rickshangle.com

A POWER dimension.

rds

Speed Demos Archive

A web page (one of many?) dedicated to showing various people beating various video games as quickly as inhumanly possible.

I once read / heard someone (dunno who) who said, “There is nothing more boring than watching someone else play a video game.”

As (understatement) a lifelong fan of video games, I’d say that’s relatively true when you’re a hyper kid, but somewhat less true as I get older.

Namely, games such as the Grand Theft Auto series have a fairly high up-front enjoyment factor to play, but as the levels become more difficult, I start getting pissed and inevitably lose interest. Think of it as reverse learning curve.

It’s for this reason that my completion rate for the games I buy hovers around 25%, which leads to my drastic reduction in games acquired over the last few years. The exception being things like Karaoke Revolution, due to my awesome and complete dominance of karaoke-sty-lings, as well as associated styles.

Anyway, for many of these games, just kicking back, drinking a few (or many) beers, and watching a pro do the heavy lifting is actually quite enjoyable.

For that reason, I fully endorse this site. LOCKDOWN!

If you’re old school, I’d start with something bound to trigger some nostalgia, such as the original Legend of Zelda for NES. I remember spending weeks to beat that frigging game when I was about 12 (an age and time, apparently, when I had the time, energy and patience do so such things; these days, getting out of bed every can be a challenge).

Note: this site probably isn’t for milk-and-cookies gamers, nor for people who are infuriated that the cutscenes to almost every game played are bypassed by the speed daemon, who has undoubtedly beaten the game (or read the walk-through) dozens of times as training for their SPEED TRIAL.

These people are professionals. Please respect them as such when you throw down.

Other enjoyable cuts I’ve recently kick back on: Eternal Darkness, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (a GTA rev that, in rare wisdom, I didn’t even bother to buy after becoming quickly infuriated with Vice City within hours of starting.

rds

The Right Thing for the world… trying to figure out the lime green / “fend[ing] off potential thieves” connection.

rds

CNN.com - Actor Chris Penn found dead - Jan 25, 2006

rds

The first outing, which for good or ill was created within one hour of launching iWeb 1.0.0.

iWeb is Apple’s new iLife-branded drag-and-drop-and-Apple-Feel-Good-Web-Development-Tool for the masses.

After 60 minutes with the product, there’s this:

Good:

It’s pretty much as drag and drop as Jobs demo’ed.

Nice forms. Always have to hand that to Apple.

Easy enough to use that (after proper setup) it will allow my Mom to enter the web publishing world. at last.

The media browser is probably speedy enough for most users libraries. Could scroll through my 24,000 photo iPhoto library without causing a kernel panic.

So so:

The WYSIWYG element is probably only 90% there.

A good number of spinny-lollipops encountered the first goround… and that’s on a site with like six pages.

Upload / publish speed to .Mac is marginal at best, but that has ever been the case with .Mac.

Ugly:

Lack of interactivity in the “blog”-type pages. It appears that authoring can only happen through iWeb. No comments. No ability to author new content through the web. For now. We’ll see about iLife 07.

Note: The elitist snob in me wants to say, “The ‘blog’ function in iWeb isn’t, in the least, blog-like”, but I’m keeping the jackheel down. For a .Mac user who has dreamed of having their own simple blog, but has lacked the capability until now, this will suffice, although it will probably get old fairly quick without the interactive element.

Publishing setup is non-trivial, considering this is an iApp. When you don’t have your “publish’ settings up right (at least this was true in my case), when you hit “publish” you just get an endless lollipop instead of a helpful dialogue such as, “Hey, I notice you’re not set up publish to any sort of meaningful web page. How about we help you out with that. Want to buy .Mac?”

Uh - can you actually see the page I linked above, without a .Mac account?

In any event… half a kudo to Apple for addressing a gap in their QoL-enhancing apps that’s only been there for five years or so. For a v1.0.0 app, could be lot worse, but there is work to do.

I’m sure by next revision (and the version number is, literally, 1.0.0. Couldn’t they have made it 1.5, just for fun?), in addition to the standard stability / performance increases we are used to seeing v3 (or 4… or 5) iApp products, we’ll see the standard Apple-visionary-my-god-I-never-knew-i-needed-that-feature, but-now-that-you-mention-it-hell-yeah stuff:

1) Lists of your most recent iTunes songs… including a special jelly button indicating the ones you illegally ripped.

2) iWeb Double-Ender Extension

3) iWeb Studio Space Explorer

4) iCowbell (wait… that’s another iApp… I’m getting off the topic of iWeb here)

5) iWeb Power Launcher

6) iWeb Setup Wizard v9X6

7) Real interactive blogs

Manual override for studio space exploration

9) Sports and sh*t.

10) Some other stuff re: Photocasting, which I haven’t quite figured out yet… but soon. Another entry. Because trust me… I have a lot of porn to share.

Respect,
rds

round one

Any user of Mac OS X is familiar with (if not a fan of) the spinning beach ball of occasional doom. A number of sites, including this one, discuss things that can summon / conjur The Ball.

As a daily user of a gen 1 G5 Dual Processor PowerMac (2GHz, 1.5GB RAM) who keeps many applications open at once (including MS apps and Safari), reboots as infrequently as possible (current uptime is 8 days, but the average is about two weeks), and consequently (is it consequence?) does increasing battle with the Ball/Wheel/Lollipop/Death-Bringer in the later days/hours of a boot cycle, I’ve decided to incrementally look into the root causes of my situation, and take pro-action as appropriate.

This thread will be the log.

Stay tuned, come along for the ride, post your experiences, etc.

rds

Excellent article: iMac 17″ Core Duo : Page 5

Hmm, Steve’s assertion that we’d see 4-5x performance kick over the G5 was a tad optimistic. Why am I not shocked?

rds

Glengarry Glen Ross is certainly one of the greatest films of all time, due primarily to Alec Baldwin’s profanity-laden motivational speech (which, incidentally, didn’t appear in the stage version of G G R).

I probably like the film so much due to its accurate portrayal of the salesperson psyche (insufferable bastard-dom). Or the fact that most good salespeople I know love the film, despite this.

More than anything else this holiday season, Balwdin returning to form thirteen years later, as he teaches Santa’s elves to Always Be Cobbling, warms the cackles of my heart. From Saturday Night Live (NBC).

F**k you, that’s my name.

To this day (and, I suspect, until death) I spring various bits of Mitch and Murray / Lempkin wisdom on unsuspecting co-workers, mainly to watch them freak out.

A favorite remains: “This is [some object the co-worker wants]. And you can’t have [the object]. Because giving [the object] to you, would just be throwing it away.”

hardcore infrastructure supporting Jobs during his keynotes.

The truth.

rds

:: FARM FRIENDS ::

This is the right thing to do.

rds