I am going to exercise all of my self restraint on this one and not purchase it. It looks really cool and has the nicest screen I have ever seen. I don’t think the LTE features are worth the additional $130. In fact I don’t think that the extra 300% pixel density is worth another $500. But Apple is so good at marketing that I seriously considered buying it. I had it in a shopping cart on apple.com for a while, but never finished purchasing.
I pre-ordered it, started playing it at 9:00am the day before it unlocked by using a VPN in Hong Kong, and beat it last Friday. It was awesome: better than ME2 and easily the best in the series. The endings did kind of suck; if you want to know why, ranting and articles about the ending(s?) are all over the internet. This spoiler-filled article at GameFront is a good read about why they/it sucked. I guess handling all the decisions and plot events of three games in a decent way was a bit much for Bioware.
Anyone who reads this should either buy it or add me on Origin if he or she owns it; I’d really like to not have to play with really incompetent people all the time in the co-op multiplayer mode.
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There’s a centipede in my room that’s getting larger. I’ll take a pic when/if it comes out again and post it here unless somebody says I shouldn’t. :-p
Why don’t I make a personal website that uses nginx as the webserver, node.js for server-side scripting, hadoop for storage, and Amazon’s EC2 for webhosting? It’s overkill (and not really as well-suited) compared to this site’s Apache, PHP, MYSQL, and asmallorange, respectively, but I’d feel like a master of web-technology buzzwords for a few months.
EDIT: This post is idiotic for a couple reasons. Hadoop isn’t a storage system; it’s for data processing (MapReduce). Node.js isn’t really meant for server-side scripting; it’s really meant for event-driven I/O. I’m still looking into whether it’s possible to use it for server-side scripting, but it looks like that’s not really a good use for it. Finally EC2 is expensive; it’s like $105 a year just for running a micro instance if I reserve a heavy-use micro instance beforehand for a year.
I had a dream where I had to urinate very badly, so I excused myself to go to the bathroom and ended up urinating in a urinal for an hour.
Then I woke up and thought I had to use the bathroom in real life, but it turns out I didn’t.
What a really weird and misleading dream.
Posted from WordPress for Android
I thought I had something mildly insightful to post, but I can no longer remember it, so instead I’ll announce to you reader(s) that I’m pretty excited about Mass Effect 3 coming out on March 6th, which is less than a week away.
I’ve replayed the original and am finishing up the 2nd in order to build up a save file to import into the third. I played as a Renegade character in both games; it’s much more fun to punch, shoot, and/or threaten people during dialogue instead of reaching a peaceful compromise, and I expect that to hold true in ME3.
The class I chose to play as in the first two was the Sentinel; I liked having a variety of powers because it meant regardless of my squadmates’ powers I had a way to deal with any enemy. The worst part about it in the original ME was only being able to use pistols (and only being half-trained in them, too); it meant the early game was hard and annoying. Would Activision release a Call of Duty where the only weapon you had was a five-seven, and it was the only weapon you could use during the game? Maybe, but only if they released any other weapons as paid DLC (but really, no). I was really happy that they gave SMGs to every class in ME2, and even added the option of being able to use another type of weapon later in the game.
Unfortunately, the changes to the Tech Armor class power in the third (it now increases power recharge times when it’s active) gives me pause about playing as one in Mass Effect 3. Still, the large increase in shields it gives and the AoE blast that occurs when it’s destroyed made it a power that you always wanted active in Mass Effect 2, and I think that may be why it was re-balanced for ME3.
Regardless of that, the biggest reason I’m excited for it is the multiplayer mode. I played it in the demo and got an Engineer character to 20. It was fun, and it reminded me of Payday: The Heist a little bit. The balancing mechanic between how many and how powerful the guns you carry vs how often you can use powers is pretty interesting to play with, but my concern is that it will (definitely) fall victim to min-maxing, and eventually someone will come up with a “perfect” configuration that will unbalance the game and annoy everyone who doesn’t take online multiplayer games seriously.
So, who’s getting it?
I went to an indeed.com coding duel event today, but I ended up leaving a couple hours into it after it seemed clear that I couldn’t answer any questions after the first and therefore wouldn’t place and get a prize.
I guess it was good for helping me rapidly re-learn Python; it’s a lot easier to use for opening and writing to files for this type of competition than Java. I’m slightly bummed that you can’t use ++ and –, though, and for-loops are kind of a pain to use.
I have a cold right now; it’s making it hard to sleep because of the runny nose and sore throat.
I felt miserable during almost all of my classes today; I didn’t feel too bad during CS 421 even though there was an in-class midterm. I guess I subconsciously feel better writing code in OCaml and figuring out concrete parse trees for context-free grammars.
CS 431 was the worst though; my stomach was growling in pain and the professor decided to extend the lecture an extra 5 minutes because he went through all of the material very slowly. It was a tortuous extra five minutes, but I persevered, went home, and made some ginger tea.
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I’m wrote this post using the WordPress for Android app. It doesn’t have all of the options that the standard web browser version does, but it’s much easier to use, and you don’t have to deal with zooming in on the phone.
Hopefully, tomorrow doesn’t suck as much as today did, but in the past hour I’ve developed a headache, so I don’t know…
I felt pretty meh the whole day.
I took a nap and had a dream that some of my teeth fell out. Then, I walked to a chinese restaurant and got some fried rice for takeout. I watched an episode of Breaking Bad, and then felt mildly displeased afterward due to Walt becoming an increasingly unsympathetic character and the mushrooms in the fried rice tasting a little strange.
It’s technically Monday, and my replacement graphics card should arrive later. One of the fans on the old graphics card was dying, so I RMA’d it about 1.5 weeks ago. Hopefully the replacement lasts a bit longer and won’t possess an angrily growling fan.
I also need to find a plug-in for a mobile version of WordPress’s dashboard. The standard one is awkward to use in the Android browser.
