Kevin's Musings

I love long weekends, but who doesn’t – but are they ever long enough? We have been spending our unusually long weekend with in the Phoenix area with family — we’ve staying with the my missus’s poppy and his wife, our son, and his girlfriend. We’ve mostly just been relaxing and visiting. We spent part of a morning hitting garage sales (always fun going through other people’s reject-stuff). We played a game of Bocce Ball (on a real Bocce Ball court, click here for a description of Bocce Ball). Then we attended a play that a friend of ours is in, Everybody Loves Opal. We don’t have specific plans for the rest of the long weekend, but I’m sure we’ll figure out something interesting.

Just remember,

• If someone asks you if you’re a god, you say “YES”!
• If someone asks you if you are Sarah Conner, you say “NO”!

I’ve been thee quarters-heartedly working toward getting the final achievement points in Assassin’s Creed, which means collecting lots and lots and lots of flags. While it isn’t quite as many flags as orbs in Crackdown, the Crackdown orbs were a lot more fun to collect. This got me thinking about the comparison of the two games… there is a fair bit that the have in common but if you asked me which one is more fun, I would definitely give the nod to Crackdown. The huge jumps (which never get old) and the diversity of tasks make Crackdown better (by a long shot). I still think Assassin’s Creed was a solid game and I’ve had a lot of fun with it, they got the free running and climbing absolutely right and the fighting system is spot on. It (almost easily) could have been a 10/10 game with just a bit more variety (and possibly with a somewhat improved AI system). Anyway, if you have a 360 and haven’t played Crackdown, go pick it up – I am sure you can find a $20 copy of it.

I played a bit of SSX3 last night on the 360. It plays it pretty flawlessly using the 360’s Backwards Compatibility feature. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have widescreen support, but it is still a lot of fun. I am really pining for a new SSX game (SSX5?) to come out native to the 360.

I got up this morning and checked my email and the my Weather Widget, as I do pretty much every morning. There was nothing notable in my email, but the Weather Widget informed me I was going to have to bundle up for my walk into work (I walk from Grand Central Station to work most mornings — and evenings back to Grand Central, about 1.8 miles each way) — the widget informed me it was a chilly NINE degrees (Fahrenheit, of course) outside. I’m sure with the wind chill it was more like -47 (well, maybe not – but it felt like it). I am sure it was actually more like 12 or 13 for my walk in, but ouch it is cold outside. Amazingly, it is supposed to be 55 degrees on Monday — the weather just can’t make up its mind.

I love languages. No, I’m not enamored with French or Spanish. German is kinda cool, but Groovy is, well, really Groovy. It’s no secret I’m a Java fan, I’ve also written at least my fair share of PHP, Python and probably a dozen other languages (C, C++, C#, [Object]Pascal, LISP, JavaScript, BASIC of various flavors.. just to new a few). I’ve played with Ruby (and read some of this amazingly great Ruby book) but I tend to come back to Java (with some PHP now and then for my personal web site). Scripting languages are neat, but I tend to prefer strongly typed languages and like to work in a good IDE (currently I use Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA for Java code). The only language I tend to despise is Perl – bleh (although I couldn’t get into Forth the couple times I tried).

I’ve been watching Groovy since (approximately) its inception. Groovy is a very Ruby-esque language but with roots in Java. I’ve been meaning to do something with it but have just never gotten around to it. I had heard tell of it’s beautiful abilities to parse XML. I knew it had some degree of interoperability with Java (Groovy scripts execute within the JVM) but I didn’t realize how totally complete the interoperability could be. You can write and run Groovy so that it is plain Groovy, you can write Groovy so that it leverages the Java standard library (or any objects created in Java) or you can compile .groovy files into .class files and treat them like normal Java classes – seamlessly create Groovy objects in Java and vice versa, pass the objects back and forth. Really neat. Do whatever lifting in whatever language you like, completely flexible. The Groovy compiler (groovyc)  will happily pass compilation of non-Groovy (.java) files to the standard javac compiler so you only need to have one line in your ant script to compile both languages.

After writing the XML parser for my current project in Groovy (the rest of the project is Java) I wrote a couple of other stand-alone Groovy scripts to become more familiar with Groovy and I will say I am very impressed. If you’re a Java programmer (or just a language lover) you should check out Groovy. And for a nice bonus, IntelliJ IDEA comes with a nice plug-in for editing .groovy files.

I’m still liking my new hosting provider. With some luck, nobody will know the difference (except me).  Their time to respond to support / questions via email is much faster than any hosting provider I have used in the past.

I went (without the missus) to see Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Alien vs. Predator Reqium. Both movies where exactly what I expected, if you have an opinion, it will probably match your opinion. If you like those kinds of movies, go see them. Dewey Cox was silly, somewhat funny but not “over the top” funny. AvPR had a tremendously high body count (even higher than Sweeny Todd) but was pretty much a movie focused at the teenage boy – not really for the connoisseur or Alien OR Predator. AvP (the original) was better than I expected, this one was “as expected.” Oh well.

I am still greatly enjoying Orange Box (on the 360). Even though I previously played Half-Life 2 and (started playing but never finished) Half-Life 2 Episode One on the PC, I would still say everyone needs to get Orange Box for their respective system (unless you don’t play games / shooters…). The Half-Life series is absolutely the best set of games (better, I dare say, than anything Halo has imagined) — and Portal, I can’t say enough good things about Portal. If you don’t play games, have someone you love (who does play games) play Portal for you, what a game. And then they throw in Team Fortress 2? What a package. I finished Half-Life 2 tonight from Orange Box on the 360 and I am still blown away. Sure, maybe it isn’t Half-Life (the original) but it is a super, super solid game. The bump in graphics they gave it on the 360 is evident. They made a beautiful game look even better. Also, the addition of achievements is always welcome. I have started (again) playing Half-Life 2 Episode One and am looking forward to Episode Two.

We saw Burton & Depp‘s new movie Sweeny Todd and the Ridiculously Long Title. I haven’t seen the Sondheim Broadway musical on which it was based, but the movie is fantastic, but I can’t imagine it will be a box office success. First, it is absolutely a musical. The music is really nice and all the voices and music are top notch, but I don’t see the average American film-goer going to a musical. Secondly, it is (deservedly) R-rated and while there were lots of folks there with their teen and pre-teen kids, it is bloody (drip drip drip). I don’t mean “I nicked myself shaving” bloody, I mean “I’ve seen slasher films with a smaller body count and less blood” bloody. But, all that said, we really enjoyed it and don’t feel bad that we paid full price to see it on the big screen. I would categorize it as an intensely dark comedy / tragedy with really nice singing and music. If what I have said so far doesn’t turn you off, run out and see it – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I am just completing the changeover of my hosting provider. I was previously with made2own.com and while they have offered relatively good service and hosting, I am now using Hostgator.com and (so far) I am incredibly pleased with them – while I would say it is still over-priced, their price is considerably better and their email support is a lot faster (or it has been so far). I would have stayed with my previous provider, but they decided their hosting service should cost nearly 5 times as much as they charged in the past few years, which I think is crazy.

We got the movie Deep Water from Netflix a couple days ago and watched it last night. This is an incredibly interesting documentary about a group of men who did a yacht race around the world. The rules required to leave before a specific day, only one man per yacht, and the boat can never come to shore. The trip takes (or at the time took) about 10 months and this was in the days before GPS – a absolute test of skill and mental fortitude. I won’t give any further details because I encourage everyone reading this to go rent the movie, I can’t imagine you won’t be captivated from start to finish.

Spend some time with someone you love. Do something silly. Have a good time.

Since I got the TiVo HD I have been doing a fair amount of video conversion so I can watch TV shows on my PSP while I commute, which is really nice. My only complaint is that Vista has caused just a touch of premature aging to my desktop machine and when it is doing a video encoding the gray hairs are even more apparent. This, coupled with the fan on my “decent” video card getting really loud a few weeks ago, prompted me to look into a few upgrades. Since I am mostly doing gaming on the 360 these days, I didn’t feel I needed to upgrade to “state of the art”, just give it a bit more horsepower.

I ended up bumping the memory from 1GB to 2GB (a must if you are using Vista, IMO), I upgraded the CPU from an Athlon XP 3800+ (single core) to a Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (dual core). And the video card from an Nvidia 6600GT (down to a NVidia 6200, when the 6600GT fan flaked out) to a 7600GS. While the 7600GS won’t win any “major awards”, I was able at least to play the Hellgate: London demo without it being overly glitchy – which is a vast improvement over my previous configuration. In general, everything now feels much more responsive. The fact that Vista almost downright requires 2GB of RAM and a dual core processor is kind of sad – Vista is such a hog.

We don’t have any extensive holiday plans. I am planning to take a few extra days off to catch up on some movies, play some games, and spend some time with the missus.

One of our neighbors is Danish. She and her husband invited us to a “Danish Christmas Feast” where we ate interesting Danish foods including a couple different kinds of herring, etc. Most of the food was new to us but everything was good. Humorously, after they played Guitar Hero at our place, they bought a 360 so they can play GH. So, after dinner we all took turns playing it, a good time had by all.

Aside from the all day affair of the Danish Christmas Feast, we mostly spent the weekend in. We caught up on some TV, watched The Manhattan Project, I finished my first play through of Mass Effect (great game!!). I started playing Half-Life 2 from Orange Box. The Half-Life series has been on the top of my list of favorite games, and Half-Life 2 on the 360 looks phenomenal — I played it when it first came out on the PC, and I think it looks even better now. They also got the controls spot on, which is always a worry for a game when it moves from the PC to the console.