Why is it one of the first things we ask about a person we have just met is “what do you do?”. The question is actually very open ended however it is generally assumed the response is in form of what takes up the majority of your time (what’s your job). Does our job define us? Should it? My goal for the next few years is to be a Unix System Administrator (nerd) however I try to avoid answering the aforementioned question for a work related answer. Society is too conformist these days, people should question the norms more.. just because something is typical done in a certain way doesn’t mean it has to be. Next time I’m asked what do you do, I’m sure to come up with something witty.
Been an age since my last update, sorry to all those strangers who don’t actually read this. If all goes well and passed my exams I’ve gotten my undergraduate degrees and working on the last unit for my MBA certificate. I’m meant to be studying currently, however the book on Organisational Behaviour is basically a philosophy regurgitation (I much prefer Three Minute Philosophy or Philosophy Bro).
Probably be moving to Canberra in the next month or two.. scary times.
I suffer from it, amongst other things. Why put off what you can do today.. I think the saying goes like that no? Well I’ll tell you why.. S OYOU DONT HAVE TO DO IT TODAY>!
Uni is draining my life force.. it’s the worst. I miss work. I miss money. I miss having a purpose. I miss not being surrounded by a bunch of try hard nerds… well at least not ones straight out of school.
So uni has started and I’m behind in my readings already, probably one of the many reasons why it’s taken me 9 years to finish my degree. Fingers crossed if I can stop being lazy this will be the last semester!
Just stuffed myself at a Thai restaurant with some friends from high school, funny that after 10 years the four of us are still relatively close and for a couple of years even all worked at the same company! Speaking of iiNet (the aforementioned company), if you don’t know what I’m talking about.. then Google iiNet AFACT as the chances are you pirate and should be aware what’s going on. Anywho.. the appeal was dismissed – Huzzah. Next is the high court no doubt, however lets celebrate this victory first.
Ahh Louis CK, you tickle me in ways that you shouldn’t. I know I’ve probably raved about him before but I can’t help myself.. Google him. Great stand up, although I’m not a fan of his “tv show” that’s based on his stand up.. lacks a lot of the punch.
We are in a pretty interesting place right now in time, the digital age has revolutionised every aspect of our lives. When was the last time you went into a bank to get money? What would you do if you had no mobile phone.. or worse, the Internet broke! People bitch and moan too much, what about a bit of elbow grease and suffering. The people in Egypt revolted against their government to get what they deserved, yet if the fat kid doesn’t get the latest Halo he kills his mum – listen to Drew Carey.
Was yesterday.. dam all those happy people out there. Started up uni on this auspicious day – doesn’t seem very fair. Not sure how I managed to convince myself that dragging out finishing my degree from 12 months to 18 wasn’t enough, nooo I signed up for summer and winter units to get a head start on an MBA. What does an MBA have to do with my Computer Science / Internet Software Devleopment degree you ask? NOTHING. What does it have to do with my goal of being a Systems Engineer? NOTHING. Sigh I’m great.
Hopefully as I mentioned last post I’ll do up a quake-gasm post, however I’m still in Duke fever. Gearbox announced the other day the special edition of Duke, heh love the name: Duke Nukem – Balls of Steel edition. I’m really looking forward to the hard cover book and shamefully enough the radioactive emblem dice!
Hmmph since the new YouTube plugin causes all sorts of performance issue going to spam a bunch of links I’ve had saved for a rainy day. Not a very exciting post I know, but the next one will.. hmm might be :)
Almost half my life I’ve waited for this. Where can I click buy?
*UPDATE*
Had to run away to Margaret River for a family holiday, back now to dribble on about Duke for a bit. Going to do a bit of an unfair comparison here, Quake vs Duke. It should be fairly obvious that Quake is hands down one of the greatest games ever created (will write up something about it shortly), however at the age of 12 when both Quake and Duke Nukem were released in 1996 the choice was easy… a creepy scary game or a humorous character blowing shit up. Duke won and I loved him for it!
If for some reason you’ve never seen Duke Nukem or Quake check out the two below videos (Quake video goes for 6-7 minutes).
Duke Nukem 3D
Quake
So there was Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem 2 (wow great name), Duke Nukem 3D (hah not bad) and finally Duke Nukem Forever (get it?!).. pretty clever naming if you ask me. The news that the sequel will finally be coming out after so many issues is hard to believe. I’ve waited for 13 odd years for this game, that’s a pretty dam long time. 13 years ago the Internet was only starting to poke it’s head up. Think back, here’s a short list I came up with:
Pluto was a planet
The Internet was dialup, had 300 million users vs 2 billion
Mobile phones were a luxury
A billion less people were alive
Flat screens didn’t exist
A gigabyte was a lot
Apple and Blackberry were fruit
The destructible environment was another great aspect, most objects could be destroyed including some walls (Red Faction eat your heart out). There are so many secrets scattered within Duke that it would be silly to even try and list them here. Some that spring to mind are the dead Doom guy, Indiana Jones, Terminator and so on.
Perhaps one of the greatest parts of the game was the multiplayer (be it co-op or dukematch!). Being a youngster I didn’t know any better, but the game did not support TCP/IP but followed in Doom’s steps of IPX. Head-to-head modem games were a common thing for my friends, calling on one phone line while playing on the other.. it was too much fun for a 12 year old. There was a pay service via Kali or TEN, however I never used it due to the ever increasing costs.
My first introduction to modding was thanks to Duke, however it was more common to call them TC’s – Total Conversions. The first TC most kids got was the porn pack, replacing all the videos in the game with actual porn.. heh thanks Internet. Another first for myself thanks to Duke was the concept of expansion packs:
Duke Caribbean: Life’s a Beach
Duke it out in D.C.
Duke: Nuclear Winter
I couldn’t get enough of Duke, he was my first digital hero. Alas I digress, I heard about the sequel some time in 97 and have been waiting patiently.. well maybe not patiently. If anyone has visited the old 3D Realms forums the name KaiserSoze should ring – that guy is a trooper. I’ve been an off and on again reader of the forums for far too long.
There are plenty of web sites out there that will go into detail outlining every little promise and mistake 3D realms made, however I’d rather focus on media releases. Duke Nukem was an insanely fun game for it’s time, a great mix of humour, fps and secrets – I’m looking forward to seeing what Gearbox can do!
Do you ever feel blue? I think that most of us have ups and downs, yet you see those around you who appear to be in either state continuously. Are they damaged? Are we for not being? It’s been over a year back at uni and it still irks me, somehow telling myself only another 6 more months doesn’t equate to Dorothy’s heel clicking – where is my dam tornado.
I remember once making a deal with a friend, a deal where he was to ride naked for 5 km’s (only allowed a helmet). I doubt he will ever go through with it.. how boring. I’m more of a why not guy.. why not jump off that 30 foot bridge into the ocean? Why not call my little cousin Beebs to annoy him, that’s what family is for right?
Anyone been to Italy before? It’s awesome for many reasons, funny enough the food and wine was definitely not highly ranked in my books. I was doing a Contiki tour with my gf at the time and while we were fighting constantly, managed to get fooled by a con man, get lost in Rome for over 2 hours.. it was probably my favourite country.
Going to be some epic games coming out this year, hopefully I’ll have some spare coin.
Do you use WinZip? Shame on you, it’s not cool anymore. Sure in the early 90′s when you didn’t really have a feasible alternative (assuming you don’t use a unix variant), but if we believe Bob Dylan times they are a changing. Did you know WinZip doesn’t even use it’s own compression algorithm, they stole PKZIP’s – lame. Not to mention they are proprietary, and we all know how evil that is don’t we? The Internet has made just about anything free, free in the sense of $’s… don’t want RMS rages.
So what to do, what to do. You could be a cool sheep and use WinRAR, it’s gained a lot of popularity over the years. Being a cynic I’m attributing this to the rampant increase in pirating, and pirates rar everything, it infuriates me. I would probably snap if saw zip’s however rar’s are not far off in my books. So how can you make me happy? Check out 7-Zip, it’s sweet and tastey like *bleep*.
Been around for about 10 years, and has a cool sounding name which I believe is reference to when it was initially released it had support for seven different types of compression algorithms! Either that or the algorithm used was based on seven others.. I really don’t know but I like to think these guesses are sound. According to this Wiki page 7-zip is the only compression program that is supported across all platforms – did I mention it’s free?
The actually compression itself is pretty impressive, I’ve read a number of interesting articles comparing speed to compression. Sadly I have neglected to save them over the years, a quick Google shows one – however it looks questionable. Oh before I forget.. it’s almost 1/20th the size of WinZip and can compress up to 16 exabytes. I don’t even know what an exabyte is, so it must be a lot!
Can unpack the following formats:
ARJ
CAB
CHM
CPIO
CramFS
DEB
DMG
FAT
HFS
ISO
LZH
LZMA
MBR
MSI
NSIS
NTFS
RAR
RPM
SquashFS
UDF
VHD
WIM
XAR
Z
Anyone notice that list is missing zip’s? Well cause the silly 7-Zip website listed it odd. It can compress the common formats such as Zip, Tar, BZip and GZip.
Anyone who hasn’t watched Community hasn’t lived. Do it now.. NOW.. Did you do it? Good.. LIAR. GO DO IT.. buy it, watch it, steal it.. get it. One of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a long time, over time it might even rival AD *gasp*.
Do you hate Facebook? I do. It’s taking over the world, over half a billionpeople use it. A man who has called Facebook users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their private information, sounds like a winner. Are we so alone and desperate to make a connection that we will give up our privacy? This reminds me of an episode of Boston Legal where James Spader goes on a terrific rant about how far America has gone with Guantanamo Bay and the PATRIOT Act. Facebook is evil and makes people stupid.
Saw Muse the other day, was a pretty decent concert. Had some pretty cool bits, check out the video (skip to about 4 mins in if you are lame).
