Health-related humor

You know the question: which is more painful, a root canal, or a trip to the DMV?

I recently had the opportunity to do both on the same day, which turned out to be a Friday.

The root canal is worse.

On a Saturday, it might be the other way around.

Time for some politics

It should be clear to anyone who thought about it hard that the North Koreans really had/have no intention of actually shutting down and dismantling/destroying the Yongbyon nuclear plant. The only reason I can think of that they would agree to allow the inspectors in etc is because they had already removed everything that they cared about that was portable...i.e., nothing to see remained behind.

And therefore bringing it all back would be relatively simple, as soon as it was appropriate to do so. Which it now seems to be...

You can figure the same will be true in Iran as well. Excepting that at the moment, they are busy bragging about all their centrifuges, when the time comes that they have to allow inspections, it will probably turn out that they tell us they were lying about how many they had...but that will be a lie too.

So don't be surprised by what's going on in North Korea. It was always going to happen this way. They have no intention of not having nuclear fuel processing capability, and will lie about it every time.

Personally, I think we should have gone with the invasion route a few years ago. You don't seriously think we couldn't invade NK and pound the crap out of them, do you? Station two carrier battle groups offshore, there's plenty of space there between NK and Japan, start the air assault, drop HARM missiles on their radar installations, continuous targeting of the DMZ, Patriot batteries to protect SK (because you know that NK's #1 target is Seoul (#2 targets are in Japan), not us, as in "if you attack us we'll hit your friends"), continuous air assault on all the military installations across the country (which, in fact, isn't all that big), a few diversionary sea landings along the eastern coast (also with close air support), and of course the final ground assault across the DMZ once it and all the troops on the north side have been pounded into rubble.

i.e., no land war until physical installations have been pounded flat.

You also have to figure that NK has left a few goodies behind that are going to blow up later, so we don't want to be standing around waiting at the DMZ.

Of course, what would actually happen would be that as soon as the first CBG started to get close, NK would go all crazy and launch missiles at SK, and probably throw some of their experimental stuff at us. We'd want to begin with a number of Patriot counter-missile batteries, brought in quietly. Then the CBGs. and eventually pound Yongbyon into rubble no large than peas.

iPods

Apple announced a new round of iPods last week. Annette wants the new silver 16GB nano. I got the old 160GB classic, since it was discontinued and it sounds like they won't do another high-capacity unit again.

I have about 100GB of stuff on it at this point, so I have 60GB available...I probably won't ever fill that all the way...I'm not into video on the ipod, although I do have most of Strongbad on it (*that* is why you get a video-ipod).

This is my 3rd one. First I had a 20, then a 60, both of which got filled a little too easily...now, everything I have in terms of music will go to about the 3/4-full point.

Nice.

Jade Empire

Having done an upgrade (well, to Win XP) on the older PC, it turned out that Jade Empire installed ok and played. My son already ran through the game, in roughly a week.

Seems overly linear to me, and I have not figured out the combat system. Don't like it, though...I can't tell whether I am supposed to continue clicking on targets or what.

The voice acting is pretty good, but despite it supposedly being chinese people, they have clearly no accent whatsoever.

Otherwise, it's kinda a Crouching Tiger appearance...

Travel

What is it with women and travel?

You know the story...retirement comes around, and they want to travel.

*I* want to have retirement be my home time--where I can have plenty of hours to work my projects that don't get enough time now, and read, and so on. Travel prevents most all of that.

Travel via driving isn't so bad as travel via flying--I *really* don't like flying. Airports have become such a hassle. If I never fly anywhere again, that's fine with me. Driving, altho slower, I'm ok with.

What I don't know yet is how much she wants to travel when the time comes...part of the problem, I think, is that when at home they can't relax, really let go...gotta worry about laundry, dishes, phone calls, etc.

Gotta learn to let go.

Getting Old, and what to do

I'm going to turn 50 shortly...already got the letter to join AARP a month ago (and sent it back with the $, so I'm official)...and then, last week, when Annette asked me "what do you want for your birthday (besides sex)? You're turning 50, don't you want something special?"

and suddenly it struck me: The XKE! It's time for the mid-life-crisis sports car! And I've wanted one since I was about 10. Click here for a gazillion photos.

So I've been investigating them online...there's a fair amount of interesting info, history, tales of restorations, plenty of photos, and apparently plenty for sale, from junkers that were literally "found in a barn" to immaculate restorations that are probably *better* than they were when they left the factory; and of course the prices reflect all that, too.

And fortuitously, just this past weekend was the local Jaguar Club annual meet (with judging). About 10 XKEs were there, including the (apparently) #2 show car in the US (VERY nice looking).

It did come in a variety of colors, but British Racing Green is, imho, the only one to have; red, and a pale yellow seem next-most common; I'd be ok with the yellow, or a silver-gray. More convertibles ("OTS") were made, but I have never liked them as well, so I'm getting the hardtop ("FHC" or "2+2").

I'll be getting the series two (68-70) model, probably a 69.

One good reason to get a car like this: evidence that women are turned on by them

I'd probably go for a series 3 (the ones with the V12 engine) except that I really don't like the bumpers on them, those are stupid bumpers. The wire wheels are best, too.

Jags have a rep for problems and breakdowns. Not looking forward to that sort of thing, so it'll be important to start upgrading parts pretty soon.

I've found one this is almost exactly what I want...BRG exterior, but black leather interior (hot!) and no A/C (hot!). If I still lived in Texas, no way I'd buy this one. My first car, when I moved to TX, had black vinyl interior (Dad's fault), and no A/C (my fault). Never again down there.

A little higher-priced than I'd have preferred, but I think I won't have any issues with it right away, which is critical.

Plenty of new stuff to learn...fortunately, with an engineering degree, and some experience in car repairs on another car from '73, I have some existing knowledge...

Should be interesting.

an interesting blog by someone else...

Here it is (yeah, that's the guy with the goofy-looking beard/hair inversion I wrote about last week)

Pointing out some amazingly ridiculous things. Dangerous things.

Like this


and this

although that graph is clever, if you compared it against which party controlled congress, it'd be different...Dems controlled Congress while Reagan and Bush 1 were prez...and the President does NOT write budget bills--Congress does. An awful lot of people seem not to remember this (there was a fabulous ObviousMan cartoon on this topic ("The president can't make tax law!"); click here for the homepage)

Facial hair

Can someone explain to me why it is that so many guys grow a beard when they lose it up top?

http://stupidevilbastard.com/graphics/seblogo.jpg

Far Cry

Got this yesterday for $10...and the specs aren't so hairy that my better machine can't run it (unlike some *other* games)


FC has a stellar rep, been waiting for it to be cheap enough for a while...

Two Worlds -- another game

got this cheap recently...only to discover in the unreadable tiny print on the back, that it won't install in XP x64. Slugs.

well, after tribulations with the old PC (disk drive disasters, followed by new big disk), got it installed and running. A tad slow, however; I probably should reduce video settings.

Also on the box: "it's like Oblivion on steroids" -- must be those steroids that reduce in size, because it's less large...but it is still similar, probably the reason I bought it. Well, when I say "less large" I mean there are fewer "locations" to explore. In terms of distance side-to-side, that is probably comparable.

Fighting is pretty much a click-fest. One cool thing: if you find two of the same thing as loot (weapons, armor, spell cards), you can drag the new one on top of the existing/equipped one, and the stats are increased--you can stack them as high as you want; unfortunately, the stats don't increase as a simple summation, and there's diminishing returns. Eventually you find things that are good, or have the money to buy them with...

Opponent hardness levels up with you, and you don't get a choice about leveling-up, it just happens. So those 30-pt wolves at the beginning are later going to be 300-pt wolves. Some enemies seem just about unkillable, you'll need a Summon for some; others (Flesh Golem) seem just unkillable period, but I was able to run around them. Eventually I discovered the solution: once you have a big stack of a ranged attack spell (like Fireball (i'm at 52), or Poison Dart (36)), you want draw one near a mana fountain, close enough that you can stand next to it and shoot the opponent, and then pound it until dead, mashing the 6 key as often as you can. This works on dragons, golems, cyclops, ogres.

Your favorite spells are these: Heal, which you'll be using first, Summon XXX (Devil seems best), and Chaos Rage, which causes enemies to attack each other (and your horse, if it's too close, so always dismount a ways off before your attack). The Demon is an extra-strong summon, and combined with Chaos Rage, means you don't have to get in the fray too often (important with undead, whose hits poison you); unfortunately, you don't get the kill points if you or your summon doesn't do the kill. This is valuable if you attack a Tower of necromancers, let them kill each other, you just do cleanup. I found the Hell Master to be a lousy summon, it can't actually hit a target; swings and misses endlessly. When you encounter them as opponents, they are far better than that. The Soul Helper (? Air) has a bow, but mostly runs from danger.

Some quests oppose each other, so you get a choice about which groups you help out.

You can drag/drop a power-up magic enhancement onto a weapon, but only one kind...but you can keep on doing it, so you can also enhance that aspect, not just a second instance of the weapon.

There are entirely too few dungeons here. Oblivion had hundreds, it seemed, between caves, Ayleid places, houses... TW has a few dozen; I feel kinda cheated, but I am having fun with the game.

NPCs all do the Morrowind-style random bopping-around town behavior. No big deal, except that finding which ones you really need to talk to is harder than it should be. And made worse by the fact that the merchants tend to do the bopping around too. In an improvement over Oblivion, the merchants' stock changes over time, which means you can buy new stuff they didn't have before.

Visuals are pretty good...long-range seems better than Oblivion, but close-up seems worse. There's no real "night-time" behavior, but it does rain some, and the desert has sand-storms. and once I got rained on good in the desert, which is fairly improbable.

I have read that once you complete the main storyline the game terminates, so I'm not working too hard to finish that one. There's more than enough else going on to leave that alone.

There are certain weapons that seem pretty rare...they are of course high-end, but I'd like to find/buy them a little more often...I have the "chinese sword", it's class 3. ONLY class 3, and I've been using it for a while now...would like it to be more like class 10. This suggests that it may be better to go with lesser items that occur more often, so you can stack more often. And you can repeatedly add enhancement gems to weapons, although this too has diminishing returns, and eventually stops (if it didn't, I'd have the chinese sword of +6000 spirit damage). Not all weapons work equally well on all opponents, so you seem to need several. Turns out there's a non-obvious location for a couple of spare weapons, and a quick switch mechanism, which is nice, so you aren't carrying lots of weapons.

In the stacking, most (all?) items reach a point where you can't always add new ones. Apparently this has to do with the magical enhancements, some don't allow stacking others.

Creating potions is iffy. Sometimes when you are hoping to get a +10 potion of strength from items with permanent effect, instead you get a gem of +10 lightning or some such. More gems is the last thing I need. I have bunch of perm-effect potion items that won't do what I want (I have one recipe that creates +4 Will from ghoul-brains, I want that same behavior from other items). Could be I need more alchemy skill. Online reading: yes. Wish I could *buy* training skill levels, like in Morrowind. I have the cash...

Having been ill with a major toothache this month, I've had extra time to play during the night, since the tooth wouldn't let me sleep. Root canal coming, yuk.

Online game guide: the main storyline isn't all that long in TW, so definitely do the side-quests first.

Gor Gammar is interesting. I went once, looking for a special item for the main quest, cleared it out (lotta orcs). Then I found a magician who wanted to give me an orc-genocider gizmo to take to Gor Gammar. I can't tell him I already cleared the place, so eventually I went back and dropped it off, for the points. Back to the magician, only to find he's dead, by the hand of *another* magician, who say the first one has created an army of undead at Gor Gammar, with help from someone (awkward!). No, I was just there, place was empty. So I went back...sure enough, big pile of undead. I let them kill each other inside and out. But I wonder--if I had not cleared out the original brigade, would there have been twice as many? Ouch.

Armor and weapons appear to peak out about at the level I've been for a while. I haven't found anything new that is significantly higher in terms of HP or protection. Online elsewhere I've read of folks with apparently much higher numbers, but those comments are from a year ago, which is probably several game-updates back. It also sounds like potion ingredients were more common.

Magic appears more important at the high end. There are fewer attack spells than I think there should be (DS 1/2 had this right all along, with merchants having plenty, in fact always more than I could ever use).

As I'm writing this right now, TW was released exactly one year ago (Aug 21, 2007).

Uniquely, if you want to re-assign your skill points, you can, by finding someone who (for $) will undo them, allowing you to re-assign to something better. A good idea, imho. I haven't done it yet, but I will.

---

I finished, at about 73 hours of playtime (not even remotely close to the 1000 or so hours I put into Oblivion). Once you defeat the final two baddies (which is vaguely tricky at the start), game's over. You want to finish up some other things, you have to reload a previous save and re-kill the final two...Well, I'd about lost interest by this point, which was why I went ahead and whacked the last two bad guys. (so when I said tricky, you can't just attack the first of them, you have to actually talk to him, he says you've eliminated the magical protection for them, and then he's a pretty easy takedown--I'm level 65, and I continue to find Steel Golems harder than these two were.)

Get Smart

yes, it's actually a post about a movie. I love movies, but I seldom go to the theater: there's no pause button, and the theater is likely to screw up something.

well, we went anyway.

This is hilarious. You do have to know the original tv show, however. Lacking that, a bunch of funny parts aren't going to even register.

This show is about CHAOS trying to take over (as usual on the original GS), and Siegfried is once again at the helm--played by Terence Stamp.

Spoilers: near the end, a car almost runs Max over as he's trying to get to California. The car is driven by Bernie Koppel. yeah, the guy from "Love Boat"--but before that he was on Get Smart, as the original Siegfried. He yells at Max. It goes by in about 3 seconds. If you haven't seen the show, it will mean nothing. Likewise, Agent 13 won't make any sense, and that goes on longer than 3 seconds. Hymie won't make sense either, at the end.

They managed not to beat certain jokes to death, which was good. "Would you believe...", "Sorry about that chief", etc. Although I think they could have done each of them twice...

it also manages to parody a few other things (True Lies comes to mind, with the dance scene, and James Bond with the "swiss army knife").

Two thumbs up, as they say.

Free Music again

turns out there are a couple of classical music sites, I just learned...

MusOpen a bunch of these MP3s require either emusic or napster, which I don't want to mess with.

and

Classic Cat

Mind you, these two don't much include the great stuff we all know and love...what's available tends to be somewhat obscure.

Look up Rimsky-Korsakov. You don't get the entirety of Scheherazade, you get a couple of very short excerpts. Shubert: full Ave Maria, and a lot of others I never heard of (well, I'm hardly an expert, but I do like I reasonable amount of classical). And you apparently can get different versions of things: two complete Beethoven's Fifth's different in length by three minutes. Are these different arrangements, or different tempos?


Apparently Wikipedia can lead to some free classical...I haven't looked at that yet.

Jamendo and BeSonic continue to be favorites.

a Great quote about economics

“No one in Asia wants to live in a Chinese-dominated world. There is no Chinese dream to which people aspire,” explained Simon Tay, a Singaporean scholar.

Esp not me. One only has to look at the gov response to the earthquake to know you don't want to live there...Complain about why the schools collapsed and you go to jail. Talk to your friends about it, and you go to jail. Yeah, that's quality of life.

Why the Taliban are assholes

Remember what used to be here?

"alternative energy sources"

chatter about "alternative energy sources" has been around for a long time...I recall hearing this probably for the first time right after the original 1973 "oil crisis"...

what are these sources of energy? remember your physics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. That is not necessarily easy to do (atomic bomb), but it can be done.

(numbers used here: from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) -- go look at this, there are some interesting numbers towards the bottom)

the sources you hear about:

1) Wind power. If you put a fan blade in the path of moving air, it will rotate. if you have the mechanical linkage from that rotation to a generator, you can draw electrical power from it. This is a conversion--you are taking kinetic energy from the air movement, and converting it into electrical energy. So what happens to the air as a result? It slows down. Or it cools down. Or both.

How much energy can you extract without causing some other problem? If you could remove 100% of the kinetic energy, the air would come to a stop. Well, what causes it to move in the first place? Energy from the sun, the daily heating and cooling cycle, rotational differences (you know, Coriolis). You'd also end up removing thermal energy, making the air colder; perhaps that would help with global warming :)

2) Ocean currents. Pretty much the same as wind--if you could put a fan of some sort in the water perpendicular to the Gulf Stream, the (albeit slow) ocean current would cause a rotation that could turn generators for electricity. What would happen to the water? The current would slow down, and it would get colder.

The bad thing here is that ocean life is super-sensitive to temperature changes. A drop of one or two degrees would be a disaster for marine life.

Fortunately, the engineering cost of doing this would be insane, so it's pretty unlikely.

3) Geothermal. Taking advantage of the thermal gradients underground. If the earth's core is pretty hot, as we've been taught, then this should work fairly well. I'd argue that the engineering cost is again way too high for large-scale use.

4) Solar. The biggest, and essentially inexhaustible, energy source within a light-year or two is the Sun. You can look this up (got my number from Wikipedia, so it's as trustworthy as that is): solar energy striking the earth is about 1300 watts/square-meter. I don't know if that's at the equator, the poles, or average over the entire surface, but let's use it anyway. ("1.366 kW - astro: power received from the sun at the earth's orbit by one square metre" -- sounds like equator to me)

Solar power conversion efficiency is about 10-15% right now (we've been doing this for >30 years, but that's all the better we are). So figuring other losses, let's say we can reliably get 100 watts/sq-yard. There are 3 million square yards per square mile. That means we can get 300 megawatts of electrical power for each square mile of solar cells we build. During daylight, mind you, which IS a problem. Let's suppose we gave approx 100 square miles of otherwise unused land per state to this (so Rhode Island probably can't do that, but Nevada could pick up the slack). That's 300 MW * 100 * 50, or 1.5 Terawatts. That's in the ballpark of total world electrical consumption (Wikipedia: 1.7 TW - geo: average electrical power consumption of the world in 2001 (presumably that's daily average)).

The current retail cost of solar panels is about $5/watt, which is kinda high. In large-scale construction quantities, let's say that drops to $2 installed. That means that our proposed qty above is $3 Trillion. We would not, of course, pay that all at once, and other costs would go down as that got phased in (oil consumption would drop quite a bit, because we could stop using it for power generation during the day (still need night-time--what to do?)).

The night-time issue is interesting...Options are to continue to burn fossil fuels (oil, coal) for this. Another alternative is have a lot of batteries underneath the solar panels; I doubt this is adequate for the entire night...A friend has suggested that excess power should be used to spin up large inertial masses that would thus be storing a lot of energy in their rotation (giant flywheels), and the night-time extraction would be far less than the daytime need, so they could hold enough for overnight every day, all year. This strikes me as having some real engineering problems: how big can these things be? how quickly do they wear out? what are they made of? can you spin them fast enough (material strength)?

Ultimately of course this leads (as it inevitably must) to the Dyson sphere, but we don't need to try to do that any time soon :)

But...imagine that we had spent $500 Billion on energy development instead of a war in Iraq, which has not made the cost of energy cheaper (the opposite, if anything). That's a relatively small fraction (15%) of the total needed, but it's a certainty that the process of having done so would change the world. I think it's engineering-feasible. and we MUST get off the oil.

final on Spellforce 2

I played this through to the end, and there were nearly no crashes. I say "nearly", because there WERE a couple of crashes, but that seemed more a problem about how much other stuff I had running at the same time (which was generally way too much).

As you aren't the Rune Warrior, you don't auto-respawn if "killed", and if YOU get killed, your whole team likely will too; not always, but likely.

There's an expansion pack, but I won't be getting that. The only way it comes in the US is as part of the get-all-five-games-in-one-box-on-one-disc, for $30. Maybe not...unless I can find it used <$10 or something.

Spellforce 2

I finally finished Spellforce 1, but not before it crashed a couple more times. Infuriating. Won't play that one again, too many crashes.

Got Spellforce 2 yesterday, for $10, at MicroCenter. Could have also gotten the entire game series, SF 1 + two expansions, and SF2 plus 1 expansion, for $30. Maybe not. I had tried the SF 2 demo game a month or two ago, but that didn't install and run properly, don't know why. Took the gamble on the full game having been patched enough to behave...and it worked fine.

Seems to take place let's say 30-50 years later. You meet up with Craig UnShallach's daughter pretty early. You see a Rune monument, but it's inactive. You aren't a Rune character.

So it's similar, but different. The skills tree looks just like the one in a number of other games. Can't say I think that's good.

Overall the game looks good, the detail is better, the 3D is better. I'm not convinced the UI is any better.


---

I was at MicroCenter to get a couple of things: in particular, a new, bigger disk for my laptop. Laptop is just old enough (summer/fall 06) to not have a SATA drive, which means the 120 GB I got is really the biggest thing that's going in there. Fortunately I don't need to do too much with it; no digital video, in particular. I was running out of space on the old disk (80GB), which turned out to be because I had a couple of video podcasts collecting up and hogging space (15 GB). Killed those, and I'm good again, but it's time. I'm thinking about a couple of other possibilities, but it's also time for O/S upgrade, to Leopard, soon as taxes are done.

Anyway, having gotten some games cheap there, I looked around, and SF 2 was $10. That's my threshold at which I'm willing to try most anything.

A programming tidbit

from the PDF Ref doc for Hibernate:

----

4.1. A simple POJO example

Most Java applications require a persistent class representing felines.

----

I had no idea. I have clearly been remiss in my past work. Conveniently they provide just such a class def on that same page, so I'll use it in the future.

another amusing non-affiliate

Hyde Yoga, a clothing operation in NYC.

Of course our name is Hyde, and my wife is a yoga instructor.

Crysis

just for grins, I tried to install the Crysis demo today, but it aborted near the end, saying an archive file was corrupted, and that I should download it again and retry.

The installer is 780 Megabytes...I don't think I'll download that a second time...sayonara.