The episode I managed to catch (there are three in total according to IMDB), was about the birth of the universe and continued all the way until Hawking’s predicted death of the universe. It was definitely a good watch, even if it was a little dumbed down in order to make sense to a wider viewing audience. Sure, I know about the planck length and about the strong, weak and other forces… but I shouldn’t expect everyone else to. I should applaud any effort to educate the masses since it seems so many people just don’t care, or are even scared, of scientific knowledge.

On the whole I enjoyed the episode. Professor Hawking makes wonderful and simple analogies for viewers to understand and yet doesn’t over-simplify things too much. Of course he glosses over the math and other things, but he gets the basic point across for people to understand. I do believe I will be watching more of Professor Hawking’s show, if I can find it to watch.

On another note… why have my last two posts been about TV? Apparently I’m watching too much?

When the PA guys decided to start putting out their own video game I was pretty excited. Mike’s artwork is always good, and Jerry’s prose is just phenomenal. I was looking forward to getting it as soon as it came out! I didn’t actually get it as soon as it came out, I waited for it to come to the PS3… but when the second episode came out ( launched at the same time with XBOX and PC ) I did get that one right away! I swear I did!

For the last couple years I had been patiently waiting for the announcement of Episode 3. I wanted to see the game to its full conclusion. To my dismay the game was announced as cancelled a few months ago (at PAX East I believe). I was quite disappointed with the news, but the reasons were evident… The game cost too much, didn’t bring in enough revenue, and the studio they were working with was doing some other things now.

If you happened to be disappointed like I was, you can rejoice again! I just checked the newsposts on the PA site and noticed something while going back to the previous day (I do this since sometimes miss posts they make on non-comic days). Jerry is putting the rest of the series up in written form! To tell you the truth I’d rather read it than play it anyway. As I said earlier, I love the way Jerry writes. I really think he should pen a novel, if he hasn’t already, I would buy it in a moment!

At this point I should note that if I was willing to actually shell out for a phone, I probably would never have picked an iPhone. I’ve never had anything but trouble with Apple products, and the device lockdown rubs me the wrong way (being a free software advocate). This phone I have at the moment is a hand-me-down from Jackie. She got a 3GS back in February, and I got her 3G with a broken screen. All told, it’s better than the cruddy Motorola phone I got from Telus and the “Pay as you go” rates from Rogers aren’t horrible.

So back to my frustrating upgrade experience. It really did irk me that the upgrade took something like 4 hours. Most of this being the copying of all my music and other data to the phone again. Oh… and since Jackie had been the last one to sync it tried to copy all of her apps over to the phone and delete mine. WTF???

At this point I was pretty pissed with all the Apple BS and decided to look into the jailbreak option. I had attempted it in the past but failed miserably with funky “Error XXXX” messages when trying to restore the custom firmware. This time it actually worked flawlessly with r3dsn0w. The only hard part is getting the phone into DFU mode since the lock button is broken and only works sporatically.  It took some fiddling, but the jailbreak process itself was very easy.

During the jailbreak process I was asked if I wanted to enable the features Apple had turned off for the 3G and I decided “why not!” The features were definitely enabled, but the performance was horrible. After about a week of dealing with a sluggish phone I had to go back and perform the jailbreak process again to turn those features off.

On the whole, I’m impressed with the Cydia package manager. It’s using dpkg for all of the package management work (Go Debian!), and it works pretty damn good. My only complaint is that Cydia itself is a little slow, even after turning off all of the 3GS/4G features I had on originally. I love that I have a basic terminal on the phone now… I can SSH without a computer to any of my boxes at home. I also like Winterboard and the cool themes. In particular I’ve got one theme installed called Glassillumine which is very slick.

All told, I enjoy this phone much more now that I have the ability to put more on it than the things that are approved by Apple!

Her reaction was fairly positive, but she did ask “where do you find this crazy stuff?” In reply I chuckled and said “the Internet, silly.” Overall a good experience, even if it did keep us up too late.

Anyway, if you’ve never heard of Dr Horible, I recommend checking it out: http://www.drhorrible.com.

http://planck.cf.ac.uk/node/166

The formation of new stars as viewed by the Planck satellite. Pretty cool photos.

So what I have done is modified my script to be able to seek through the digits, and show you a picture starting from anywhere in the first 100 million digits. It did not take a lot of extra work, and I think the result is quite pleasing. I am actually considering doing the same for ln, phi, and some other interesting constants.

Yes, this is truly nerdy stuff.

The year was 2002; I was in college at the time. I was beginning my second co-op work term during the winter semester. I also had a girlfriend, of almost a year – the longest ever at the time.  (SIDE NOTE:, this is the same GF whom I lied to about smoking.  Not my best years, I must admit.)  Sadly it was not to last as someone else,  ‘something‘ else rather, came into my life shortly after. As you can guess from above, this was a MMO game.

I had beta tested a few years before for a game called Asheron’s Call being created by one Turbine Software. At the time I was not very interested. The beta came and went and I paid no heed to it. I was more into first person shooters and real time strategies at the time. I also had a real Dungeons and Dragons group to get my true geek on with, why bother online?

Flash back to the co-op work term. I was working for the same company I did the first term for, but the load was pretty light this time. I was working from my apartment and corresponding through email and telephone. To make a long story short, I was bored:  I had nothing to do and I had no desire to find anything else to do.

My playstation and my old video games were getting a little tiresome.  I decided to try one of those new MMO games I was hearing about on the Internet. My first attempt was at EverQuest, but it just did not seem right to me. I packed it up and traded it in (yes, you could still do this at the time).  I remembered playing the beta for AC, and looked it up. I could not find it in stores but managed to have a copy shipped to me. It was the begginning of the end for my social life.

I am sure that many people who will actually read this post know what these games are like, but I will explain it anyway. The game was like being on drugs. I was glued to the screen for 18 + hours a day. Yes, 18 hours of every day I was spending on this game. Always trying to make my character better, trying to compete against everyone else. I had to be the best! If that meant I needed a widget or a do-dad which could only be found by killing a super-rare monster a hundred times, I would do it. I could not stop myself.

I soon stopped calling my girlfriend. I could not talk to her and play at the same time. When she called me I would ignore the calls whenever possible and make up excuses later. When we did talk I tried to keep it short, any time that I was not spending on the game was time other people had to get ahead of me! When I went to see her, all I could think about was the game. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up! Not of the woman whom I had told I loved…

Yes, this is exactly how I behaved back then. And as you can guess I was to lose her soon afterwards. There were other reasons, of course — and I will not enumerate them all here — but this is the one I look back upon and feel ashamed of. I let a video game control my life, and I lost something special because of it.

After she left me I went a little crazy.  I was stuck between a rock and a hard place – give up the game, or give up the girl. I told myself I really loved her, but I did not give up the game : I wanted both.  In the end I said some nasty things, none of which I can recall. I do, however, remember the reaction which they got me.  I was an immature 22 year old, but I say that with 8 years of retrospective. I would never have admitted it at the time.

All of that said and done, I quit the game forever 6 months later. I got a real job, since my money had run out. I could not devote the time I needed to it any more. When I quit, I had absolutely nothing to show for it except a still broken heart.

With that said, I am finished my story for today. And if you ask me to play an MMO, you will know the reason why I turn you down without even a second though.