Angry Gamer

I bought a deep fryer last weekend, and it’s pretty much the best thing I’ve ever done. I realize that I’m probably shaving years off my life with every delicious meal, but I bet those years would be pretty crappy anyway.

The ‘08 Presidential field is pretty abysmal, and I’m having a hard time deciding who to support. It’s often said that a President never has the luxury of making an easy decision; the implication being that any easy decision would just be made before it gets to the Presidents desk. So, what is the definition of a tough decision anyway? In poker a tough decision is one that is very close to zero EV (expected value), and they are often called coin flip situations. It’s kind of interesting that “tough decisions” are decisions that could really go either way. Thinking in these terms it seems totally obvious that our next President should be a random number generator. This way we get a tough decision maker without having to deal with a slimy power hungry egomaniac!

rand() % numChoices; ‘08!

When I was at ATI Chris Oat and I used to say “there’s your skywalk” all the time. The quote came from a random scene in Die Hard 2, and it turned into our version of “Eureka!” I still say it every time I find a bug in my code. Chris Oat is a genius.

Searchles TV is pretty sweet! I used it to mash up some funny SNL commercials.

Bad Idea Jeans, Mom Jeans, Turlington’s Lower Back Tattoo Remover 

Anytime there is a school shooting a wave of people call to ban violent video games. I think instead we should ban all religious texts, because they have caused far more senseless violence than Grand Theft Auto ever will. Of course if you criticize religion you will hear arguments about how much good they do; I guess the implication is that it offsets the bad. How many Meals on Wheels do you think it will take to overcome the blood soaked carnage of the crusades?

Rachel and I went to see Stretch tonight at New Brooklyn Tavern. It was a great show, and the sound was rockin’ thanks to Magic John. Every time I go to a show it motivates me to keep crankin on Poker Smash, so it should be a good productive night.

The show Lost is just horrendous now. The first season was great, but everything went downhill from there. The part that is the most annoying to me is when the story breaks well established rules (a classic case of writing as you go). For example, we know very little about the island and the others, but we have gotten to know Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, etc. Sure, we don’t know everything about their past, but we do know how they interact with one another. When the writers have these characters act drastically different to one another in an effort to keep things hidden the story totally breaks. The worst part is that I can’t bring myself to stop watching. Very frustrating!

Crackdown has a pretty sweet game mechanic with these agility orbs that are peppered in high places all over the world. For those who don’t play Crackdown agility orbs are these little green spheres that, when collected, increase your characters agility. Each time you level up your agility you can jump about 10 feet higher, and being able to jump higher is a huge part of the game. So, the orbs are pretty valuable especially early on. It’s sort of a positive feedback mechanism where you explore the world in search of new orbs which increase your ability to explore the world (uncovering even more new orbs). Anyway, there are 500 agility orbs total and I’ve collected 480. There is an achievement for getting all 500, so now you know I’m going around looking for the last 20 just to get the achievement, even though my agility has been maxed out for a while now.

I switched to Visual Studio 2005 (AKA VS8), and my link times are so much longer than they used to be with VS7. It’s driving me nuts!

I freakin love playing co-op games. Ryan and I played some co-op Crackdown last night, and it was a blast. Games that combine good peripheral achievements and co-op are money.