Starcraft 2 – Dune 2k all over again

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Over the years, Real Time Strategy games (RTS) have always attracted me, but usually only through the single player campaign.  Often times, I even get board of that and never really finish them completely, alternate campaigns that start you back at “you gain one new unit permission!” have little appeal for me.  One game roped me into competitive online play, Dune 2000.

Dune 2000 wasn’t a phenomenal game by any reach of the imagination and bore much in common with Command and Conquer.  On the ol’ dial up and the original family Gateway (Windows 98SE, Celeron 300, 3GB hard drive, 64MB of ram and a screaming for the time 12MB Voodoo2 graphics card) I would play into the wee hours of the morning during high school.  There was a ladder and typically I was in the middle, the highlight of my experience there was a dramatic victory over the 13th ranked player that I could bore you with the details sometime.  By far, that has to be the most played RTS game for me, ever.

I enjoyed the original Starcraft, but to be honest I was late to the party, the game looked old and I never finished Brood Wars, the expansion.  As for multilayer, I played against other real people exactly one time in a ranked Battle.net match where I obliterated some random internet guy (kid?) who accused me of cheating with a good amount of profanity thrown in.  This was a good way to start – and a good way to end.

A big reason for me shying away from the online multilayer aspect of RTS games is the intensity that the one on one matches bring to the table.  As some of you may know, I like to play games competitively, sometimes to a fault.  I know better, but often times my brain equates fun with winning and that drives me while playing.  Out in the rest of the world, people are really good at these RTS games and playing against them can be a lesson in futility and frustration if you allow it to be.   In Dune 2000, I got to the point where I had a “build order” and a strategy, and played it enough that I just knew what the other player was up to frequently by what units I would see early in the game.  It probably helped that I was in the game playing/learning highpoint of my life, being 15 or so.

Out comes Star Craft 2.  I’ll admit I got caught up in the hype of it, and like Diablo 2 it was purchased Day 1 of its general availability.  Heck, the collectors edition is currently on my desk, complete with its thumb drive containing all of SC1 amongst other nifty things.   Anyway, for the first time really, I knew a bunch of people who had also purchased it and were playing as a group regularly (Thursday night, 9PM for those interested) and this helped take the edge off of playing online.  Dan T. played a 2v2 online match with me versus the great unknown, and thus scary, others on the Internet.

Emboldened by this, I played through the prerequisite five placement matches on the SC2 ladder (there is a very robust, continuous ranking system in place online)  and manage to win one and lose four very tense matches.  This got me placed into the “Bronze” league.  The bottom one out of five.  Which is fine, really, because I thought that meant I would play only against other Bronze level players.  Wrong.  You get automagically placed against anyone looking to play, and that can include Diamond players, way up there at the tippy top.  The type of gamers who play SC2 as a job.  Suffice to say, I lost three more matches and then, finally winning one.  This was a good time to wrap up my play for a while.

In the meantime I started watching Day9 daily over lunch after reading an article at Ars.  In the comments of the article, his feed was mentioned as one that focused on improvement over entertainment value.  I have found that true – and have one my last two ladder matches pretty convincingly against folks that I was “slightly favored” over.  Terminology and lingo have also been valuable information gleaned from his daily broadcasts.

In closing, I promise to the people coming to the LAN party that I am not going to 2 gate-Robo into 2 base 8-gate and rush you with speed Zealots every game.  Unless I start losing. 😛

And if you know what that means, I am sure you’ll be able to neutralize it 🙂

–Nat

Taxes & Such (politics on the internet!)

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I had the opportunity to read an article from the Star Tribune that was talking about one of (the?) the Democratic candidate for Governor of MN.   The reason of this article existences was to deplore this candidates commitment for increasing the taxes on the “wealthy” in order to help cover the cavernous $5.3 Billion (?) budget deficit facing the state.

On the one hand, I understand the basics of his argument.  He says that income does not equate to wealth.  Fine.  This candidate wants to hit those with moderately high income ($150k couple) somewhat harder and those that make more than a million a year much harder.  The contention is a classic one – the rich paying for benefits for the poor.  The rich getting robbed of their due income because the state government is too needy.

OK – I got it.  Call me a liberal (I like to think of myself as a moderate) but I think that if  paying a 2-3% higher income tax when you make a million vs $100k and your personal economy breaks, or if you really even notice the difference, then your ability to manage your income is suspect at best.  To put that in perspective, lets paint that as 3% on a million dollars different.  That’s what a teacher makes in a year and its a whopping 3% of our millionaires take home income.  The utility of that money to the millionaire is tiny compared to what that money means to that teacher.  Personally, I think that as a wealthy citizen of the U.S. you are obligated to help fund the system and society that made you that way and to keep it working well for those unborn generations of U.S. citizens.  In a rational debate, I think that many could agree this is a reasonable way to view our system of taxation and why those who can be inconvenienced a little but provide much should be for the benefit of all.

On the other side of the higher taxes argument is, what I think, is giving the “Tea Party” conservatives so much momentum.  Where is all this tax money going?  How is there not a clear and public breakdown of this?

Continuing on with my opinion piece, it is necessary for us, as citizens to completely layout and reach agreement on what we expect from our government.  Clearly, we want roads and education – yet these are exactly the places where money is being pulled from for “other things.”  It is just extremely frustrating to not have a clear picture of the state, and countries, commitments and understand where all the extra lard is going.

The fact of that matter now is that if you cut taxes, you lose something that the government provides.  We have huge groups of people clamoring for lower taxes and we need to understand what will be the ultimate outcome to the government and its spending if we do so.  “Big Government” is here and now and has had a good century of so of build up and a century of U.S. citizens becoming dependent or at least accepting the activities of big government as absolute.  One election cycle won’t change much.

With that, I urge anybody with good sense not to knee jerk react and vote for rhetoric this cycle.  Vote for the intelligent candidate who will do the best job of making this best of the mess the economy has gotten us all in.

–Nat

Computers are fun…

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Precious blog time has been consumed lately by issues with the home computers.

As the NFL season is ramping up along with new seasons of Survivor and The Amazing Race, I thought it would be a good idea to refresh the Media PC. The one that was there was put there in disgust when I couldn’t get the last refresh built out of some Frakenstein components and smallish case that was a little too loud and ran the drives a bit too hot. Makes sense to recombine a few parts that I had been hoarding from “great” deals to refresh it, right?

Well, this became a huge time waster. The new machine was totally silent, a little bit speedier and looked a lot nicer than the old one. Great, eh? Until it would randomly freeze. This was particularly distressing as that was what had forced me to abandon the earlier refresh in frustration. Just like I did about a year ago, I started down the path of replacing components to figure out the problem was.  I accepted that the power supply was good as it had been in use for over a year and was a solid brand right in the same Antec case, so no worries about electrical  shorts and extremely horrible power supply.  By using integrated graphics, the power footprint for the new media center PC should have been very tiny.

I was convinced that components shared with the previous failed media center build out where the culprits – that was limited to the CPU, heat sink and memory.

  • Changed out the heat sink.  No change.
  • Changed out the CPU. No change.  Ran PRIME95 for hours.
  • The old, failed setup was running better with a newer CPU.  Picked up a used, newer CPU.  No change.  (the PC sat in the corner for a couple days here)
  • Ran memtest4 overnight, no issues. (memory checked out)
  • Plugged the PC right into a surge protector rather than the UPS.  Now getting a “signal lost” freeze when watching TV.
  • Changed the tuner out for a different Hauppauge tuner.  No change.
  • Replaced the power supply with a brand new one.  No change.
  • Added in a ATI all in wonder 3650.  BAM.  Blue screen.  Reinstalled Windows 7, same issue.

I had to think about this for a while.  So, the only repeat part that was still in use from the previous, failed build was the damn ram. Replaced that, no more blue screen.  Theory?   The integrated graphics were using the RAM that was bad, hiding it from memtest.   Tonight I am going to put that ram into a box that isn’t using integrated graphics and test it out.

Lesson learned?  Dammit, maybe memtest doesn’t work with new AMD chipsets (as the memtest forums indicated)?  Bleh.  Too much wasted time.

–Nat

Ubuntu 10.04 SSD Tweaks

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Reduce “swappiness” to 0

This prevents the swap file from being used unless it is actually needed, preventing unnecessary write cycles on the drive.

Code:
vm.swappiness=0

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf by using your favorite editor :
$sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

If the line doesn’t exist, you will need to create it.

After reboot vm.swappiness is 0

Enable TRIM (if applicable)

Uninstall proprietary (ie, video card) drivers first. The 10.6 cats included didn’t like the newer kernel and it really garbled up the video driver install process.

Update to a newer kernel. 2.6.33+

Edit your /etc/fstab file so your SSD line looks like this:

UUID=of your SSD here / ext4 noatime,discard,errors=remount-ro 0 1

After reboot TRIM should function.

Links I found useful:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php…1&postcount=43 (swapiness syntax)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9740235 (fstab discussion)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD (link to Kernel versions and an explanation of how to update)

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2069761 (incredibly informative forum posting about SSD drives in general)

Enjoy!

–Nat

Tasty Chicken Pasta

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What You Need:

2 Cups mulit-grain rotini pasta, uncooked
1 lb. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces
1 & 1/4 cups tomatillo salsa
1 (10 oz.) frozen corn
1 Large Green Pepper, cut into strips, then cut in half
1 Cup KRAFT (guess where the recipe came from!) Mexican Style 2% Milk Four Cheese

Make it!

  • Cook Pasta as directed on Package
  • Meanwhile, heat large non-stick skillet sprayed with cooking spray on medium-high heat.
    Add chicken, cook & stir for 4 minutes. Stir in salsa, corn and green pepper, simmer on medium-low for 10 minutes or until chicken is done, stirring occassionally.
  • Drain Pasta. Add to chicken mixture, stir slightly. Top with cheese. Remove from heat, cover, and let rest for 1 minute or until cheese is melted.

Nutrition (Per Serving – 4 servings):

460 Calories
9g total fat
4g saturated fat
1020 mg sodium (!)
54g carbohydrates
42g protein

“Improvements”

Kristin and I simply used four chicken breasts, which I cut into chunks. We added about 10 mushrooms and used three ears of fresh corn that we cooked and then cut off – this resulted in a lot of corn in the mix. For “salsa” we substituted 1.5 cups of Chi-Chi’s medium salsa.  Next time, we’d like to make some fresh salsa to make this a completely “from scratch” type recipe and hopefully further reduce that horrendous sodium content.  We also substituted in a whole box of Penne Rigata because it is what we hand in the cupboard, pasta is pasta 🙂

Kraft claims this is four servings, but we are looking at more like 7 to 8.

Final Thoughts

It was pretty good. I would suggest adding in some pepper for flavor and not to be scared of using spicy salsa. The medium Chi-Chis is decently spicy but it was completely mild in this dish. The fresh and slightly crunchy corn was delicious.

You’ll want to use a *large* saucepan for this. Ours was overwhelmed before even adding the pasta, so we served it up Spaghetti style by putting the chicken sauce over the pasta right on the plate.

If you might be looking for a way to use some corn, green pepper and salsa this would be an excellent and potentially quite healthy experiment. We wouldn’t post it here if we weren’t planning on making it again!

–Nat

The drive home…

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Sometimes, coming home from work can be complicated.  For instance, last night on the radio we heard about massive delays on 35W by Roseville, so we decdided, somewhat on the fly, that we would take some back roads to clear it and then get back on north of the issue holding up traffic.

As backed up as 280 was, I thought this was the case.  So, we tried to get back on at County Road D and I am glad we had the ability to see the interstate before we turned – evidently this is where the stop and go really started.  The helpful lady on the radio said it would take at least and extra twenty minutes to get by the accident area.  So we crossed over 35W meandered by an awesome looking park on Lake Johanna, got on Snelling, went north a ways, and then crossed back over.  Kristin picked up her CR-V and I took back roads the rest of the way home.

From leaving work (~20 minute walk to the car) to walking into the house, it took about an hour and twenty minutes to go what should have been ~25 miles.  Sheesh!  At least it gave me an opportunity to try embedding a Google Maps thing into the blog…


View Larger Map

–Nat

Mt. Denali

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Mt. Denali (still officially Mt. McKinley because of a cranky old Ohio Senator) is the tallest mountain in North America and is stunning in its height compared to those mountains that surround it.  When you first catch a glimpse of it, coming up from anchorage on the Denali highway, you might not think it is very impressive.  The key is that you are still some sixty miles away from it.  Even when you are closer, it is hard to fathom that the mountain in front of you and Mt. Denali peeking over it are some thirty miles apart.

Since we were in Alaska in July it was highly unlikely we would see the mountain.  It is so tall that the warm air hits it and consistently shrouds it in snow storms.  We lucked out and took a couple hundred pictures to prove it 😉

We were about 25 miles away at this point.

The foreground mountain was about a mile away, Denali ~35.

Towering above the plains, it climbs ~18,000 feet from base to peak.

The mountain is really quite awesome, in the truest sense of the word, to behold.  It would be incredible to see it free of clouds as you can during the winter.

–Nat

Animals in Denali

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Kristin and I spent two days in Denali National Park and together I think we took ~1,500 pictures there.  You can therefore appreciate that the following is a small subset of that 🙂

Also, these photos have already been cropped in some cases.  Because of how you view the wildlife in the park, the animals are usually hundreds to thousands of feet away.  Good thing I had a long lens!  Too bad it was soft at full zoom…

Any animals in particular you’d like to see more of?

–Nat

Camping in IL – Pictures

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A few pictures from lovely Illinois where we camped with Blake and Kaela Bemis. At least the weather wasn’t too hot…

I need to take a longer zoom lens out on these walks…

–Nat

Youtube Management Fodder

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Reading an Ars Technica article about how researchers have turned protein mapping into a game where humans can quickly overcome difficult challenges that baffle computers, I found a reference to this video in the comments.  Basically, it analyzes how rewards motivate workers.

Based on similar discussions in my classes at St. Thomas, this is actually quite a problem.  Paying people money is easy, offering them autonomy is hugely challenging and takes great managers.  I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but I find myself wanting more than a paycheck, too.

–Nat