Month: April 2006

Battlefield 2

Picked up Battlefield 2 for Xbox 360 the other day.  I absolutely love this game.  I played the demo for a solid week before I got it, so I had a bit of an advantage going in against all those other nubs.  I think out of my first five matches, I probobly averaged 50 points per game (that’s a good thing).  My performance dropped pretty quickly after that, however.  I think the match chooser in ranked games sorts by rank, so once I got up to around Master Sergeant, I was playing with people around my skill level and I started to get between 25-35 points.  Still, that’s better than average, so I can’t  complain.  My first 200 kills were with the engineer kit, no exceptions.  I’ve since adapted and can perform fairly well with sniper and assault too.  Still see no reason to have support, and I haven’t given special ops it’s fair share yet.  Yeah, blah.  If you want to play with me, my gamertag is RedKrieg.

Next weekend…

…I’m going to VT to visit my cousin!  I’m thinking maybe kegger, but we’ll see.  Should be a ball!

In related news, fuck The Bamboozle and their fucked up over protective policies.  I can’t fucking stand when a music festival bends over backward to appease the parents of the 14 year old crowd to get them in there.  It ruins good things.

When advertisers prey on Myspace ignoramuses

I’ve seen at least three different sites claiming to be a "see who’s looking at your myspace" deal…  They want you to post a bulletin with a link, picture, whatever.

That can’t possibly work.

The bulletin is never displayed on your profile, so there’s no way to track anything but who is clicking your bulletin.

The ONLY way to track visits to your profile itself would be to add code to your profile page linking to an off-site image.  Bulletins will not work.

I could write a backend to collect the referrer url whenever an image was requested, but said image would have to be on your profile, not in a bulletin.

All those "profile trackers" are doing is getting you to go to their site and increase the chances you’ll click their advertisements.

If you really want to see who’s requesting your profile, get a good webhost and start grepping your logs for requests to that image.  The referring url will include a token from which you can derive your friend’s friend ID, which could in theory be linked back to their profile.

I personally don’t know what encoding algorithm is used for the token, so no…  I won’t write you a friend tracker.  If anyone out there is willing to provide me technical info about how that token is encoded, I’ll be more than willing to write said tracker for you and tell you what you need to paste into your profile.

K, thx.

More IE hate

If you’re an Internet Explorer user, you noticed the splash page suggesting you download Firefox.  That was me.  It won’t show up again for two days assuming you have cookies enabled, so don’t worry about it too much if you’re accessing this from, say, an internet cafe or your work place.  If it’s the former, please suggest to them that they install Firefox.  If the latter, please round up all your IT personnel and get a petition going for senior management to get Firefox approved for your environment.  Your sysadmins will thank you in the long run.

Google AdSense

As much as I love Google, I chose not to sign up for their AdSense program to try and rake in a bit of cash from this desolate corner of the intarweb.  Why you might ask?  One of the provisions of their "Program Policies" is that one must not include "Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol".  That’s just not how I roll, so I’m gonna go have another beer and drift off into a peaceful slumber.

Good night world!

Richmond

How sweet it is. I go to richmond and visit my friend at work, and what awaits me? Free biscuits and all the Killian’s I can drink! This may not seem awesome to some of you, but I can throw back a LOT of beer, so I’m on fucking cloud nine. The only downside is having to wait for her to get off so we can go grab some totally sweet grub. No biggie though, I read Time and laughed at how much has changed from two weeks (when the magazine was written) until now. Thanks to the internet, print magazines are all but obsolete to the likes of me. I know what’s happening in the world up to the minute. And not that dumbed down stuff on CNN, real news… News that can show you what’s really going on in the world. Time did have a rather interesting article on teenagers multitasking. While I’ve read about the phenomenon often as of late, something about the presentation this time around made me realize that it’s something everyone I know does. I personally have caught myself in the act and actually tried to analyze what I’m thinking at the time… Here’s my brief: When balancing multiple tasks, I first sort them using two criteria:

  • Real time vs. My time
  • Important vs. Trivial

Now for some definitions: Real time – requiring constant attention to prevent failure; e.g. Driving, juggling, video games My time – non-critical in nature, no time constraints; e.g. Typing, reading an article Important – needs to be done, high priority; e.g. Assignments, work, maintaining a conversation Trivial – Frivilous, unneccecary; e.g. Doodling, singing along How are these used? Well of course the realtime important tasks are done first, but in many cases, real time tasks can be trivial… For instance when driving, I’ll often be typing a message to a friend on my phone. Both tasks are rather easy to accomplish and the typing can wait for gaps in activity. Tasks on my time with low priority can often times be tripled or even quadrupled with little detriment, usually making the total time required less than the sum of its parts. The other key to my multitasking is the ability to "put my mind on hold," storing working data into my short term memory and not having to think of it until I switch back to that task. When the tasks are different categories of thinking, this is even easier: communication tasks work very well with objective tasks. An excellent example being having a conversation while assembling a puzzle… Different parts of the brain can be trained to operate independently for the most part. Combine this with putting tasks on hold for brief periods and you’ve got yourself an awesome recipe for doing four things at once! I don’t know if other people do the same thing, but I’d be interested to find out! Drop me a comment and let me know. UPDATE: just to let everyone know, I was pretty drunk when I wrote this one…

On my way…

Headin’ up to richmond as I type this… Really needed a timewaster and a reason to try posting from my phone more than anything else. Driving by one’s self can be boring, especially with tunnel traffic. Todays adventure is sure to be worthwhile though, so who am I to complain? As much as I’d love to wax intellectual right now, I’m afraid my attention is divided between this and the road, and with the rain and traffic, I’m gonna say the road is winning. On that note, I bid thee adeiu.