John's Random Review

I really liked it! It had a few glitchy things at the beginning, though. You’d think that if you were making a game about ghosts you would maybe maybe write your code in such a way that said ghosts don’t get stuck in the environment. Several times i’d get to a spot in the level where nothing was happening. All of the other ghostbusters are standing around, obviously waiting for something to happen. So i had to run around in the whole level, looking for that one stupid ghost that was stuck somewhere. On one of the first levels, he was stuck between a building and a car. Other times, having the ghosts stuck somewhere turned out to be very convenient, as it meant that there was one less ghost to deal with.

The storyline was pretty good, the flow was pretty good, the acting was “meh”. It has all the original actors in it, but it would appear to me that they recorded all the audio sentence by sentence actor by actor. The conversations between characters didn’t seem like they were all in a room together talking, like it should. One cool thing was how when you got “killed”, the other ghostbusters could come tag you and bring you back, so you only “died” if all of the ghostbusters died. In some of the boss monsters or other places where there were tons of ghosts at once, this meant that you spent most of your time running around reviving the other ghostbusters, and spending what little time you had left actually trying to catch ghosts.

The weapons were mostly cool. I loved the standard proton pack thing, it worked exactly like you’d think it would. The “blue” gun mode thing i hardly used (some kind of freeze ray and a semi-shotgun thing?). The “green” gun was a slime gun, similar to what they used in ghostbusters 2, and towards the end of the game you had to use it far too much. I want to be a ghost buster, wrangling ghosts, not a slime pump! The last gun you unlock, the “yellow” gun was like a ghost-busting machine gun. It was useful in some places, but not many. About the only place i really used it was one of the last bosses.

All in all i thought it was a really good game; it had the feel of the first movie, so it was really entertaining for a movie based video game!

The thing I misses the most since the tragic end of Rosetta Biosoftware will be not having a real Halloween party tomorrow. And not just because someone in the carpool had won either Best Costume, Best Group, or the Golden Frankie for like the last 5 years. The best thing was probably seeing your managers, directors, etc, dressed up in costumes. Microsoft has kids over and trick-or-treating, but it isn’t going to be the same as having Yelena forcing people to wear whatever costume things she brought for the people who didn’t dress up!

Some examples…

Not a winner:

Winner:

Winners:

Winners:

Winners:

(thanks to jay for photoshopping in the background!)

In the end we’re all losers?:

(thanks to jay for that one)

I’m going to need to start emailing around Microsoft Research now that i work at Microsoft…because i’m intrigued by this thing:

Microsoft Research’s Courier

This new device, called “Courier” showed up on Gizmodo today, and i don’t know why it hasn’t gotten more press. Maybe because its still in a “late prototype” phase and everyone assumes there’s an apple iTablet thing due any time now?

I’ve never been a fan of the ebook reader things because they just don’t look right. my laptop, for how small it is, isn’t the right form factor either. My iphone is just too small to read on. I think this thing is about perfect! I had a Vadem Clio years ago, and it was the closest thing to the right size device for what i’d like to carry around, but it was underpowered and the touchscreen wasn’t anywhere near the size or quality as they are now.

Vadem Clio. now ancient technology!

But this Courier device looks like it would work great with the right ebook reader software, and a coworker already said it would be a great machine to fold over, with a screen facing each way to play battleship on . It would be a great meeting computer, surf the web on one side, take notes on the other. I’d never need another paper notebook ever!

In haiku form:

mirror’s edge, the game
it is a jumping puzzle
and that’s about it.

Well, maybe it had other things, but i never found them. I just couldn’t get into it, because it was just jumping puzzles, so i gave up. I’d just finished Tomb Raider before that, and at least it had puzzle puzzles. And swinging puzzles, and fire puzzles and shooting puzzles, etc. There are just too many other games out to play something that pisses me off.

I’ve spent a couple weeks now trying to get this server back running and have had the wierdest problems…The network keeps disappearing! After a few hours, the NIC just stops working. Device manager still shows it, but the link light is gone, and the activity light stays off. I’ve updated bios, drivers, tried another NIC, same problem.

If i uninstall the driver, and reinstall the driver, sometimes it just magically comes back…looks like i might need to get Win2k8 server R2 when it comes out, see if it fixes some of these things… We’ll see how long the machine stays on the network tonight!

Fallout 3, by Bethesda Softworks is probably the best game I’ve played so far in 2009. Personally, i think the world felt a lot bigger and a lot more immersive than GTA4.

There was so much to do, and so many places to go, i found myself just wandering unexplored areas of the map to see what i could see. There were some great quest chains, and other not so great, but on a whole it was a great mix of RPG and action. There were some quests that were secondary that could be completed regardless of the main quest, and then there were a fair amount of “mini” quests that don’t show up in the quest list, but showed up as notes instead…which was annoying. Some of the mini-quests were literally seconds long: a dude ran up to me in the middle of the wasteland, and said

Help me! I’m wired with explosives!

And then ran away, and exploded! ooooooops! Sorry dude!

I really enjoyed Oblivion, and this was like a futuristic post-apocolyptic version game using the same engine, minus magic, plus guns. How can you go wrong!?

It started off a little hard, running out of ammo all the time, but towards the middle that ceased to be a problem. Inventory/weight management was probably the most complicated problem in the game . The recent “Broken Steel” DLC was pretty good, raising the level cap and adding some story after the end of the original game, so that was pretty cool too.

One of my favorite parts was how it took place in Washington D.C., and took a fair amount of geography and history into account. There are several chains of quests that have you go through the D.C. area museums/etc to find/recover artifacts that weren’t destroyed in the wars/bombings, like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta. Another set of quests has you finding Abraham Lincoln artifacts (including the head of the statue at the Lincoln Monument!) to help out a group of former slaves (slavery running somewhat rampant in the times that the games take place).

Most of the quests and things in the game let you be good or evil, although none of these games with alignment has really gotten “evil” correct yet. So far, most of the games let you either be a saint, or a dick. There’s no really evil stuff, where you do the good thing only to manipulate people into doing some really evil things. Force Unleashed is probably one of the few games that came close, but you didn’t have a whole lot of choosing there.

The huge amount of voice talent in the game was great too. The people feel a lot more real when the conversation is real speaking, however i always have the subtitles on whenever possible in all games. Its surprising how many games do not have that feature, but to me i like to be able to skip through conversations when i can read them, or have already listened to the speech before too. I only wish some of the background chatter that took place had subtitles as well. There are a lot of places where you can just stand around in the crowd and people are having converations, or the radio is on in the background and ThreeDog is talking about things you’ve actually done in the world. That was a pretty cool touch!

Along with CoD2 and CoD4, this is only the third game i’ve played that i’ve had dreams that take place “in the game world,” so to speak. To me, that’s the definition of immersion. Although with the CoD games, those dreams were more like nightmares of some point in the game getting played over and over and over because i couldn’t get through it. The fallout3 ones were like real life quests in the fallout universe, which was really cool!

After a hardware disaster, corrupted backups, professional data restoration, a hardware upgrade complete with more hardware failure (somehow a new power supply i bought at FRY’s was DOA!), everything is mostly back to normal. Everything is running on newer builds of php and mysql, with 4x the processing power and 4x the RAM. I’ve seen mysql crash a few times already, though, so we’ll see how that goes.

If you see somethinng missing or broken, let me know!

Before i get to the wood part of the project, can you identify the object the wood goes with?

If you’ve never seen one stripped down, you might not recognize it. Here’s a better “pre” picture that will make everything clear.

OMG SO SCARY AK47 MACHINEGUN!!11!! No, its an AK variant, a Yugoslavian M70AB2 underfolder. Its semi-automatic, not a “machine-gun”, so don’t get your panties in a bunch. It’s less powerful than most hunting rifles. Yes, it accepts 30+ round magazines, but so does almost any semi-auto gun these days. Why do i have one? Because (1) i like guns, and (2) the bill of rights says i can, so there! And this way when zombies attack or red dawn goes down, i’ll be ready…Everyone should have at least one AK!

But to me it doesn’t look right with all that plastic, so here are the parts getting replaced (bottom), and the replacements (top):

Inbetween sanding and painting other house projects the last couple days, I’ve been sanding, fitting, oiling, and waxing those wood pieces. Finished, looks much more correct now. The result:

Unfolded to its full size:

Thanks to Ironwood Designs for the fantastic quality, made in the USA handguards and grip. Well worth the wait!

I was browsing random crap on ebay today…and on my profile, saw this:

Member since: Feb-16-99 in United States

Holycrap, really? I’ve been buying stuff off ebay for a decade? I thought that ebay would die a quick death, like some of the other auction sites that we bought computer stuff from in college….

I posted most of this as a comment on the blog of Michael Yon, a former special forces operator turned war journalist, in a response to his post: http://www.michaelyon-online.com/tons-of-arms-flowing-to-mexico.htm. I really respect Michael, and read all of his disptaches and own all of his books, including a signed copy of Moment of Truth in Iraq.

Michael’s post is really just a link to a government document full of statistics about “tons” of guns going to Mexico. All of the block quotes here are quotes from the government document.

Mexico is having huge problems, yes, but now people are trying to make it sound like this problem is our fault. And because it is our fault, we should limit our own rights. But that won’t solve the problem. If there really is one. Let the statistics begin!

It is an undisputable (sic) fact that the weapons and firearms used to fuel the drug-related violence in Mexico can be traced back to guns procured legally or illegally here.

Wow, how vague. “weapons and firearms”. plural. That could be one knife and one gun, or one baseball bat and one gun, or could be many more. For an indisputable fact, that isn’t very specific.

In fact, according to ATF’s National Tracing Center, 90 percent of the weapons that could be traced were determined to have originated from various sources within the U.S.

Again, wow. “90% of the weapons that could be traced…” 90% of how many? How many couldn’t be traced? I read this as 9 of the 10 weapons that had serial numbers. the other 300k didn’t have serial numbers because they weren’t manufactured in the united states.

In FY 2007 alone, Mexico submitted approximately 1,112 guns for tracing that originated in Texas, Arizona and California. The remaining 47 States accounted for 435 traces in FY 2007.

Finally! some numbers: 1547 guns in a year. That is “tons” now? they still don’t say how many were traced, just 90% of the TRACEABLE ones were traced. Even if 100% were traceable, that means that 1392 were from the USA. ATF stats for 2007 say that 2.7 MILLION guns were produced that year. Not only that, but 207,000+ guns were legally exported. So if 90% of the guns that were traced to the US turns out to be 1392 guns, that is less than 1 percent (0.67%) of all exported guns, and less than 5 hundredths of a percent (0.05%) of all of the guns sold in the us in 2007. The only way this is tons of guns is if you measure it by the pound.

And again, this is only the guns that were submitted to the ATF for tracing, and those that could be traced. Best case, that’s all 1392, worst case that is NINE.

There are related statistics to these 1392 guns that were traceable that i would like to see:
1) how many of them had been reported stolen?
2) how many of them were reported lost or stolen by the US Government? State and Local governments?

Those are harder numbers to find. So lets look at state by state trace information published by the ATF.

If you look at only the Texas ATF trace statistics for 2007, they traced 14,111 firearms to that state alone. Of those recovered, there were seventeen “machine-guns”. 17 of fourteen thousand!

What is the distribution of the guns given to the ATF for trace? How many hanguns? revolvers? shotguns? rifles? how many were “scary black rifles”? If you go with the texas numbers from above, it would be about half autoloading handguns, then about a fifth revolvers, a fifth shotguns, a fifth rifles, the rest random stuff.
How many exactly were fully automatic? That’s what everyone is talking about, drug runners with scary machine guns!
If you go with the texas numbers above and do the math, it would be less than 2. Yes, two. Two machine guns. All this press and rhetoric about two machine guns.

California has much more restrictive gun laws, so That state must have much fewer guns than Texas, right? Heeeeeeell no. Lets do the same things with the 2007 Cali statistics:
Traced weapons in california in 2007? 27,672. So around double that of Texas and twenty times as many as were done for Mexico. The pistol/revolver/rifle/shotgun distribution is about the same as Texas. How many machine guns? 62 in California. About two tenths of a percent of those recovered. So that would round up to be 3 machine guns in the mexico batch.

In addition, drug traffickers frequently resort to using “straw purchasers” to gain firearms from federally licensed gun dealers in the U.S., dealers who often are unwitting participants in these schemes.

Yes, and straw purchases are already illegal. Its the first checkbox on the ATF 4473 form you fill out when you transfer a firearm. paraphrasing: “Are you buying this for yourself? If no, stop right here.” If someone’s going to lie on the first question of the form, why wouldn’t they lie on every other question on the form?

ATF also has seized large quantities of ammunition for use in these firearms.

Define “large quantities”, that is a very subjective term. Almost everyone who owns a .22LR gun has large quantities of ammunition as they sell ammo in 550 round bricks. People buy .223 and 7.62×39 by the 1000+round case, because its the cheapest way to get it. People build ammo forts and take pictures. Go to any standard retailer (like Cabelas) website and go look at prices for ammunition. Nobody is going to buy ammo 20 rounds at a time for $1 / round when they can buy 1000 for 33 cents/round.

Unfortunately, in the past six months we have noted a troubling increase in the number of grenades, which are illegal to possess and sell, seized from or used by drug traffickers, and we are concerned about the possibility of explosives-related violence spilling into U.S. border towns.

This is the best part of this document. Something that is already illegal to own is being sold to drug traffickers. OMG PONIES! People breaking the law are selling illegal things to other people breaking the law! Lets change the law for selling other things that have nothing to do with this to solve that other problem!

Update 4/2/09:Seems that i’m not the only one who’s complained about this number. FoxNews (yeah, i know, i know) did some real research and got real numbers from someone. the 90% number is exactly what i said it was. A percentage of a small percentage of some smaller number of guns. The real number is around 17%, which is much more reasonable to me based on the size of the border and the number of guns produced here. Its still unclear from that number, though, how many of those were M16′s that might have been produced here under military contract for the mexican government:

More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.

The article says they are Belgian produced, but some portion might be from the US.