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Author: Rembrandt Created: 8/23/2006 4:12 PM
Mindless rantings of a dizzy geek.
Gaming Catchup
By Rembrandt on 11/10/2006 11:21 AM
Not like I have had a lot of time recently. But since my last post, I played a bit of 'Just Cause', and I either got frustrated with the controls, or something - because I just couldn't 'get into' it as much as I thought I might.

I might have just been the mood for a different game. So .. I broke out Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, [Ebay $10] I've always been a sucker for these games, and this one is pretty cool. I got through 44 of 45 achievements, the last one being .. of course 100% completion .. which means I have to play everything all over again at 'normal' settings, and then play the stupid story AGAIN, at 'easy'. I don't see the point of it, its not like the plots will change, only the 'point' requirements on scores and stuff in levels. *sigh* I'll do it, but it will be between other games. [Another quirk, I needed LIVE to do about 12 of the achievements. thank goodness they were easy ones, because there was like NO ONE playing this game on live.]

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance being one of them. I splurged, and acutally bought this retail. (I was in Target buying 'Cars' for my son.) I've played the first mission through, and its pretty cool. I've always liked the RPG/Action games on platforms. Although so far it seems pretty much linear on the RPG stuff. I got some silly unlock code for Daredevil with the game, but no instructions on how to use it or where to use it to unlock the character .. great .. talk about great marketing. The inter-web doesn't say much either.
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Star Wars Is DONE ! Viva La Revolution !
By Rembrandt on 10/25/2006 11:36 PM
Finally finished the last 4 missions in Lego Starwars II. Some 55 hours to finish the game 100% with all 1000 gamer points on xbox live. thats less than .50 cents an hour in entertainment costs :P

I've moved on to 'Just Cause', another e-bay win for $20 under retail. At first I wasn't convinced it was as good as I was hoping for, but its growing on me. Oddly enough, I seem to be wanted by the police all the time.

Overall, I find the gamer system for xbox live to be interesting. For any new game there is about 3-4 hours of play time where you really just establish what the hell your doing. Gamer points come slow. Then there is a middle phase, where you pick up a bunch of points quickly, as various stuff that has been stacking up as you 'learned' catches up to you. After that you hit the tedious 'end' phase, like in Star Wars Legos II, where it takes like 3-4 days to get the last 100 points or whatever.

Tomb Raider Legends followed the same curve, but was a lot more enticing to 'keep going' so to speak. I found it to be very easy to WANT to play through to get the last few awards. Star Wars Legos II was fine until i hit the last few, eyes-bleeding because I have played them 100's of times already, levels.

Just Cause, is a little wierd, it seems a little disjointed, its cool from the go anywhere - do anything stand point, but at the same time - the 'story' missions are pretty weak, I find i'm not as 'involved' in the story as I was in Tomb Raider.

Time will tell.
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Star Wars Legos II - coming to a close
By Rembrandt on 10/2/2006 11:50 AM
After about 3 weeks of plugging away at it .. the end of Star Wars Legos II is coming into focus, Last night I racked up about 230 points out of the 1,000 in about an hour. [Finishing up a bunch of missions I had open, and hitting 80% of the game done.] I really have only clean up work on Return of the Jedi to do - which should go fairly quick.

The last 80 points, doing the remaining four 'flying' missions without dying, those are going to be the hardest.

So in a week or so I should be back to killing zombies, unless I decide to finally 'finish' call of duty-2 by doing the remaining levels I have to do at the 'ultra-hard' setting.
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When the boy is gone ...
By Rembrandt on 9/25/2006 2:00 PM
The house is just too quiet. Don't get me wrong, there are worse places for him to be during the day. Day care is way friggen expensive, and we are holding our own as it is. So the last thing I will do is complain that the boy spends time at his grandparents every week.

He could be in a day care, with people that basically sit him in a corner and ignore him, all the while costing us more than my wife makes in a week. Instead, he is with people who love him, and would easily protect him as fiercly as we would. People who stimulate his mind, and play with him, teach him things, and make him laugh.

It still doesn't help that the house is so quiet, and that between 6:00 and 6:30 if I play video games at all, its by myself, with no one to laugh or tell me to make someone walk off a cliff into a hole.

No matter how good it is for him to be with family during the week, he isn't here, and I miss him.
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Shot down by google
By Rembrandt on 9/21/2006 12:09 PM
Apparantly not just ANYONE can get google adsence anymore:

Hello XXX,

Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense. After reviewing your application, our specialists have found that it does not meet our program criteria. Therefore, we are unable to accept you into our program.

We have certain policies in place that we believe will help ensure the effectiveness of Google ads for our publishers as well as for our advertisers. We review all publishers, and we reserve the right to decline any application. As we grow, we may find that we are able to expand our program to more web publishers with a wider variety of web content.

Please note that we may not be able to respond to inquiries regarding the specific reasons for our decision. Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

The funny thing is, they never say exactly WHAT the criteria is .. oh well .. not like I expected to make a fortune off of it anyways. Funny that certain pr0n sites can get google ads, random blogs can get google ads, and 'clickthrough' sites can get google ads. Just not me.
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Not sure of my point of view.
By Rembrandt on 9/15/2006 3:14 PM
We have this old TV. Well .. make that HAD this old TV. It was a hand-me-down from christa's folks in 2000 when they moved out of their old house to VA. The TV was a number of years old by that point .. today .. I would say it would have easily been 10 or 11 years old.

At least that was before I woke up.

I walked downstairs this morning, went into the basement to start up a Backup Job for work, then went back upstairs to get some toast and tea. I turned on our TV to watch some Mythbusters or something else we recorded on the ReplayTV. Our TV takes a while to 'warm up' .. normally it just kind of 'clicks' on after a min or so ..

After two mins I found myself impatient, After five, I thought 'oh crap'. I had sound, I had no picture. I wacked the TV, hoping for some results .. nothing. I turned it off then on .. nothing. Even now I find that I am still caught half way between elated and depressed.

Christa said the other day that I was 'excited' about out TV being on its last legs. [Its been on its last legs for like a year .. but in the past few weeks the HUM that you hear over the speakers has gotten louder, and the wavy lines you see go up and down the screen have become more and more pronounced.

I explained to her, that its obvious that ALL men love technology. Hand in Hand with that is the fact that ALL men hate to spend more than $100 on a TV.

So I am equal parts dismayed and elated. I would LOVE to buy a flat panel TV, that we could put a wooden frame around, and a painted canvas over .. so it woudln't LOOK like we have a TV in the living room. But I don't really want to pay $1800.00 for a good TV.

Sometime before Sunday, I will have to go over to Best-Buy and see if they have any open boxed sets on sale, because Chris comes home on sunday morning, and we still have 2 discs of the second season of LOST to watch.

She'll kill me if we cant.
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Is it a victory when someone looks scared shitless all the time ?
By Rembrandt on 9/13/2006 11:11 AM
Score: US: 1 vs Builder: 0.

As I am sure many of you are just pining away to hear the latest crappy saga in my life, I would hate to dissapoint.

We have been fighting with the developer who built the little strip of 10 houses on our street for over a year. The lots all around us were never graded properly, and as a result of being at the bottom of a hill, about 300 yards from the river, we get a LOT of water in our yard.

In the summer, its a swamp - complete with mosqueto infestation, and large reptiles.

In the winter, we have our own ice skating rink.

Either way, with the (final) addition of a house on the lot directly [and by directly, I mean EXACTLY six-teen feet] next to us, its gotten a lot worse. By that, I mean our basement never flooded before this year. Our power was never all wonkey, its just gotten bad.

Of course, I have been trying to get the developer to fix it. Every time they tried, it got worse. Gas lines were ruptured, landscaping was destroyed. My father-in-law called the county, I called the county, my wife called the county. [I think we got an inspector canned] and Today .. Today ... the current inspector - incidently, a nice guy .. biker always tries to do what he says he will - came out .. with the developer and 3 contractors. He told them, with not an ounce of subtle hinting, that until this is fixed, nothing else is going to be approved. He also suggested that if its not fixed well, and promptly, that situation might not ever change. When dealing with them .. he was *NOT* a nice man.

After the developer left, he told me that like a lot of developers, this guy was playing the system. As long as they do a 'little' work and show effort, its hard to pin them down and extract funds, stop work orders - but that didn't mean he couldn't turn the thumbscrews in other ways :) I got the impression that didn't sit too well with him. :)
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His indian name should be 'Whispers in the Night'
By Rembrandt on 9/12/2006 1:13 AM
You would think, that after a day with very little sleep, a BUNCH of being overworked, and a tonne of drama involving a builder from hell .. I would be tired or frustrated when my son wakes up at 1:30 .. just as I am about ready to go to bed.

You would be right, if he were a normal kid.

Instead of screaming like he would have two or three months ago, he now opens the door to his room seeing as he graduated to a 'Big Boy' bed a month or so ago, being freakishly tall. He creeps out to the top of the stairs, with someone in tow. Could it be 'Brown Bear' his (thusfar) lifelong sleeping companion ? Or maybe the stuffed black cat that was mine as a child, which my wife let him know .. once .. about a week ago .. had been mine as a child. Incidently, now named 'Dad's cat', or 'black cat' if he is feeling descriptive.

He approaches the top of our stairs that lead to the living room, where I am reading a book, trying to unwind my brain enough to get to sleep. Standing infront of the childgate which keeps him from his normal reckless headlong pitch down the stairs, he whispers 'Dad'.

'Dad' 'Dad ?' 'Da' 'Dad' 'Dad ?'

He is whispering, and when I pick him up, he says [still whispering] 'mom's sleeping, get bot[tle]' and points down the stairs.

It was hard not to laugh.
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Straight to the point
By Rembrandt on 9/11/2006 6:30 AM
I am not the easiest person to rouse from sleep.
I can be cranky, sullen, moody, beligerent or on a good day, I might just ignore you.
I blame it on very rarely getting more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep in a good night.

Sometimes its hard to shut off your brain, seems to be my family's curse.

This morning around roughly seven, I awoke to hear my wife whispering to my son 'What did you want to say to daddy ?'

No response.

'Vincent, what do you want to tell daddy ?'

Nothing.

Really leading him on she says 'What do you want daddy to do ?'

The correct answer, of course, is 'Wake Up' as she has to leave for work, and the boy needs watching.

Vincent looks right at me, notices I opened my eyes, looks at his mother, smiles, then turns back to me and gleefully says 'CUPCAKE!'

Hey .. any good salesman knows - you never get a 'yes' until you have asked.
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Pipes vs Cigars vs Cigarettes
By Rembrandt on 8/31/2006 8:57 AM
I honestly don't consider myself a 'smoker'. I have a small humidor with cigars in it, a handful of pipes, and a bunch of pipe tobacco, but I still don't think I am a smoker.

I have a lighter specifically for lighting pipes, and one for lighting cigars, but I don't consider myself a smoker.

I will go weeks, MONTHS even, without smoking tobacco, and honestly really only consume it for the taste, and ritual involved - not the niccotine.

I think, personally, to be a smoker - you have got to be hooked on the cigarettes. Cat-piss-smelling, formaldyhyde-containing, 60-seconds of crap ACTUALLY in your lungs, cigarettes.

So, by that defination, I don't consider myself a smoker. That being said, I went out to eat the other evening, and the restraunt (Silver Springs Mining Company) had a sign at the bar. [Where they allow smoking.]

'Cigar and Pipe Smoking not Allowed.'

You have GOT to be kidding me. Cigars may not smell like roses, but they smell a damn sight better than cigarettes, and PIPES, man .. I have tobacco that smells like resberries .. or Vanillia .. or Christmas cookies .. how can *THAT* be offensive when compared to cat-piss cigarette smoke ?

I just find it odd, that its 'OK' to smoke cigarettes at a public bar, but a Pipe .. something once associated with a gentleman .. thats like a public no-no.

This country is wierd. I'm trying to imagine someone getting thrown out of the 'The Half Moon'
or 'Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem' for smoking a PIPE.
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