seem to work very often.

But I really wanted the extra goodness.... so I tried to build for a while... and got cranky, and crabby, and down-right pissed.

Maybe I'm dumb or something, but you'd think somewhere somebody would mention (within the NantContrib download, or docs, or wiki, or whatnot) how to get to the extra goodness.

Feel like I'm taking forever getting to the point You don't know the HALF of my pain...

S O L U T I O N (i.e. how to get NantContrib Tasks to work with Nant):
Just copy everything in the NantContrib\bin directory into Nant\bin. That's it. No compiling, no tweaking, no building, no nothing. Just copy the guts out of NantContrib into Nant, and you'll be able to use tasks like slingshot,sql,vss,etc.

Maybe everyone else in the world saw that as the way to proceed. Somehow that just didn't seem like the answer to me. But hey... if I'd have just seen it mentioned somewhere... the docs the readme the wiki

Posted on November 25, 2004 | | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

November 22, 2004

FireFox 1.0 Launches External Links in current browser

So... when you upgrade to FF 1.0 you may notice a new default that BUGS. It's the default that tells FireFox to use an existing browser when you launch an external link (i.e. when you click on a link in Outlook, Instant Messenger, etc.  the link 'commandeers' your open browser and displays there).

 

If you want to get rid of this 'feature,' you've got two options. The first is to grab an extension that makes all Tabbed Browsing options available as a new options section from Tools > Options within FireFox. If that option doesn't float your boat, you can easily make the tweak yourself:

- In your address bar, type in about:config

- Within the filter, type in: browser.link.open_external

- Double Click the Config Preference, and set the value to 3

- Restart your browser, and voila! external links now open in a new tab.

 I'm sure you could play around with the other options... and probably get it to launch external links in a new window, etc..

Posted on November 22, 2004 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 19, 2004

Updated Links

Well, I've added a PC / Workstation link section to my collection of links on this site.

Like many of my links, there's a good chance everyone has heard of a few of these sites, but my hunch is that anyone could easily find a resource they didn't know about before. My hunch is that this will be true for this new section of links.

BlackViper.com has been one that I've used probably the most. His overview of winXP Pro services is invaluable, and I've used it to create my own list of which services are safe to shut down on my machine (and I use that list each time I FDisk, which is every few months). Aaron Margosis' Blog is also another great resource -- if you're inclined to run as non-admin.

So, run over and check out the new links.

Posted on November 19, 2004 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Blogging

I've decided that blogging is a pain-in-the-butt.

It's just hard to keep up with. Yeah, it definitely doesn't help that I'm such a perfectionist that I sometimes won't blog something because I don't have time to perfectly prepare it. (Some would say that makes me a horrible blogger... I dunno, I guess if I just oozed awesomeness then I could get away with spouting whatever comes to mind, but my thought is: there's enough crap out there in the world without me adding more to it.)

Anyhow, what brings this mind-set Well, it's been 2+ months since I last blogged on SQLAdvice.com. I only just today made a new post to repeatableread. (I still like the name, too bad I can't make it repeatablepost <g>.)

What makes that sad is the fact that I've got a little notebook chock-full of ideas that I've flushed out about 70% or so... but just haven't had enough time to tweak/finalize to the point where I feel like posting them. I want to blog, I sort of like it... just don't seem to find/make enough time for it given my perfectionist tendencies.

Posted on November 19, 2004 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 12, 2004

New Layout

Well, you may not have noticed it, but I've made some massive improvements (in my mind) to the site. I've converted everything over to a strict CSS-Only layout, and I hope that I've significantly improved some of the factors (fonts are a bit smaller and cleaner, and links are more obvious now. I've also tried to make the left pane the more visible -- relegating the right-nav bar to nav-bar status (instead of having it trying to trump the main copy section for prominence).

The only thing I worry about is the fact that I've set the site up to center itself in browsers, only ... when some pages are long enough to require the scrollbar, the scrollbar actually narrows the width of the page, meaning that you'll see the pages 'dance' around a little bit as if you click between shorter and longer pages. Oh well, if I end up hating it, all'z I need to do is change one piece of CSS and it's ALL FIXED. (CSS rules.)

One noteworthy thing though, all this messing around with my site has distracted me from working on my ToolPanel control. Well, I've worked on it in tandem, but tonight the pressure was just to great and I decided to publish my new layout without having completed everything for my ToolPanel Controls. Oh well (I'm somewhat getting sick of those things -- or would be if they weren't so cool.

My plan is to have version 0.6.5 out to the world in a few weeks. Lets see how that goes...

Posted on November 12, 2004 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 02, 2004

Costco Meatball Sammich

Okay, this post is a little beyond-the-pale for my blog... but I can't help myself.

This weekend I had the best sandwich ever. Here's the 'recipe.'

- Costco MeatBalls (Warm them in the oven).
- Hamburger buns (toasted, of course).
- Dijon Mustard (put on the top or the bottom bun).
- Bleu Cheese Dressing (on the other bun)

That's it. Nothing complex... but Bleu Cheese and Dijon Mustard make for an awesome 'sauce' combo on a meatball sammich.

Posted on November 02, 2004 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)