(warning: if you have been hiding in a hole for a while, the following may contain spoilers)
The second (or is that first?) Star Wars Trilogy had the potential of being something truly amazing. An epic with love, war, death and betrayal – what could possibly go wrong?
Well… the dialogue for one. Read the rest of this entry »
I finally broke down and learned how to get rotating logs and web statistics working. For ease of use, I recommend cronolog and webalyzer. AWStats provided more information, but it is not fun to set up, so I put it aside for me. Webalyzer just works, and outputs the info in a nice form. Well, getting to the point, I was quite surprised by the results of the analysis. Since mid-October, 2004, sf2 has served well over 23 gigabytes of content. Thats averaging around three gigabytes a month. Thats hardcore. And thats just web content. sf2 is also a heavily used mail server, and sports a few other less-used daemons as well. In the same time, the sites powered by sf2 have seen almost 100,000 visitors viewing more than 270,000 pages, with more than 500,000 files requested, for a grand total of 760,513 hits. Silverfir.net has been up since sometime around March, 2003. So, I imagine that in reality, the various forms that silverfir.net has taken have surpassed one million hits. Not too shabby for a web site that looks like this.
I just “beat” Half-Life 2, if thats what you can call finishing a game with an ending like this. It was one heckuv a ride, but I think the whole Citidel thing was way too repetitive and way too short. One omnipotent weapon, and a fast-forward to the top of the place didn’t really make for a challenging or climatic end. I’ll be the first to say that the end to the original Half-Life was probably too challenging (I never really completed that one on the level). Nevertheless, there’s never any real time decision making going on towards the end. Its just right-click left-click right-click left-click. And in the end, it feels like they could have raised the whole game to another power and really had a spetacular ending. So in the end it was a somewhat disappointing finale to an otherwise incredible game.
Don’t get me wrong – the game really was incredible. It’s hard to forget the first descent into the Citadel, the first time bringing down a dropship, or the vehicular rides through expansive outdoor landscapes. Indeed, this is where HL2 really shines – it’s engine, source. That a masterful, though imperfect game was put on top is a bonus, for sure. How incredible the engine really is struck me again when, a couple of days ago, I saw a combine soldier swinging back and forth pinned to the ceiling by a crossbow dart. All rendered real time, perfectly.
If I could return Doom 3 to buy another copy of HL2, I probably would, just because its that good. And because D3 sucked so much. Oh well.
All choices have consequences – this is an eternal principle that cannot be overcome. While we live in a generally free society, one in which you and I are free to go where we want, talk to whom we please, seek gain with many diverse scheme, we are still not free from the consequences of our actions. This is a good thing, generally, as it encourages one to make decisions carefully. Today was one of those days where I wish I had chosen better.
It started, as it so often does, with procrastination. A paper I had due for my English class today, put off until last night. Then I found out that the CEO of the TRC was expected me at a meeting that I had not been planning on attending. Since I had a night class, I had previously been expecting to be able to write the paper after work today. However, with a meeting in the way, I decided I had to write it last night. Well, I put that off too – not getting started until well after midnight. By the time I was done, it wasn’t worth going to sleep before work. But I did anyway, and ended up missing most of work – which usually is ok, excpet today, because I missed an important meeting. So while the TRC and school were covered, I’m now feeling pretty terrible about letting down my coworkers and friends at work. I do hope they’ll be forgiving, and even more that I can learn from this mistake.
I recently bought the DVD of Primer, probably the most thought-provoking movie I have ever watched in the Sci-Fi genre, and a worty recipient of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury award in 2004. I have already seen it twice – first, at the Seattle International Film Festival last year, and then at a Seattle screening several months later. The first time, I made it through about the first third of the movie before becoming completely lost. Though lost, the rest was still fascinating. The second time, I fared better, making it through the second third of the movie before I was overtaken. Last night, the third time through, and aided by PowerDVD’s ability to rewind and replay important conversations or plot developments, I for the first time felt that I understood most of the movie. Certainly, I will need a few more tries at it before I really figure out the subtleties of the Primer universe, but I finally understood (I think) the idea behind the “failsafe machine,” and who the narrator really was – important details like this that had eluded me before. My next project in this regard is to watch the movie with the director’s commentary to learn what I can from that. Then maybe the cast commentary, though I’m doubtful if that will be helpful. Then maybe, I will finally get it. Or maybe not, and thats what makes it so much fun.
With the cancellation of my English class Tuesday, I found myself in a cafe on Capitol Hill with Dan at a SeattleWireless Hack Night. Not much hacking was going on that night, but after Dan and I got our SIFF choices figured out, Matt Westervelt seemed to be in the political discussion mood, and as the secretary of the Libertarian Party of King County, who was I to pass up such an opportunity? I come from an anti-government-power point of view, and Matt was coming from more of an anti-corporate-power point of view. The discussion was good, even tempered, and thought-provoking. In the end, I still think that most corporations, even global mega-conglomerates, have very little power outside of their capture of government regulation and manipulations of an over-reaching political system. Nevertheless, upon reflection, I think that the fundamental point is this: concentrations of power are dangerous, whether they be corporate or political. That two thinkers with different fundamental presumptions and world views can come to more or less the same conclusion on this topic is a testament to the importance of that fact. So I will state it again:
Concentrations of power are dangerous, whether they be corporate or political.
