Day One Hundred fifty-eight: Evening of January 7th 2010

Fallout 3 and Borderlands were the games of the day. This, of course, was squeezed in between the routine housework, a moderately heavy snowfall (which required shoveling), and the beginning of a head cold.

The nice thing about video games when I’m a bit under the weather, is the distraction it provides. Initially, the congestion and runny nose dominate my state of being, but if the game is challenging enough, the discomfort is diminished. A drawback, caused by the illness, is that I fall asleep when the action becomes monotonous.

In Fallout, I’ll be walking along, going from Point A to Point B, and the next thing I know “Where am I?” is filling my thought or worse, “Why is that monster pounding on me? Run!!!” I think that happened about three times today.

I would have returned to Fallout in the evening, but I notice that the latest downloadable software for Borderlands was posted on the PlayStation network. I had been waiting for 'Mad Moxie’s Underdome.' I downloaded it and played it in split screen. Definitely a survival challenge, but I didn’t quite understand what was going on. I’m going to have to try it again in single rather than split screen mode. Just a brief statement about where the confusion occurs - I couldn’t figure out how to get out of it after the first round of challenges. I just wanted to test it out and quit.

Tomorrow will be another snow day, maybe, I’ll feel better after shoveling and squeeze in some more gaming, especially Borderlands.

Day One Hundred fifty-seven: Evening of January 6th 2010

I just ordered Army of Two: The 40^th Day and a new controller for the PlayStation 3.

I’m hard on controllers. I consistently drive the stick into the upper edge to emphasize the need for speed. I don’t think anything really goes faster if this is done, but it feels so good. Now I get forward drift when I’m using either of the two controllers. I went online yesterday to see how to get into the controller to try to fix the problem. From past experience, I know that I won’t be able to do anything, because I didn’t see a drift adjustment (potentiometer bias adjustment) in any of the online descriptions. But I wanted to try, who knew what I would find inside the controller. When the exploratory work was done, nothing could be done to fix the problem. For a minute, I considered pulling out my soldering iron out and use parts from the one broken controller to fix the other, but I wanted to continue playing. When the new controller arrives, maybe then I’ll fix the other units (if I can find my soldering iron).

Speaking of returning to something to work on, I mentioned that there was a login for the CoolIris plug-in, and that I was going to check it out. It appears that it’s primarily a demographics thing - to see who the viewership is in order to tailor the information place in the plug-in. The developers state that the information supplied will be kept private. You can, also, be put on an email list to keep you abreast of new developments in the plug-in.

Today’s game play was Fallout 3 on the PS3. It was fun, and there were some new surprise in store for me today. Sometime it plays the same, but that wasn’t the case today.

Day One Hundred fifty-six: Evening of January 5th 2010

I caught the closing minutes of Attack of the Show on G4tv, when the acting host, Chris Hardwick, mentioned a plug-in for the FireFox web browser. It’s called CoolIris, and is an image oriented browsing tool. In other word, images trigger the links to the underlying story, products, or videos. Going to the site, I discover that it works in the Windows and Mac environments with Safari, FireFox and Explorer (v7.0 and v8.0). Clicking on the 'Download Now' button causes the website to check your browser and automatically load the appropriate plug-in for your browser. A quick restart then activating the plug-in, brings up the plug-in’s opening screen. What is striking is the way you interact with two rows of what appear to be floating image tabs laid out as the user’s guide to CoolIris. In the upper left corner is the access menu to the actual browser of CoolIris. When you open this menu your choices drop down and you can peruse the content of the Web. Granted the designers have set up the plug-in to pick the images, but this maybe something that the user can control can adjust to taste. I haven’t had a chance to explore the tailoring aspect of this plug-in. Also, there is advertizing, in this case Nikon has a contest /ad grid inserted on the less active pages. Not a big factor now, but this could give you a clue into “the shape of things to come.”

Anyway, I’ll be returning to this plug-in periodically, just to see what’s happening with it

One other thing that I forgot to mention and haven’t checked out fully, there is a login button. I don’t know what you would be subscribing to with this function. I didn’t notice any mention of a trial period, so I’ll have to check that out later.

Day One Hundred fifty-five: Evening of January 4th 2010

So on yesterday’s post I stated that I would get the name of the registry optimizer for today’s entry. Little did I realize that I bought into a controversy when I purchased Advanced Registry Optimizer by SammSoft.

In order to find this out, I had to check the path of the icon back to the actual application, which I found a bit of a bother. After checking out the title of the software on my Toshiba netbook, I decided to look up the review on cnet.com. It was during the search process that I notice one of the Google hits had the word “spam” tacked onto the name of the application. Whoa! Brakes screeching. What was that all about? I clicked on that link, started reading the text and became totally confused. It seemed like the page was a set of ads for other software. At the bottom of the page was a set of references that had selected/edited comments followed by more link after the entry. I was uncertain about what the intro comments were trying to communicate. Some actually had a negative bent, and other hedged their bet by sounding like ‘well maybe’ statements. I didn’t bother to click on any of the links, because I wanted to hit the cnet.com review to see where I went wrong.

The first thing I noticed was that I’ll have to update to version 5.1 of ARO. Then I reread the review, noting the cnet.com editor’s four stars out of five rating. That had not changed, but the user reviews had dipped below three out of five. So I continued to read. The one star reviews range from application flaw evaluations to enraged claims of the cnet.com editors being in the pocket of SammSoft. I think one five star review was a lead to a source of a ‘free’ full version, which sounded questionable. There was one poor review that claimed that the registry cleaning actually broke registry links to software, which has happened to me. However you can customize the software to address this issue, but it was a time consuming operation to actually find the applications link and mark it as a ‘skip’ link. Another individual commented on the poor customer support, but I didn’t bother to seek out kindred spirits in the 200 plus comment. A few others noted the fact that the company offered a free version but it only tagged the first twenty registry errors, and you had to pay for the full version. This elicited comment about phony hits, and how can you be sure. A downward spiral became apparent.

The scary thing that I noted was that there wasn’t a response by a company representative or a cnet.com editor. I’ll have to hit the ‘See all’ link and check if any responses by either group are buried in the user reviews.

Then again, maybe I won’t. The application, as a part of a periodic maintenance system, seems to keep the system running well.

As an addendum, I think there was a piece of SammSoft software that I had a long time ago for my Mac 512e that worked. I wonder if I can find it. If memory serves me correctly, it was a memory management application-squeezing a few extra kilobytes of RAM out of the system.

Day One Hundred fifty-four: Evening of January 3rd 2010

Nothing serious in the way of tech work was done today, other than updating my daughter’s PlayStation 3. Normally, I do all of the updating wirelessly, but her machine’s reception is poor. I don’t quite understand why it can’t work with that level of reception, when I have my Toshiba or Mac Book Pro in approximately the same location, even with poor reception connections are made, and files can download.

Although I’ve done it a few times before, I went to the PlayStation support site and re-read the directions for doing the update. Following the directions, I created and nested the prescribed two folders. The update file was downloaded and place in the correct folder. This was all done on the Mac Book Pro, and the update folders were loaded on a flash memory stick. I haven’t had a problem doing this, if I’ve followed directions, and this time was no exception. I was done in about fifteen minutes, start to finish.

The last thing that I did was to check to see if the update is in effect. I usually restart any machine that I’ve done major update for the same reason. With the computers, there are additional actions that I take. With the Mac, I use MicroMat’s Tech Tool Pro. With the Toshiba, I use a registry cleaning software that was recommended by CNN Tech (of course I’m on my Mac and nowhere near my PC to get the name of the application). In searching for the name at CNet.com, I couldn’t recognize any of the listed applications, so I’ll mention it in my next post. I guess that is the problem with clicking on an icon and activate the tool. I do the same thing with the antiviral software.

When I was in the service, we had a Preventive Maintenance System (PMS-no comment here) that was used to check the performance of the electronic equipment that we used. In essence, it was sets of scheduled tests, from daily through to annual checks, tests, and alignments. Because our, the crew’s, lives would depend on this system in critical situation, we knew the importance of even the most trivial test. Of course, my equipment performance isn’t as important as that, I still feel the importance of some kind of maintenance program is needed to keep even the gaming equipment operating at optimal levels. So system updates are an important part of system maintenance.

Just a word of warning, every once in a while, some updates have negative effects upon the system or software. That is why the warning is given, whenever you implement systemic changes that you should back up your hard drives. To be honest, I don’t always do this, but I do back up critical documents on the hard drive periodically. Another, approach would be to hit the Internet and check, via a search, if there are any negative effects being experienced by other users.

That was a lot of text for a light tech day.

Day One Hundred fifty-three: Evening of January 2nd 2010

I noticed that the post added extra line spacing between paragraphs. I tried to remove it, but it kept appearing. I wonder what coding is picked up by the text editor used by Blogspot. It doesn’t look that bad, but it is strange that I can’t easily control it.

As of right now, Borderlands highest level is fifty. I played today for about two hours, forty-five minutes in the morning and an hour and fifteen minutes in the evening. I watched the experience points as they were accumulated and noticed no change in the HUD’s display of that information at the bottom of the screen. So, Level 50 it is. There might be a change is future downloadable content pushes it up.

We’ll have to see.

Day One Hundred fifty-two: Evening of January 1st 2010

The shift has occurred, I’m typing this entry in MS Word 2008 for Mac. I tried once more to work with the MS Works files from my netbook, trying the insert approach but that resulted in the same outcome – failure to cleanly open file. I guess it’s appropriate that I start the new year out working on a different, hopefully more stable, application.

We shall see.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was started today. It’s an action-adventure video game with a stealth element incorporated into the game play. Basically the Joker has tricked and trapped Batman in Arkham Asylum which has been conveniently been stocked with Joker’s henchmen. I’ve just fought through the tutorial section where I learned the basics of movement, fighting, and the use of special functions. One such functions is the detective mode, which, when activated, alerts you to any points of interest that you might need. It is fairly straight forward, and flows smoothly from one learning experience to the next, while getting you deeper into the Joker’s trap. It was fun, but after dinner, I decided to play some Borderlands. It is still rewarding primarily because the difficulty has matched, if not exceeded, my level of development. I’m not sure if the experience point additions from my battling will result in any more advancement.

We shall see.