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11:08 PM Congratulations! Today I got my first freak e-mail from a guy named Jon Bazemore. I first received this e-mail from him: Hi I was wondering if you have the Tekken2 intro w/music, Yeah, ok, seems normal enough. Twenty minutes later, I get this. Let me guess: you are afraid to write to me because some Uh, OK. Amway wife. Weird. I sent him an e-mail and he replied. > I hope you sent this to me by mistake. And why is that, Mr. Taciturn? Your so-called "A/V Game Page" is pretty You say on your page that you have some files offline, and I I will not write to you again, because you don't seem Thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Not capable of coherent reasoning? I have written exactly one line to this guy. Who is the dude who went ballistic on me after twenty minutes? Who's ranting about the system? Honestly, I wonder how people like this get on the Internet at all. I do have to hand it to the guy, he is articulately incoherent in a strange sort of way. Hehe. Whatever. I think this is probably the craziest e-mail that I've ever gotten. I guess this is some sort of milestone? Mad monster party on UO Meanwhile, my other roommate was yelling and screaming because hordes of about 10-15 ghouls, spectres, and shades were swarming him and some other warriors at the crossroads between Yew, Skara Brae, and Britain. We decided to run over there and check things out. When we got there, things looked pretty dead. I was kind of pissed off. All of a sudden, another horde started swarming us! It was nuts. There were way too many and we had to beat a hasty retreat. They were manageable as long as you didn't get more than two on you at once. The fighting was crazy and there were dead bodies and people everywhere, but with a good team we could mow down the undead pretty easily as we fell back inch by inch. I literally mixed and drank about 70 ginseng worth of lesser heal potions. Alchemy definitely gets its money, no doubt about it. Ginseng is way too hard to find, though, even for sale. After four or five waves the carnage finally ended. There was a lot of running around, mixing potions, deequipping shields and all kinds of running from ghouls in the meantime. Woohoo! My stats went up about 2-3 points in each area. Overall I'd have to say this was definitely the best night of UO so far.
5:55 PM NEC's MobilePro 400 at OfficeMAX I just read on the newsgroups that several places like Best Buy and CompUSA have been selling WinCE machines for terribly low prices...around $149. The best deal I've heard of so far is at OfficeMax, where the NEC MobilePro 400, a 4MB model, is selling for $99! Man, for that price, I'd get one just to play with it! There's a Microsoft presentation here at Penn tonight where they are going to be giving away a WinCE machine, so maybe I can win that! Yeah, right. I asked my friend to call around and see about that OfficeMax deal, so I hope he gets back to me soon. Marvel Super Heroes for the
Playstation Kali 1.2 released ftp://ftp.charm.net/pub/kali/k95_12.exe 2:32 AM Stupid UO tricks The next dumb thing to happen was that today I ran into a little orc horde. About 3 orcs and 1 orc captain. It's usually too much to handle alone but if you lure 1 or 2 away it becomes a good fight. Anyhow, I was luring a couple away so I could kill them when, lo and behold, I see another guard. Oh no. The guard kills all four of them. Wap wap wap wap! As if that wasn't bad enough, when guards kill monsters, they don't leave anything. So not only did I not get any experience, I didn't get any loot either. Those stupid guards again! The last stupid thing to happen occurred this afternoon. I was playing and the server was quite badly lagged. Unfortunately, any time you get lagged, the server keeps on going, so you could be getting whacked on and not even know it. I had been running around a dungeon for a while and had just finished off a scorpion when I saw a gazer. Some guy ran too close to it and got waxed. I started to run. Lo and behold, about 15 seconds of lag kick in. I'm sitting there frozen, and the gazer is on my ass! When I wake up, I have about 3 hit points left and I haul ass with a fireball chasing me. Then, from a very far distance, I somehow get paralyzed. Then I see another fireball come at me. Game over man! Luckily, due to the kindness of certain people, I was able to get most of my stuff back. A grandmaster accompanied me into the dungeon as I ran back and when I finally got there, a master swordsman had fended off most of the looters and kept my stuff for me. Wow, you really need buddies like that in UO! As it turns out, though, the server crashed shortly after and the backup they came up was after I had died. Lucked out again!
1:21 AM WinAMP 1.55 released Another bugfix revision. One thing that's really annoying me is that everytime I download a new version of WinAMP, none of my preferences carry over to the new version. Why is this? I hope don't have a bunch of registry entries from every single version I've ever had sitting in my registry. http://winamp.lh.net/winamp155.exe 1:07 AM
9:30 PM Updates I couldn't update yesterday because I had a paper due that I hadn't even done the reading for. So that was my religion up until early this morning. Plus UO, of course. If last night was any indication, monster respawning rates in dungeons have picked up immensely. I picked up a couple of nice magic items today in a shop, of all places. One was a massive close helm of defense and the other was a fortified bascinet of guarding. Hot stuff! By the way, the official guide to UO is extremely useful. However, to be honest, this is all info that should have been in the manual and it is also clear that much of the information was taken from the beta and no longer actually applies. What a racket that is, huh? Hercules comments on 3Dfx trade-in
offer Sun sues Microsoft PowerVR2 GL Quake drivers released ftp://ftp.videologic.com/PUB/PRODUCTS/APOC3Dx/DRIVERS/OGLB18A.ZIP
9:30 PM Starcraft web site redesign Blizzard just did a total overhaul of their site, with Starcraft at the front of their page and all new content behind it. Go look at it NOW! 5:00 AM Now, about the teams...they were done kind of funny. It was basically a freshman vs. upperclassmen/sophomore type of thing, except, apparently for me and my roommates. We got stuck on the freshmen team. I think the teams were done like this...the guy who put together the trip said "OK, all the people I know (i.e. all the sophomores) on one team and everybody else on the other." Our team consisted of 1 pretty serious paintballer, my room, and a bunch of freshmen. Altogether, it was around 10 people. On our team, only the one serious dude and another guy had ever played paintball before. Meanwhile, on the other team, a bunch of guys had played before and a couple came dressed in camo fatigues. Hehe...the first time I saw that, I was like, "Whoa." To sum things up, we beat their asses pretty badly, which was surpising, given that they had actually played before. I did pretty well too, I think. In general, I moved very slowly and carefully, which I'm not sure was the best, but, hey, who cares, right? I consider myself a very good shot, but that didn't come into play that much, since it was hard to see at all where the other people were, and probably most importantly, paintballs aren't bullets. Luckily, I didn't take any bad hits either, although one time I called myself out when the paint didn't break. Speaking of bad hits, this kind of comes back to the semi vs. pump thing. There was this one scenario where we were doing elimination. It was the second time around where we had switched positions. The other team had apparently decided to just completely defend, so we came up very fast and held ground right up against their "base." I had moved up on the left with a team member. Anyhow, I was watching the base closely when I heard a guy sneaking up behind me. I spun around to shoot and at that same moment my teammate must have spotted the guy and shot at him. For whatever reason, the guy missed me. He had a pump action and I had a semi. Do you see what happens now? He missed his first shot, and because he had a pump action, it was his only shot. During that second that it takes to reload, I rained about 6-8 shots on him. No chance. Communication is very important, by the way. It was so much safer to team with a guy and call him to cover you while you leapfrogged ahead, to have him watch one side while you watched the other, and to call enemy positions to so you could get two angles of fire on one position. Well, I seem to have strayed from the original point, bad hits. At the very end of that same game, I had snuck up right to the edge of the hill. When the ref called 15 seconds left, I decided I would just rush over and find some cover real fast and maybe surprise a couple of guys. When I came over, I saw one guy who shot at me once and missed. His cover was a somewhat thin Y-shaped tree, so although I was relatively far away, I ran straight up at him to a pretty thick tree about 15-20 feet away from him and kept my sights right on that tree. When he came out for the next shot, I nailed him through that gap in the head about 3 times. I don't think he was expecting me to be right there. He yelled pretty loud and the next time I saw him, he had a huge welt on his forehead. Maybe I should have yelled surrender but he was pointing his gun at me too so I figured I would just unload. It turns out that there was another guy there whose gun had jammed earlier and, consequently, was just hiding. I would have been screwed if that guy's gun had been working. But, oh well. More Ultima Online observations |
