Testing... testing... 1.2.3... (take 2)

Sadly, my work has pretty much closed off ALL social networking sites (myspace, facebook, flickr), including blogger.com.  I can’t even READ a blog now.

But thankfully, blogger has a “mail-to-blog” feature that should work.   Unfortunately, yesterday I attempted to mail a test blog to the e-mail address they provided, and….

NOTHING.

Nada.  Zilch. 6 hours later I got the dreaded “Undeliverable E-mail” e-mail.  Turns out I was trying to e-mail to blogspot.com and not blogger.com. 

So hopefully this one works! 

Retronauts last gasp?

The latest Retronauts podcast was an interesting one.

For those not in the know, Retronauts is 1up.com's retro-gaming poodcast. After 50 episodes, Jeremy Parish [sic] has said the format is changing because he doesn't know enough about retrogaming. But after saying he doesn't know enough about retrogaming, he then announces that Retronauts is going to a weekly podcast. Considering he also said that he was having a hard time thinking of topics, it make me stop and think about the viability of the podcast from here on out.

Now, Retronauts hasn't been the most reliable podcast to listen to. In fact there were times when it updated every week for 3 months, and then nothing for a month. They tried going every other week, but even that fell through. So how are they going to make a weekly podcast viable?
I have no idea. Hopefully they will keep it interesting, because I think the podcast is funny, insightful, and very informative.

And as for topics, they've done 50 (although 3 of those were repeated - Castlevania, DragonQuest, and MegaMan). And personally I thnk they haven't even scratched the surface of retro-gaming. For the most part they have stuck to console gaming, but PC gaming has been around longer, and there is treasure trove of info to be mined. I have a few topics that come to mind.

1.) History of the Ultima Series
2.) The evolution of the 1st person shooter
3.) Atari 8-bit games
4.) Colecovision/Intellivison
5.) The evoultion of the 4x game genre
6.) Multiplayer gaming
7.) Puzzle games
8.) Movie Based Games (a crapfest, with few exceptions - but would be a great bitch-fest)
9.) Tomb Raider
10.) Bard's Tale
11.) Star Wars games
12.) Rogue-likes/NetHack (evolving to Diablo)
13.) Construction Set Games
14.) PC RPG'S (non-Ultima)
15.) Tetris/Tetris Clones/Tetris Spinoffs

And that is just a start.

I'm just hoping that Retronauts doesn't change to much. I like my Retrogaming goodness.

Scrabble for the iPod - Review

I love playing Scrabble. It's one of the best board games that exists, and has withstood the test of time. 50+ years on forming words with tiles.

So imagine my joy when I found that Electronic Arts created a official Scrabble game for the iPod. So $4.99 later, I started playing the game on my 80GB iPod.

Plus Side: Graphics - Considering the small-ish iPod screen, I'm impressed that it looks as good as it does. It uses the current Scrabble motif - the reds and pinks, and the tiles can be read easily.

Word list - The dictionary used is the current Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th edition. This one doesn't have all the naughty words (that is reserved for tournament players), but it has every word that I know, and a tons of obscure words as well.

Stats - Statistics tracking is neat. It shows how many games you've played, your win percentage, highest scoring play, highest scoring game, best bingo and number of bingoes played.

Neutral Side: Game mechanics - The click wheel is a semi-burden in the game. It's very sensitive to where you place you tiles on the board and sometimes if you are listening to music while playing, you may accidentally pause the track or skip to the next track. Annoying to say the least.

The Zoom - Maneuvering tiles around the board is easy, but when you zoom into the board, it only zooms into one part of the board at a time (whereever your cursor is), but then after the play, it zooms out to the full board. There is no way to zoom into the board and keep it zoomed in. It needs a Zoom toggle.

Down Side: Challenging - Challenging plays is non-existent. It basically follows the British "single challenge" rule, where if you play a word that is not valid, you get to take your tiles back and try again. Which basically makes it easy to just put as many words on to the board until you find a good one. It's not conducive to learning strategy and new words this way.

No game recap - Sadly there is no way to see a recap of the game (what the plays were, what the blanks are, etc.)

The other huge down side is the "Best Word" function. "But wait", I hear you say. "That helps you find words in your rack! How can the be a down side?" Easy. First, for those who want to use this version of game to help their real-life game, there is NO way to turn off this function. Personally, I find it hard to resist the temptation of just hitting the "Best Word" function. Second, it only finds the highest scoring word, and doesn't take into consideration your rack leave. Sometimes the highest scoring play isn't necessarily the best play. You have 4 uses of "Best Word", and it's far to easy to use them and outscore the computer AI.

Overall impressions: I like the game. It's a decent implementation of the game for the iPod. For living room players and casual gamers, it's great. But it falls short in areas that tournament players would like to see.

Grade: B+

On Cryptograms

I love puzzles.

Any type of puzzles, really. I love Word Searches, Fill-ins, Sudoku (technically Dell's Number Sums), and especially cryptograms.

It's one of the few things my Mom got me into while growing up. She got me into doing word searches, and I slowly graduated into doing Fill-ins and other word games. But it was when I was in High School I finally realized how to solve the elusive cryptoquiz/cryptogram.

Cryptoquizzes are easy (at least now they are - back then it was a triumph for me to solve them), It's usually a list of words (usually 10-12) that are encrypted. And all the words have a common theme. Like "Oscar Winning Movies" or "Frozen Foods". Since the words all have a common theme, it's easy to spot patterns in the words and solve the quiz.

The cryptogram, on the other hand, is a bit tougher. Normally it's a standard substitution cypher, where one letter is substituted for another (T is replaced with J, etc.). But the challenge is finding word and sentence patterns within what looks like nonsense. For example, if I see the cypher - DJKD DJU - I'm 99% positice that the real message is THAT THE. You can see the DJ combination at the beginning of both words and follow the logic from there. Or noticing that if the quote ends in a question mark, I can be sure that the first word is usually WHO, WHAT, or WHY.

And I really believe that growing up with all these puzzles that have challenged my brains over the years have helped me throughout my jobs, especially here at the bank. Seeing the patterns of numbers, looking for logic behind outages, and just letting the logical portion of my brain take over when something has gone wrong.

And to top it all off, I can get Daily Cryptograms and Cryptoquizzes in my RSS feed on a daily basis. Much easier than buying a book and forgetting to bring it in to do at work :)

Thank god I love salad...

Because if I didn't, my food choices would be sorely lacking.

Being newly diabetic, I've had to undergo a lot of changes, mostly in my diet.  I'm restricted to 240 grams of carbohydrates a day.  Considering a normal person needs 300 grams, it's akin to skipping a meal for me, even though I eat 3-4 times a day.

So I'm trying to eat healthy, but I also want to watch my sodium intake as well.  And sadly, I do eat a lot of pre-packaged foods.  I'm a single guy and I find it hard to actually cook a meal at home, because I usually end up throwing leftovers out.   And I for one HATE wasting food.  So I tend to lean towards quick, easy pre-packaged meals that I can toss in my microwave and then chow down on it.

I'm still trying to find that balance of eating healthy and eating what I like. It's a happy medium thing right now, at least until I figure out what is good for me and what isn't.   But I'm nailing those down too.  I like chocolate every now and then, but I try not to eat an entire candy bar in one sitting.  Weight Watchers puts out a low carb Peppermint Patty (by Whitman's Chocolate) that is really good.  So I'm also starting to find substitutes for all the crap stuff I've been eating over the last 30+ years and seeing what I like and don't like.  For instance, I got a Healthy Choice soup with Beef and Noodles. Ugh. The combination of the two sat on my stomach like a lead pellet.  But the Chicken Noodle Soup?  Delicious :)

Soda was the tough one though.  For the longest time, I went without soda or caffeine. I think I went at least 3 years without touching a caffeinated drink. But slowly I started to drink Pepsi again.  And that's pretty much what did me in, diabetes wise.  so I've switched to Crystal Light type drink mixes that have no carbs at all, and they taste pretty darn good.  No more Sweetened Iced Tea from 4C.  But I do occasionally will drink a Diet Pepsi.  I still don't like the taste of diet soft drinks, but I can live with it.

WoW update!

Well it took over a year, but I finally hit 70 two weeks ago.

And now I'm trying to figure out the best way to make money, because I'd love to get my flying epic mount.

The pseudo-easy way is to run the daily quests in Shattrath and Quel'Danas. The Shattrath quests are fairly simple - and not that time consuming.

Quel'Danas on the other hand, is a pain in the ass. It's basically a free-for-all PVP area that guarantees someone will gank you within 5 minutes of leaving the main areas. But the monetary rewards for completing quests out there almost outweigh the constant dying.

Not only that, I decided to go back to the starting areas of Ironforge, Stormwind and Exodar and grinded rep with each of the factions. The starting quests are so easy it took me literally an hour to get through them, and the reputation bonuses (150-500 points) made it super easy to finally get Exalted status with all but the Gnomes. Why not the gnomes? Because I'm a Night Elf, I'm "too big" to ride the mechanical chickens. Oh well. No big deal - I now have epic riding mounts from 4 of the 5 major Alliance Factions. You know, I'm not really in a huge rush for my Flying Epic. With Lich King just around the corner, I'll be on my way to level 80 soon enough - I figure that I should be able to get more money once the expansion hits.

So for now, I'm going to try to grind reputation with some of the other factions (Argent Dawn comes to mind), and run dailies when I can, and just have fun now. Also try to level my Rogue up to 20 :)

Moving aftermath.

It's pretty much finished.

On Saturday, I ended up moving my bed, headboard, dresser and clothes into my computer room for the winter. After 4 hours of moving, cleaning and re-arranging, it's done.

And I've moved everything around so I can access my books and my closet. As long as I keep the room clean, it should work for the winter. All that is left to do, is to get plastic and tape and tape up the windows for the winter and I'll be all set.