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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • All kinds of trouble

    I would like to state for the record that running Groupwise is preferable to running Outlook. Along the same lines, death by beheading is preferable to death by starvation.

    Corporate email is having all kinds of trouble this week. I’m certain that it’s a problem I’ve had with Groupwise in the past, namely that one corrupt message in the processing queue can bring down the entire server. As of this writing, incoming mail is sporadic, outgoing mail doesn’t seem to be working (although Corporate claims that it should be) and there’s no way to know when things will be back to normal.

    In addition to that bit of jolly good fun, the T1 that carries the streaming audio as well as data to and from the kgon.com machines here in the building had another spate of strangeness this morning. The problem seems to have solved itself, but I have the phone number of someone at Northwest Link if it goes bad again. Once again, if the T1 goes down then this website is useless.

    My ongoing task for the day is to rebuild the computer for the west conference room. Its hard drive failed in the classic click-of-death fashion. This sucks pretty hard, since it had all of the Panja programming software installed as well as the Smartboard drivers and various other nifty software and data. Grr. I hate relying on spinning metal disks for data storage almost as much as I hate relying on flimsy plastic strips wrapped around spindles for data backup.

  • Taglines, get your big steaming bowl of taglines!

    Because the world really, really needs another geek with a gigantic taglines collection… I present unto you my complete taglines file. Be careful, it’s 164 kilobytes in size. It’s been sorted and lightly duplicate-checked, and contains lots of geeky stuff as well as the occasional tagline you don’t want to show your parents. Or your children, depending.

    The majority of these came to me from the proprietress of Cosmic Central, so you should probably peek in at her site. She’s good people.

  • If I had a car, I’d put some of these on it.

    I’m not really sure about the premise, but seeing as how I’m one of those losers who enjoys reading bumper stickers I couldn’t resist visiting InternetBumperStickers.com.

    Link via Cosmic Central.

  • A great new game that’s a lot like a great old game

    As promised, I’ve typed up a quick review of the game I badgered Wendi into buying for me this weekend.
    Heroes IV review

  • Brief outtage

    At a little before 4:30 this afternoon, Northwest Link‘s main router crashed. It took over ten minutes for them to restore operation, and during that time the T1 to Entercom Portland was useless. Hence no database for this site, no IRC chat, no streaming audio for those three stations that still do streaming, and a host of other useful functions were cut off.

    I suppose that ten or fifteen minutes isn’t that bad in the great scheme of things, but until Invite.net upgrades their MySQL server I have to rely on a machine at work to host the database. I don’t like being dependent on Entercom hardware to keep this site operational.

  • Heroes of Might and Magic IV

    There are three computer game styles I love. Shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament help me unwind after a stressful day. Realtime Strategy games like Age of Empires give me that wonderful experience of building an army and obliterating my enemies. And there are turn-based games like the Heroes of Might and Magic series.

    The long-awaited fourth installment of “HoMM” makes a few significant changes to the gameplay that made the previous titles so successful, but keeps intact the best parts of the series. Anyone who has played either Heroes 2 or Heroes 3 will spend a fairly short time adjusting to the changes in the new game.

    The most significant gameplay changes are the new skill system and the fact that heroes and creatures truly work together interchangeably now. You can have more than one hero in a group, or you can have a group without heroes at all. These creature-only groups are limited, but they make great decoys. Having heroes take active part in combat takes getting used to, but after a while you realize that this is how it should have been done all along. Your opinion may differ if you’re a longtime Heroes player, but for my money this is the way to go.

    What takes more mental adjustment for veteran Heroes players is the new skill system. It’s complex. A hero that starts out with one title can be built to wear another with the proper progression of skills. Take my advice: If you buy this game, also buy a copy of the Prima guide just so you have a handy set of detailed charts.

    Other changes include a totally new visual style, wandering creature stacks, caravans for creature transport, daily creature generation and a few new types of map structures. Oh, and as of this writing the game has no networked multiplayer capability. Hotseat is an option, however, so our household is okay.

    Heroes IV is a splendid game overall. The only minor quibbles I have right now are the disabled multiplayer mode due to be fixed in a future patch release and a seemingly slow and difficult “early” game. In other words, when you’re starting out it takes forever to move around and you tend to have difficulty patrolling your area effectively. I haven’t completed any of the campaigns or larger maps yet so this may not turn out to be an issue in the long run.

    If you want a game that looks great, is mentally stimulating and terribly addictive, pick up Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I highly recommend it.

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