The North American Union

I find this scary. Think about this for a second. The North American Union, No US, Canadian, or even Mexican representatives had any input.

It was just DONE!

Who's pulling those strings? Do the representatives know they're supposed to be involved in things like this? It's insane.

My PC is Overheating

Well so much for any PC gaming this weekend. It's over a hundred outside and my AC borke again! Argh... It's about 98 degrees right now and rising inside my apartment and it's making my PC overheat and reboot when I try to play any games. I've never had a heat issue with my PC before I hope it doesn't cause any real damage.

Oh well I guess it's to the mall or some place cool.

The Supporters of Vista

I have finally come to a realization about who the supporters of Windows Vista are. They're not users, that makes no sense since Vista is dead weight as a productivity tool. It's the OEM's and technicians who make money selling and servicing hardware. Bunch of lying used car salesman scumbags.

Over Produced Products

I saw this the other day and it made me realize that I'm among a growing number of people who prefer Microsoft Notepad to Microsoft Word. Then I looked at my AutoCAD Custom Menu's at work and it was the other way around. It made me realize how great Microsoft Word is for a journalist, but for me it's about as useful as giving a journalist a compass and telling him to use it write a story. He could do it but that tool is not the right one for HIM. Kinda like Word is the wrong one for me.

Installed Ubuntu at the Office

Well we'll see how this works out in the long run. I can't run AutoCAD or Adobe on it which are my two primary money makers so that sucks. But when it comes to other little things I think it'll make me a little more productive. Most of all I want to try VMWare to run windows inside Ubuntu and see if I'm more productive or not. Generally I get the feeling it'll make an improvement. But we'll have to see where it goes in the long run. I thought that I HAD to reinstall windows today anyway but it turned out my CD/DVD burner is just plain broke not the drivers.

I'm running the up to date official release of Hardy Heron LTS 8.04 both at the office and home now.

A New Encounter Level System (D&D)

I've seen this issue written about before. At this point there is no question that the Encounter Level system in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons doesn't work at higher levels. One thing that is clearly out of balance with both Team Evil and Team Heroes is that both have gold totals that are grossly out of whack with their level. So we decided to use the gold levels of your Items as part of the determining factor for a PC's Effective Level. Here's how it works, DMG pg 135 has a list of typical gold levels for PC's. We basically use this as a level determination tool, add up the gold value of all your magic items you don't include your keeps, non-magical jewelry, and all non-combat relevant stuff (including piles of coin,) let's say you have the gold of an 18th level character in items but you have the XP of a 12th level character. Take the Average of these two and you have the PC's Effective Level in this case it would be 15th level. So when determining XP treat the PC as 15th Level.

Or DM seemed a little squeamish about using this system. He says he fears player resentment which I can understand, but I think he doesn't need to worry about that. I can certainly see why it's a concern and I sure would like to see this system work and balance the game out. I think it will... Kinda sorta not really work. But it'll make everyone feel better about it. At least everyone involved is making an honest effort trying to make a system that wonn't work, work.

I think the real bottom line is that Dungeons and Dragons has gone from a poorly balanced role-playing game since 3.5 was released. To a grossly unbalanced role-playing game now that all the splat books are out. You've got the the two worst offenders Magic Item Compendium and the book of nine swords along with sprinklings throughout the splat books (like the Goliath and Hell Reaver) that definitely add excellent flavor but drastically lack game balance.

Getting Hit with the Nerf Bat (D&D)

Yesterday the DM for our weekly D&D Game with Team Heroes expressed concerns about the apparent power level of our group as whole as well as the power level of Lomak. It was after my 15 ECL Goliath did 154 points of damage with one hit without a crit. That's deceptive but true, he was using steadfast boots which double the damage dealt to a charging creature.

We discussed the issues and pointed out the fact that our 3 12th level, 2 13th level, and 1 15th level character's have the gold of a typical 17th level character each with one exception. We got to thinking about it and decided to Nerf our character's down to our level or get closer to our level in gold. And in the future we should take total gold value into account to figure for ECL.

The results of our attempted nurfing were not as inspiring as I had hoped. I dropped a ring that was very expensive but may have been broken anyway. That by itself brought my gold level down to my level since I am 15th it was easier for me than the other member's of the group.

We ran another fight in Moore Castle where we continued to level everything. We ran into a demon prince 18 ECL and in a matter of 2 rounds we dropped him. I was in shock, one of my buddies was insistent that this is just how it goes in high level games. If one of us go down it will be the same way he did quite a bit of damage in but by a fluke because of a magic Item that was not removed but thought would never get used the Demon Prince's attempt to heal himself healed my character instead. On the surface it did not look like a challenge but up until we stole his heal spell my character was well down past half and went from half to full hit points.

Then we decided to do some real testing. Our character's are specifically designed to fight "evil" and "Demons or Devils" So the results might be a little skewed in Moore Castle with the large number of fiends and evil in general. We ran a test run of 4 Iron Golems to see what would happen. Sure enough, the 4 Iron Golems lasted 7 to 8 rounds, the difference in how long the enemy lasted was stark. Individually the Golems were a CR of 13 but a total of 17 together. It was a really telling experience, we were really in no danger until the end when I started screwing around but the point had already been made clearly that the neutral golems were lasting far longer than the demons of Castle Moore even with thier lower CR. The important thing was they were not evil or demons.

So now I'm going to take my character's Gold to a 16th Character level, since I'm 800 XP away from leveling.

Case Closed

Well my first and hopefully last (well at least until I retire or actually have the time) run of jury duty is over. Now that it's over I can discuss it. It was about a malpractice suit I could never really be certain who the right person to believe in the case was but there was one thing I could trust not to lie the numbers.

I had written a much longer version which explained my opinion but couldn't cut down to bite sized so dang it I'll just give my opinion of the case instead.

That guy should count his blessings! The doctor saved his ass... Until it comes back, but if he's lucky he'll die of natural causes before it comes back.

On a positive note I'm not nearly as behind on work as I thought I was. I noticed I don't have the usual pile of work for a missed week. That may change Monday though.

Jury Duty

Well this sucks. I was one of those guys who got the jury duty summons and thought to myself Oh crap screw that I don't have time for that! Well, now that I'm on a jury the truth is I like serving on a jury, but now I know I really don't have time for it. I'm still expected to perform at work, and I know I'm failing. The owners don't say anything. Well... They're great people and say it's important and say that they support me but I can't get the feeling out of my head that now I'm a failure and I'm not going to recover from this It's caused a cascade of problems with the timing I had with my jobs. I've never been this far behind on the job before and it's really stressing me out. Oh well, tomorrow is closing arguments and hopefully we're all on the same page to make it quick.

Silverlight

I have heard a lot of good things about Silveright and I 'was' pretty excited to see a competitor with Adobe's Flash. Played around with the BETA and it was looking... Well BETA can't fault them for that it's just a new kind of flash app at this point not seeing anything special yet but does have potential and does look prettier. But I just discovered that Silverlight is designed to work with Vista's DRM capabilities and is a flash app specifically designed to do DRM, my hopes for a more reliable stable Flash app have been shattered. DRM has destroyed everything it's touched... Microsoft is investing wayyyy to heavily in DRM and it it's probably going to sink it seeing as how it's destroyed every product that's used it except apple. IF Vista isn't a shining example of the damage that the idea of "wrap DRM in a nice pretty package and everyone will buy it" has done to the PC industry I don't know what is. No one is buying Vista because it's pretty and they "want it." They only ones who get it do so because of Microsoft's virtual OS Monopoly and it's shoved down their throats. They'll probably try to do the same with Silverlight.

I'm certainly not saying it's gloom and doom for Microsoft, hell their management could join the ranks of the catholic church in infamy and continue churning out sub par products and they would still come out unscathed financially thanks to the OS monopoly. Until Google decides to openly break their business model they're not going anywhere.

Dungeons and Dragons

Been having a helluva time with my gaming group lately. Unfortunately I've been having a hard time making it to our weekly games. A few weeks ago I thought the game was canceled but I got that mixed with last week so I missed the scheduled game off and on. Then today I had to go into work, I can't catch a break.

I've got a character that I built to be quite the min/maxed monster. Lomak is now at a 15 ECL Goliath he's still primarily a damage dealing raging barbarian but with only 1 level of barbarian. I went with the hellreaver PrC because it's primary ability is the Holy Frenzy which has a nice holy barbarian flavor too it. But I underestimated just how powerful it is. It's abilities are all supernatural so they can be used while raging, in fact it's arguably a near broken class really pushing the limit especially the way I put it together it's just grossly powerful. I didn't expect it to be THIS powerful when I was doing it. My DM nerfed one of it's abilities which I really don't see a problem with seeing as how it is similar but superior to an ability of another well established holy class. That ability was only a supplement to the rest.

Still this is my first 15th level character in 3rd edition (or 3.5) and despite the fact that there is a lot of min/maxing the character is well rounded in combat but is capable of more damage than anything I've ever heard of. In his opening volley as a 15ECL he did well over 200 points of damage to a fiendish T-Rex in ONE ROUND! I've heard of crits on boards like that but the thing about this attack... there were no crits! just a straight up large amount of damage from a full power attack and 4 attacks due to haste. The amazing thing is he's well over +20 to hit with a full power attack. I know it's impressive to me but maybe not other's, this is the first 15th level 3rd edition character I've played. So I'm kinda left feeling is this broken or not?

Still it's frustrating that I feel min/maxing is required to play a character long enough to establish him. I had another character that was pure flavor but was feeblely min/maxed for combat, but now that I think about it he was min/maxed for flavor if you take my meaning. I think I had more fun with that rouge/wizard than any since my old group with my ranger who latest 8 years in a 2nd edition campaign which was a VERY long time for a character to survive. The rouge/wizard never died but the team broke up and the group fractured because of one player who seemed to enjoy causing problems. Still it was kind of nice retiring a character whom the DM would use later to be lord of the last metropolitan cities of his lands. The PC was perfect for the part of the lord who hires future low level adventurers to kick start new campaigns.

Got 8.04 Hardy Beta 64 bit Installed

Well I noticed that Grub loader got screwed up after going back and forth between the 64 & 32 biit Versions. So I decided to start back in square one and wiped my hard drive. This time I said screw it this time I'm going to dual boot the 32 & 64 bit only on purpose this time. For some reason I installed the 64 bit version first and the Video drivers installed just fine this time. I don't understand why but it is what it is I suppose. I'm going to be trying VMWare but I'm wondering about the fact that I got my 64 bit version working and I only have a 32 bit version of XP I may wind up having to reinstall Ubuntu 32 bit.

Broken Ubuntu

Well I was screwing around with wine trying to get it to recognize my CD's and I broke my Beta Ubuntu 8.04. Apparently there is a bug caused by copy protection that prevents many games with CD based copy protection from running (I first ran into it in Ubuntu 7.10 it's no beta problem.) It's not unusual for games to require access to the CD that installed them but with wine for some reason after installing it from CD it won't see the CD that just installed it. :/

I was probably way too tired when I lost access to the CD drive. So I reinstalled everything, now I can't install my freakin Nvidia drivers. DOH'

I'll have to try it again after some sleep. On the positive side of things Microsoft Windows improved a bit. I reinstalled XP to start dual booting again and service pack 3 has resolved one of it's major driver issues, I can use the mouse again, Yeah. I still need to use the fix for the sound using some generic microsoft sound drivers instead of the standard Realtek sound drivers. I'm not sure I trust the source though, it's one of those that makes me a bit paranoid it might be some sort of backdoor trojan that's unknown.

Back up

Well that's odd. I thought for sure I was using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Hardy but on a hunch I threw the 32 bit verision of Hardy and everything including the video drivers installed fine this time. I thought for sure I was using the 64 bit version before but Now I think I was mistaken. Oh well, all is good in the world again.

Just Found this on Dvorak.org Very cool and reopens up some interesting concepts like are some animals actually sentient? If you don't rethink those ideas after watching this your head must be made of concrete. Dosn't mean you can't arrive at the same conclusions but WOW this throws a interesting wrench into it.

Is there something wrong with Vista at a more basic level?

The most common complaint about Vista is usually people pointing at drivers. What if it's something much more basic?

I find this scary where it leads. Let's pick on EVGA since I use them(Any manufacturer will do.) check out their Video Card specs. They all carry the claim "built for Windows Vista."
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/512-P3-N802-AR.pdf

Now The Motherboards however are another story. No such promises or even claims that Vista will work. I'm pretty sure I remeber seeing it on there when I got it just after vista's release, but it's gone now.
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/122-CK-NF68.pdf

This is pretty much consistent will ALL motherboard manufacturers. My tinfoil hat theory is that it's for legal reasons. I think that the "driver problems" are related to a more basic problem that Microsoft and the manufacturers must know about but won't discuss openly, because Microsoft accidentally broke Vista in an attempt to increase hardware requirements to help them sell hardware. Again this is a tinfoil Hat theory, but it's either that or Microsoft has blown billions of dollors being totally incompetent.

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron BETA (New Operating System)

Having an interesting time with my first Linux BETA OS. Had my first little glitch with the video drivers trying to resize the resolution. On the very positive side however my sound drivers work much better with this build. In previous builds I had to max out the volume to make it what I consider medium. Other than that I have run into little in the way of hang ups. Plays all my Amazon music and DVD's great for entertainment.

All I can say is WOW this OS is purrrty. In the screen shot above I discovered I can have more than 4 desktops, that one has 5. Open Office has turned out to be much better than expected.

The state of PC gaming

The trend of video games the last few years has been a big push to consoles. PC gaming has been getting pushed to the side for many reasons the past few years for many reasons which make sense unfortunately. Many gamers hate the expensive system components, insecure operating system (windows,) crappy stability, and general buggyness of PCs. Unfortunately I tend to agree with those assessments but do they really outweigh the fun you can have on PC game system? Windows Vista has most certainly not been helping the situation. Direct X 10 is no good without a functional operating system. Then there is the Linux OS's, not much better. Wine is a great attempt at bringing the mainstream games to an alternate OS and it's got some potiental like most Linux to Microsoft items compatibility has been less than stellar. I really wish I could say otherwise. It's a hobby in itself just getting the stuff to run, I'm not giving up on it I find the challenge to be fun but that will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream.

Never the less the flexibility to do what you want with a PC system is clearly superior. The consoles are definitely trying to bring the two closer but when it comes to being part of a group on the internet PCs crush consoles. There is Xfire, Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Team websites, message boards, chat clients, the list goes on for days when it comes to PC's and community. Some of these are accessible with some browsers now built into the consoles but there's still no comparison to a PC when it comes to communicating on a message board.

Dispite that console gaming have some more obvious advantages. Hacking and piracy are a lot less common in the console world, it's there just less common and game makers like that which makes sense why they would want to promote it. It's not that they're less hackable it's just that hackers often like the same kind of flexibility and community (different circles though hacks take the fun out of it for me) that I like. Then there is the fact that windows has not been making improvements and frankly they've been making it difficult to see a future in PC gaming since game publishers will only publish on a windows system. The console game systems tend to be more stable in general, you don't have to worry about drivers crashing or the blue screen of death. Your console will run the game effectively it's practically a given. Most of all, a top notch console will run you about 600 bucks plus the extras. A top notch PC well that'll vary a lot! Opinions vary and they've all got good points. I think it's safe to say that you can figure on 2 grand for a good gamers PC that's a pretty huge discrepancy and it makes sense why parents buy their kids a console while many of the older gamers like myself tend to go PC.

With Parents buying their kids more consoles than old timers are getting PC's it's no wonder the number of console game titles are finally outnumbering the PC game titles. That may be the final blow to PC gaming making it a bastard child of gaming in the near future letting consoles take over.

Disappointed with Microsoft Windows

For a long time I've been one of those fanboys making excuses for windows. It's been over a year since the official release of Windows Vista and a despite that fact I recently felt so disenfranchised with this last release of windows (Vista) I can't continue making excuses for it since the service pack and/or patches haven't fixed the buggyness of Vista and I have now have switched to Linux. It was quite an eye opener, and made me realize just how bad Microsoft really is between their questionable monopolistic business tactics and poor quality product. If they were not a monopoly they'd out of the job with this considering what they wasted making it. If you compare the minimum requirements of the latest Linux vs the latest Windows the differences are gross. The latest Linux is backward compatible to the Pentium 2 generation, how is it possible that Microsoft spends billions on R&D for the new Windows and can't achieve that kind of efficiency and compatibility? I don't like the only possible conclusion I can see. They must be deliberately bloating the hardware requirements for the hardware manufacturers to secure hardware sales. It's the only thing that makes sense or are they really that incompetent? I can't say I'm too surprised, I've listened to a few of Steve Balmers interviews on Vista's poor performance. It really points out the whole attitude at Microsoft of sticking their fingers in their ears and humming. They spend all that R&D on bloating and overproducing the product instead of thinking of the basics and streamlining the kernel for both security and efficiency. I guess they've got their priorities where they want them, protecting the big corporate interests while screwing their consumers and the only thing out of their customers is "thank you sir may I have another." Well not this former customer, not anymore.

Maybe they'll come out of their funk. But I have a suspicion it's going to take the Return of Gates full time or something drastic to make that happen.