Any person who can defend this despicable shit isn’t welcome here. There is a line that demarcates what is OK and what is not, and although its exact location can be perceived differently depending on who you are, it has clearly been crossed here. My love for my country is deeply ingrained, and I felt deeply insulted when I saw this photo of the war anniversary protests floating around the net.
Just because you have freedom of speech doesn’t mean we must forgive the shit flowing out of your mouth.
Author: Justin
Condition Zero Review
In 3 words: Disappointing as hell.
Description: CS 1.6 with bots. There were a few new maps and minor tweaking of some old maps. Whoopee.
Worth 30 bones (at discount price)?
HELL NO! But if you are a CS junkie, you will buy it anyway (like I needed to tell you that)
Interesting note: If HL2 is this disappointing, I may smash my comp and only play sissy console games from now on.
Vampire Killer
It is just past ten o’ clock and I am stewing in my own fumes. I ate a plate of spicy Thai pork for breakfast and it is now overly apparent that the secret ingredient was garlic. Normally I would have no complaint as the breath of death keeps perky morning office assistants at arm’s length until well past lunch, but today I have a meeting. With bigwigs from overseas. Overseas as in, “garlic novice” overseas. Heh.
I have popped a lemon cough drop in my mouth and it now feels as if I could marinate a chicken in there to make some exotic chinese dish. Hooray for honey-lemon eucalyptus. This should do the trick as long as I keep a lozenge in my mouth at all times.
Except that now I’ve started burping under my breath. Garlicky richness erupts from the depths… Guess I’ll show up at that meeting with some stakes and holy water just to get into my role – wouldn’t that be a first! I’ll completely redefine my company’s approach to hostile negotiations…
Condition Zero
The most important first-person shooter ever created was Half-Life. The most important mod ever created was Counter-Strike. The most anticipated game of last year AND this year, IMHO, is a three way split between Half-Life2, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Doom 3. I now have 1/3 of the trifecta pre-loaded on my gaming comp and am waiting for it to be released.
Steam rocks!
1MB/second
My Hikari rocks. This is the fastest browser download I have ever experienced.
Question: Why does IE express download speed in bytes/second? According to numion:
In data communications only the Metric definition of a kilobyte (1000 bytes per kilobyte) is correct. The binary definition of a kilobyte (1024 bytes per kilobyte) is used in areas such as data storage (harddisk, memory), but not for expressing bandwidth and throughput.
So is this usage in IE correct or not? Somehow, I think it is not. Anyhow, this speed of 1.00 MBps is also equivalent to:
8000000 bps (bits per second)
1000000 Bps (bytes per second)
8000 kbps (kilobits per second)
1000 KBps (kilobytes per second)
8 mbps (megabits per second)
It is near the maximum speed of a 10Base-T LAN (10 mbps). The speed tests that I sometimes use show that my max download (and upload) speed on an average day is actually more than three times this, but I have never connected to an HTTP server that could keep up with this during actual net use, even in Japan. It’s like buying a Ferrari – 99% unused potential, and you just know the girls be all over my ride (Can you take me for a ride on your fiber, baby?). Smokin!
Dead to Rights Game Review
Even though I haven’t posted forever, I feel the burning need to warn fellow FPS enthusiasts about the PC game, Dead to Rights. I am very glad I “test drove” the “free” version (thank you, BitTorrent!) of this dreck before buying it. This is an X-Box title ported to PC, and it apparent in its blockiness, difficulty of use, and bloated code. The cracked version is 4 CDs in size! (The fourth CD contains only the crack.) Dude!
Also, a general observation regarding this whole genre of games:
Mandatory “auto-aim” sucks! I understand it as an option for the console game crowd, but people who play FPS on the PC platform are more sophisticated than that (or at least most of us like to think so). I mean really, why the hell have a scoped rifle in the game if you can’t even use the scope and aim it by yourself?
/end nerdrant
Overstocked
I have no idea why the stalls crammed into overflowing buildings of Namdaemun were so enthralling. It may have been the sheer volume of stuff literally stacked to the ceilings… Or the fact that most of the stores fell into one of the following categories:
– Medicinal/Pharmaceutical
– Leather belts, wallets, and stainless steel kitchenware
– Fake zippos, stunguns, and sunglasses
There were hundreds of stalls on multiple floors of this building… Simply wonderful just to wander around.
One reason why digital cameras suck
I wanted to take photos this weekend but I somehow managed to lose BOTH chargers for the rechargeable Li-Ion batteries. I invested in a second unit since I thought it would be nice to always have one in the car for trips. How I lost both of them is a complete mystery and makes me want to buy a whole new camera.
Gadgets can be clever and evil, and conspire to either sate you only temporarily or completely consume you; toys beget toys.
The Other Pink Meat
I wrote a haiku today, inspired by this site:
Dusty desert road.
Weary rocket soldier sits,
opening the can.
Obviously, I’ve been playing too much Generals lately. And Adam’s recent post on Spam ignited a firestorm in my gut. I was forced to recognize that I need Spam on a regular basis. Need. But it’s too damn expensive in Japan. It’s as if they still price it the same way they did on the black market after the war, but adjusted for inflation.
Happy Spam thoughts:
Spam is one of the few foods that taste better in the “low salt” version. I tried a can of the spicy-flavored Spam a couple weeks ago and it was nice, but I prefer the low salt Spam sliced into slabs and crispy-fried with eggs, sunny side up, decorated with ketchup and sriracha sauce. Oh, damn, why so I do this to myself at work? I’m HUNGRY.
When I was ten or eleven years old, my friend Kohei came to a profound realization and announced that “Spam” spelled backwards is “maps”. It would be much less embarassing for him if I had forgotten to state that he was twice my age; luckily, I remembered.
UPDATE: It seems my black market comment above may have been unfounded. Apparently we Americans blessed the Japanese with loads of Spam after the war, at least this seems to be the case in some people’s experiences:
http://runker_room.tripod.com/tiestalk/spam.htm
You MUST try a Spam Musubi before you die. Must. A musubi is just a ball of rice. Spam musubi has chunks of pink (former) flesh interspersed in it. I have independently developed a thermonuclear version version of the Spam musubi involving kimchi and mayonnaise, and it is a meal unto itself unless you are drunk. In which case, I sincerely hope you don’t get barfy, because the only grosser thing to spew is a meat pizza (personal Bombay Sapphire memory – friends don’t let friends drink gin neat, even if there is no ice and nothing to mix it with).
“The Panther keeps on biting me…”
If you are a mac buff, go forth:
The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin
And by “mac buff”, I mean a true OG (GFINDER) type playa. Not this new breed of iTards whose solution to everything in life is “Buy a Mac!” Yeah, buy a $2000 mac to surf the net and send e-mail you brainless chatwhores.
“Chatwhores” should be my word for the day, but it’s even below my taking credit for.
Note: This entry was posted by my Powerbook 190 (16-shade greyscale, although the right bottom corner of the lcd has inexplicably become a solid yellow). Which means not a goddamn thing except that I miss System 7. Am I alone in my misery?
By the way, GFINDER worked for me exactly ONE time out of approximately 200,000 tries. It exited the command window to the Finder, and then froze, instead of just freezing at the command window.