I’m not really sure how well this will work, but we’ll see. I’m writing this via my sidekick. Lauren and I are driving up to A&M to visit Ashley.
We’ll keep this short.
Jade empire rocks. Sahara is a good popcorn flick (Steve Zahn is funny shit). The Sox won. Who could really ask for a better weekend.
Blogging at 70mph rocks!
Now theres a combo.
We’ll take these one at a time since they each deserve equal bantering.
Saturday night Lauren and I hung out with Ashley and went to see Fever Pitch, the new movie about a guy who loves the RedSox. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The story was mediocre and I really dislike Drew Barrymore as an actress, but the subject matter was there and it was good to feel a little Boston pride. The reviews are split right down the middle. Most are calling it a mildly interesting movie about baseball and fanaticism and the rest are calling it the date movie of the year. I thought it was probably about a 70%. Like I said, the subject matter is there, Jimmy Fallon doesn’t completely suck and there are quite a few moment where I laughed out loud. The rest was your average date movie. I can’t see it doing well at the box office though. It’s a movie about Boston, Boston Fans and the RedSox. People actually IN Boston will think it’s cheesy and people outside of Boston won’t get it. It was pretty much made for people like me, a fan, who wasn’t actually in Boston when they won. It brings that feel good hometown thing to the big screen for everybody that didn’t get to experience it first hand. Unfortunately for the box office numbers, that not a lot of people. We were 3 of about 30 people in the theater… and the movie just opened on Friday. Not a bad flick. Folks like me and Nagle should drag their girls to it so they can begin to understand about RedSox fans… everybody else can wait for DVD.
Taxes. Why me? After doing our taxes last night with the help of Turbo Tax, it appears that we owe the government $850. Wonderful. Just wonderful. It seems that Lauren and I both put “Married 2” on our W4’s, which means the government takes less each paycheck but you get less back, if anything, at the end of the year. Well, the places Lauren worked for last year took that to an extreme and took out next to nothing. Out of $5000 she made at one place, they only took out $120. That’s just not right. Although, maybe it is. Our W2s match our pay stubs, so, it could be right. If it is, we’re really getting the short of end the stick this year. It also doesn’t help that we’re into the next tax bracket by about $1000. Huzah. So, instead of a few hundred back, we’ve got to shell out $850 in the next few days. Isn’t that just awesome. I’m so happy the government is working for us and doing so many wonderful things, aren’t you?
Sigh.
Ok, we’ll end this on an up note of sorts. Video Games. I’ve got 3 to drop on you and only one of them was playable. That’s right. One. Last week I took a look at Prince of Persia 2, Star Wars Battlefront and Acts of War.
Prince of Persia 2 wasn’t even remotely playable. It didn’t pass my 15 minute test, mostly due to technical issues. When I loaded it up, the Bink movies that are the intro kept crashing the game. I wrote to UbiSoft tech support about it and got the canned “update your video drivers” answer. Well, considering Brothers in Arms as well as BF (something I play everyday) use Bink movies, I hardly think video card drivers are the issue. So, I found a save game and loaded past the intro movies to actual game play. It was canned, repetitive and completely uninteresting. They seriously toned down the one thing that made PoP good, the jumping/puzzle solving. Instead they focused on a combat system, which while interesting could be found in every run of the mill fighting game. Nothing innovative about being able to make a hit combo, sorry guys. Final Grade: D+ / C- (if you can get it to work).
Acts of War was at least playable. The concept was different: a RTS based (loosely) on current world events. I think the real problem here is that whoever was developing this had never made a RTS before. Reinventing the wheel didn’t really work out of them. Also, they really stripped down the standard RTS model and tried to replace it with “nifty” things. Resource gathering doesn’t really exist, neither does building anything more than troops. It’s a lot like C&C. You have a base, the base creates an army, you go blow stuff up. End of story. It also doesn’t help that the story itself is super weak. US soldiers protecting Paris during a UN converence? Come on. There are so many better RTS games out there, this one just isn’t worth the time. Passed the 15 minute test, but only for about a half-hour. Final Grade: C+
StarWars Battlefront was both playable and enjoyable. It’s actually fun AND interesting AND capable of being played for more than 15 minutes without wanting to rip out your eyes. The premise is simple: a FPS based on the StarWars universe and played in a Battlefield model. You have conquest spawn points that need capturing, you can hop in vehicles, be different classes and recreate any of the major battles from any of the 6 movies. The geek level from being able to grab a Tom-Tom on Hoth and go after Imperial walkers is unreal. The game also looks nice graphically. The interface is easy, it’s got some pretty decent bots if you’re playing Single player (campaign or instant battle) and of course the real meat is the multiplayer. Servers are a little sparse but once you find a couple that are actually populated the game becomes very enjoyable. I’ll stick with Battlefield but it I ever need a StarWars fix, this will do the trick. My only real complaint is some of the mechanics and weapon issues, but if the game were to get any sort of a following, those would be things that could be fixable in patches. Final Grade: B+/A-
Matt out.
Dunno really why it was broken. I looked at the php, poked at it, didn’t change anything major, just moved some things and changed some spacing to clean up the code. I uploaded it on a lark and now it works, go figure.
Long long week is finally over. Looking forward to spending some time with Lauren and relaxing a bit. Her dad’s birthday is tomorrow, I think we might be going to get some food.
Oh, and I’ve got a few game reviews for you guys once I get around to typing them. Prince of Persia 2, StarWars Battlefront and Acts of War are all subjected to Matt’s famous “15 minute test”. I’ll let you know which ones passed in my next post. Until then, enjoy the working Recent Links as well as the weekend.
Later.
You know, it feels REALLY good to smack the shit out of a virus or some spyware. It really does. People who write that sort of shit are dickless, friendless assholes who will be serving me my coffee for the rest of their pathetic lives.
Yesterday I got an e-card from Blue Mountain, a company I’ve heard of and used before. I thought it was from my mom. The link to get my card when to the blue mountain servers (so I thought). When nothing opened in Firefox I assumed it was a flash/shockwave thing, so I opened it in IE…. God, why I did that I’ll never know. After nothing opened in IE (I got what looked to be a 404) I closed the browser and deleted the email. 30 seconds later AVG Anti-Virus is going ape shit. It’s detected that about 30 different backdoor trojans are trying to install themselves. I delete them all before they do anything… or so I think. Apparently I’ve caught the newest nasty virus on the block. A combination of malware, spyware, trojan and backdoor worm. Parts of it are called different things. The most common is wsup.exe and wtools.exe. WTools is a bullshit toolbar thing that hijacks IE and uses it to install more nasty things everytime IE is opened. Wsup is a system process that doubles, triples and renames itself. The kicker is that after it installs it changes registry information so that the files are undeleteable and the processes are unstopable. Trying to kill one process will literally spawn to more with different names. I had WtoolsA, B, C …. S, etc at one point. A quick trip to Trend Micro and those were gone. Or so I thought. These little fuckers were tough. They renamed themselves again, moved, and restarted even after I edited my mscofig to stop the processes from starting.
I was getting made. I restarted, booted into safe mode with a command prompt and BY HAND, tracked down each and every entry in the registry, changing them all so I’d be able to finally delete them. That worked. I deleted Wtools and Wsup. After that I booted normally and just to be on the safe side I ran AVG again. This time it came up clean. Just because I’m anal I started up TrendMicro’s Housecall as well. I’m glad I did. It seems they left me with a parting gift. A nice, hidden copy of Backdoor.Small.33x hidden in my CSRSS file.
Now, csrss.exe is a very important system file, I can’t just go and delete it… or can I? I tried all the normal steps first. I tried to kill the process only to have Windows say “this is a critical system file and it’s not to be fucked with”. Ok, ok… gotta think about this. So, I read up on csrss. Apparently its a wonderful little command layer file that sits in your system32 directory… not your windows directory. Huzah! I had an imposter. The little bastard cloned the properties of the real file so that it couldn’t be messed with but it was sitting in the wrong folder. A quick reboot with a dos prompt again took care of that.
Mess with my shit will they. Not if they know whats good for’em. It didn’t help that SpyBot was jumping around like a jack rustle terrior every 2 seconds trying to tell me that something was jacking with my registry but it couldn’t tell me what. It just kept saying “Process: -blank- is trying to modify: -blank- entry. Allow or Deny?” Great job there guys. At least it knew something was up, I’ll give it that much.
Anyway, after running AVG, TrendMicro and (after installing it) Norton, it appears I’m in the clear. Nothing mildly infectious to be found.
That’ll teach me to open IE… even for cards from my Mom. Stupid IE, if it weren’t for windows update (once a year or so) it would be completely uninstalled anyway.
But, back to the main topic at hand… those wang-less, pimply faces gas station attendents that have a sack small enough to write this shit…. blah, blah blah, explative, dirty word, vulgarity…. you get the idea.
Out.
What a weekend. It was kinda all over the place. Saturday I worked the 100th Aniversary party for American Nation Insurance or something like that. It was a crazy party with probably well over 1000 people. We were hired to photograph couples as they came in as a gift to them from the company. After that we were to photography the party, dinner and the presentation afterwards. The party was so big that we called in 2 extra photographers. I’m not sure how much they helped but it was nice to have someone to help carry stuff. Things went pretty well for the most part. My camera suffered a massive error and died about halfway through dinner, but hey, that’s what backup cameras are for, and we had 2 of’em. It was actually a pretty sweet rig, Canon 20D with booster pack, 17-35 L-Series (pro) lens, Quantum QFlash and Turbo battery kit all stuffed onto a custom bracket. I think it’ll be my main wedding rig once I figure out whats wrong with the camera. It might just need a firmware flash or maybe a good nights sleep.
Speaking of which, I didn’t get home until 2am from that shindig, which, with the time change became 3am. I slept in until about noon on Sunday. I haven’t been feeling well, I’ve got some sort of sinus/throat thing and it’s been real bugging me. I’ve been doing my usual Nyquil and OJ and it seems to be keeping the full-on cold at bay.
Sunday was pretty cool. While I was asleep, Lauren’s cell phone rang and it was Dan (from SCAD). He had a 4 hour layover in Houston before his fight back to San Diego. We figured since he was in the neighborhood we’d pay him a visit and grab some dinner with him and catch up. It was good to see Dan and he seemed to be doing well aside from stomach trouble from his excessive drinking the night before. He wanted to get something “Texas-ish” to eat so we took him for some mexican at Papasitos. After that we still had some time to kill so we stopped in at Frys before we brought him back.
Frys is quite possibly my favorite store on the planet now. It’s super Walmart sized and its full from floor to ceiling with everything electronic and computer related. It’s the only store I know of where you can go in and browse the “motherboard section” and physically handle the display board before you buy it. Not to mention the fact that isles to follow have every other component you can image. You can quite literaly walk into Frys and walk out with all the pieces to build a new computer at below retail, almost NewEgg prices. Add DVDs, CDs, Software and Home Electronics sections and you’ve got one sweet store.
And speaking of CDs, I went over to their techno section (yes, they actually have a techno/dance section) to look for the new Danny Howels Global Underground (after Chris reminded me which one it was) and ended up coming home with the greatest mix CD set ever made instead.
Renaissance: The Mix Collection by Sasha and John Digweed
3 CDs of pure genious. The quotes on the box sum it out pretty well…
“The re-release of this remastered 10th anniversay edition couldn’t have come at a better time” … “For many it was the first mix album they ever bought and for us it remains the best” … “Perhaps the greatest mix CD of all time”
Yeah. This is actually a re-release of the Uber rare original, which if I’m not mistaken, is going for hundreds on Ebay. It’s old school audio bliss. It makes me remember why I like techno in the first place.
Anyway, after we dropped Dan off we headed south back towards home when we decided to go see SinCity. A few phone calls later and Robin and Laurie are coming with us. We catch the 8pm at Cinemark.
SinCity is one of those movies I’ll have to sit and think about for a while. It wasn’t bad, it was ok, and there’s nothing that I can pick out instantly as something I didn’t like, I just can’t help feeling that it was only mediocre though. Not for any particular reason, it just didn’t thrill me as much as I thought it would. Like I said, it’s not “bad” so don’t think that I didn’t like it, it just needs some time to digest I think. The direction and cinematography were very well done. The visuals were perfect and consistant and the mood was as close to a Frank Miller comic book as you can possibly get. I think there was a thin layer of “cheese” on top of the whole thing and that most of the actors were dry and that every line felt like a one-liner instead of dialog. This could also be because 99% of the lines were taken directly from the books, not to mention about 90% of the shots through out the movie. They did a great job of trying to recreate EVERYTHING from the comics but in the end it just feels a little forced. There’s a quote from a reviewer that reads: “Accuracy isn’t the same thing as quality.” and I think I agree with that. Out of 10, from me it gets something like a 8.5. Apparently, the tomato agrees – RT 78%.
Today is my day off so I’m spending the whole of it enjoying my new CDs, trying to get rid of the spyware I just found (stupid f’ing ecards from my mom) and playing some more Brothers In Arms. I considered briefly getting a new Xbox game, but there’s nothing out right now that I feel like spending $50 on. DOA Ultimate is a thought, but I’d rather wait until it’s in the “Hits” package and $20 cheaper.
Lastly, my “Recent Links” plugin is completely borked. I’m trying to fix it but keep getting parse errors. I’ve sent an email off to the author, we’ll see what he says. That should be back up (or gone) in a day or two.
Matt out.
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