9/3 (3h) - Been waiting for the online tests to be available and a solid hour to attempt them. in the end I finished both test within 1/2 hour as well as documenting some oddities in the language. 9/10 and 10/10. Solid.
The netiquette questions I had used as examples for my forum thread happened to be in the actual test. Now it looks like I'm giving away actual test answers. The timing of the info should make it OK, but it looks suspicious. Hopefully people are mature enough to see the difference. The problem is that my comments about the inconsistency of netiquette rules when applied to 2 very similar situations now transfer to inconsistency in an actual test. I'm pretty sure the point I missed in the first test was for that, but I'm happy skipping a point for following what I believe is better netiquette than the tests were advocating.
Monday, March 10, 2008
UniLog
While I was at the reso college I had an idea of making another log similar to the GameLog to track the effort I'm putting in to the Uni course. Hopefully this will also stir (shame) me into keeping up with the study.
25/4 (9h) - First day at the residential college. I had arrived to a waterlogged Rockhampton on Sunday and settled in at Adonna & Brett's place. Got to Uni early to have a look around the place, but it looked like everything was shut until ~8:30. I grabbed an access code to the education lab that happened to be Macs. Just needed to check mail and blackboard anyway.
Lectures started in pretty comfortable fashion and the day pretty much went to plan. I had resolved my placement at St Luke's by the end of the day. One problem fixed, 3 to go.
Got access codes to the IT rooms at lunch and used them at every break to go over the online coursework. May as well get the most out of being up here.
26/4 (10h) - Picked up the textbook, 2 jobs down. Most of the morning is general orientation with the other starting Uni students that could be safetly skipped. Spent the time in the lab going over the blackboard material. There's virtually no posts on the forums so maybe no-one else is hitting it this hard. I put my 2cents worth in about some anomalies in the netiquette tests.
Lectures are getting more involved on actual content rather than housekeeping. We go through using the blackboard and at least I found out about the GDLT overview course accessible from inside blackboard, but not from MyCQU. Cleared up IT/Maths instead of IT/Science, 3 jobs down. Only Student ID card to go.
Missed another meeting opportunity with Dennis Jarvis to talk about the PhD. looks like it's not to be.
27/2 (7h) - Get in early and use the labs to finish off the content for the first 2 weeks. Should be enough to see me through to a study group setup. 2 actual lectures today on coursework. Some interesting stuff, and it's looking like more work than I planned. All the preparation going into a lesson looks like total overkill and I'm sure no-one at St Luke's goes into that much depth. Maybe you get used to it and don't have to write everything down?
After being spurned by all sorts of departments in an attempt to get a student ID card in person, I finally find the right guy who simply asked for my drivers license and a minute later I had my card (dodgey license photo included). I'm happy. Everything outstanding is now done and it's looking all sorted.
Final lecture finishes 1 hour early and Riki's suprised. I take it as a sign to head home early, hopefully to arrive for tea.
25/4 (9h) - First day at the residential college. I had arrived to a waterlogged Rockhampton on Sunday and settled in at Adonna & Brett's place. Got to Uni early to have a look around the place, but it looked like everything was shut until ~8:30. I grabbed an access code to the education lab that happened to be Macs. Just needed to check mail and blackboard anyway.
Lectures started in pretty comfortable fashion and the day pretty much went to plan. I had resolved my placement at St Luke's by the end of the day. One problem fixed, 3 to go.
Got access codes to the IT rooms at lunch and used them at every break to go over the online coursework. May as well get the most out of being up here.
26/4 (10h) - Picked up the textbook, 2 jobs down. Most of the morning is general orientation with the other starting Uni students that could be safetly skipped. Spent the time in the lab going over the blackboard material. There's virtually no posts on the forums so maybe no-one else is hitting it this hard. I put my 2cents worth in about some anomalies in the netiquette tests.
Lectures are getting more involved on actual content rather than housekeeping. We go through using the blackboard and at least I found out about the GDLT overview course accessible from inside blackboard, but not from MyCQU. Cleared up IT/Maths instead of IT/Science, 3 jobs down. Only Student ID card to go.
Missed another meeting opportunity with Dennis Jarvis to talk about the PhD. looks like it's not to be.
27/2 (7h) - Get in early and use the labs to finish off the content for the first 2 weeks. Should be enough to see me through to a study group setup. 2 actual lectures today on coursework. Some interesting stuff, and it's looking like more work than I planned. All the preparation going into a lesson looks like total overkill and I'm sure no-one at St Luke's goes into that much depth. Maybe you get used to it and don't have to write everything down?
After being spurned by all sorts of departments in an attempt to get a student ID card in person, I finally find the right guy who simply asked for my drivers license and a minute later I had my card (dodgey license photo included). I'm happy. Everything outstanding is now done and it's looking all sorted.
Final lecture finishes 1 hour early and Riki's suprised. I take it as a sign to head home early, hopefully to arrive for tea.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
GameLog 28 & 29 & 30
Been flat out with Uni, Work and games. The sufferer? Gamelogs. Another combined log with times averaged across all 3 weeks so they are comparable to other logs.
Dwarf Fortress (7h) - A healthy dose of fortress building got me back into the roguelike mood. Unfortunately the game is incredibly complex to get into. It's almost impossible to play without the wiki. I was also looking at an article at gamasutra about ForumWarz where they purposefully designed their game to be simple to get into, commenting that "as if someone is going to sit down and read through a wiki before playing". I'd agree too.
The problem I think is that there is very little autonomy in the game. You pretty much have to tell them to do everything apart from eat and sleep (which they seem to enjoy doing far too often). The learning curve to build a fortress enough to get through to the first travellers is hard enough before worrying about goblin attacks or internal rebellion. It looks a much deeper play experience than Settlers or the like, but it also chows down on the CPU and memory like a modern game. It feels wrong for a character based game to struggle, but it must be doing some heavy calculations in the background (or be poorly written) to sit at a solid 50% CPU and 300Mb memory on an early fortress.
Pirates of the Burning Seas (7h) - Had a 7 day trial for Sandy and I to test out PotBS. We opted for pirates to get going and it played pretty well. The sea combat feels really good. Reminds me a lot of the old "Sid Meier's Pirates!" game for ease of naval battle and openness. The hand-to-hand fighting is a little dull until you start getting some special moves to use. Bombs work great!
The economy looks like it has potential, but relying heavily on a player based economy tree needed that area to be simple to get into and flooded with items to make the economy find its feet. Building factories seems to be very labour intensive and unrewarding pastime as you're not going to be making anything useful without 3 or 4 factories, let alone trying to build a boat. Personally I'd have liked to try the game at a more mature level to see what type of difference players could get by spending all the effort of building boats.
Warcraft 3: TFT (3h) - Gem TD was a welcome outcome from the LAN 3 weeks ago. It also made an appearance at last week's LAN, but the big LAN this week featured more of DOTA and worm wars.
TF2 (2h) - Suffered lots from the reso college causing a distinct break with normal playtime.
Trackmania Nations (2h) - St Luke's CCG + LANs.
Football Manager 08 (2h) - Managed to look through a couple more possible players, but on the whole it's been putting me to sleep rather than making time disappear.
ForumWarz (1h) - A little diversion after reading a good gamasutra article on the creator.
World of Warcraft (1h) - Poking my head in every now and then, but nothing too serious.
Dwarf Fortress (7h) - A healthy dose of fortress building got me back into the roguelike mood. Unfortunately the game is incredibly complex to get into. It's almost impossible to play without the wiki. I was also looking at an article at gamasutra about ForumWarz where they purposefully designed their game to be simple to get into, commenting that "as if someone is going to sit down and read through a wiki before playing". I'd agree too.
The problem I think is that there is very little autonomy in the game. You pretty much have to tell them to do everything apart from eat and sleep (which they seem to enjoy doing far too often). The learning curve to build a fortress enough to get through to the first travellers is hard enough before worrying about goblin attacks or internal rebellion. It looks a much deeper play experience than Settlers or the like, but it also chows down on the CPU and memory like a modern game. It feels wrong for a character based game to struggle, but it must be doing some heavy calculations in the background (or be poorly written) to sit at a solid 50% CPU and 300Mb memory on an early fortress.
Pirates of the Burning Seas (7h) - Had a 7 day trial for Sandy and I to test out PotBS. We opted for pirates to get going and it played pretty well. The sea combat feels really good. Reminds me a lot of the old "Sid Meier's Pirates!" game for ease of naval battle and openness. The hand-to-hand fighting is a little dull until you start getting some special moves to use. Bombs work great!
The economy looks like it has potential, but relying heavily on a player based economy tree needed that area to be simple to get into and flooded with items to make the economy find its feet. Building factories seems to be very labour intensive and unrewarding pastime as you're not going to be making anything useful without 3 or 4 factories, let alone trying to build a boat. Personally I'd have liked to try the game at a more mature level to see what type of difference players could get by spending all the effort of building boats.
Warcraft 3: TFT (3h) - Gem TD was a welcome outcome from the LAN 3 weeks ago. It also made an appearance at last week's LAN, but the big LAN this week featured more of DOTA and worm wars.
TF2 (2h) - Suffered lots from the reso college causing a distinct break with normal playtime.
Trackmania Nations (2h) - St Luke's CCG + LANs.
Football Manager 08 (2h) - Managed to look through a couple more possible players, but on the whole it's been putting me to sleep rather than making time disappear.
ForumWarz (1h) - A little diversion after reading a good gamasutra article on the creator.
World of Warcraft (1h) - Poking my head in every now and then, but nothing too serious.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
GameLog 27
TF2 (20h) - Back to its best. Another map was released on the big Friday update and it's got all the fun of the originals all over again. More maps (No, make that more quality maps) is al that's needed to keep it alive. No other changes necessary.
After all the fuss about the medic unlockable guns, nothing was in the update to do anything of the sort. *Shrug*
Warcraft 3: TFT (10h) - Mainstay of the LAN with Ben. Tried a couple of custom maps, mainly TD.
Trackmania Nations (8h) - St Luke's CCG + LAN with Ben.
Football Manager 08 (3h) - Managed to look through a couple more possible players, but on the whole it's been putting me to sleep rather than making time disappear.
Mythos (2h) - Server availability is keeping me away. Would have made an excellent LAN game, but it wasn't to be.
World of Warcraft (1h) - Started playing it as a test with Ben. May look at doing a whole WoW weekend for the youth group with trial accounts for those without. Hopefully be able to crack into level 20+.
After all the fuss about the medic unlockable guns, nothing was in the update to do anything of the sort. *Shrug*
Warcraft 3: TFT (10h) - Mainstay of the LAN with Ben. Tried a couple of custom maps, mainly TD.
Trackmania Nations (8h) - St Luke's CCG + LAN with Ben.
Football Manager 08 (3h) - Managed to look through a couple more possible players, but on the whole it's been putting me to sleep rather than making time disappear.
Mythos (2h) - Server availability is keeping me away. Would have made an excellent LAN game, but it wasn't to be.
World of Warcraft (1h) - Started playing it as a test with Ben. May look at doing a whole WoW weekend for the youth group with trial accounts for those without. Hopefully be able to crack into level 20+.
Zero Punctuation: Heavy Medic Love!
Zero Punctuation Has released a new review, this time of Sim City Societies. It was probably one of the more boring reviews I've seen him do, but at the end I was about to can it when the short that followed looked familiar. Ahh, the TF2 stylings. What's this a heavy?
Certainly worth the watch ...
Certainly worth the watch ...
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Close Speaker Phone Companion in System Tray
There are a few glitchy things with my computer at the moment, one is a "phone enhancement" icon that manages to garble my mic in TF2. Finally tracked a solution down via google:
"Close Speaker Phone Companion" in system tray? - Geeks to Go!:
And the answer ...
"Close Speaker Phone Companion" in system tray? - Geeks to Go!:
A small black phone icon appears in my system tray. It is an icon of a black rotory dial phone with the handset rising off the phone. When I scroll over it I see the message: "Close Speaker Phone Companion". Left click and the icon in the system tray disappears, right clicking does nothing.
And the answer ...
Ok. this icon is not a malware, or virus. It's an option you made playng with your sound card.
My sound card is a SoundMax. And detects when an aplication is using the microphone.
Here is what you have to do:
If you have SoundMax integrated soundcard, open the soundmax control panel. (you will find it in control panel, or the system tray. like a blue icon, with 'play' symbol on it
- Open the preferences and go to the microphone tab.
At the Microphone enhancements chose No filtering.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
GameLog 25 & 26
Still madly busy at work, doesn't put you in the best of moods to do a writeup of games you hardly got to play in the first place ...
TF2 (10h) - I've sat out a couple of [QGL] matches, but have had some alternate fun with GU fun maps and 2Fort bashups.
Mythos (8h) - After hearing about this before christmas from DJ Wheat as the successor to Diablo II, I signed up for the beta. It took a while to get in, plus I missed the email that got junkmailed.Plays pretty well and I'd agree with the sentiment that it's a lot more like D2 than others like Hellgate London. Servers are up and down a bit though, and it's laggy from Australia.
Football Manager 08 (5h) - Been mulling over the Gateshead issue and tested a couple of other scenarios to take over the club. It seems unlikely and a waste of good playing time to rush through to the end of a season playing a team I no longer cared about.The optimiser in me couldn't bare to put up with the thumb twiddling. One night I dream-thought about restarting from the beginning of the season. Just ignore the work put into Barrow and move over to Gateshead for a fresh start. As it turned out it was a real fresh start as there was NO-ONE at the club apart from youth players and greys. Not even a coach. After giving Barrow the flick they accepted my offer to coach immediately.
First up, an assistant manager. Without an AM it's really hard to weed through the chaff when looking for players and coaches. you either get useless people clogging up the lists or people that simply won't sign no matter what you throw at them. I found a couple of likely AM's, but nothing like the Wunderkind from Sweden they had under their wings in the mid-season save. The AM that eventually signed had been on my shortlist from my Barrow days. Good judgement all round and a 6 star defensive once all the other coaches take the burden off him.
With the 'interested players' filter back in place the next order of business was to find another couple of specialty coaches. I eventually picked up another 4, but no real standouts as they struggle to teach at 6 stars. Might need a couple more by the time the season is through, but there isn't anything out there that is interested in the position.
Next up is to get a team together. At least I don't have any useless players on the books soaking up a weekly wage, but without any real comparisons every potential player is seen as a 'must buy' by the scouts. I ended up bringing a lot on trial so the coaches could give me some more relevant feedback. After paying heavy for some solid players in key positions it at least gave the scouts something to compare to.
The team looks shakey, but we haven't even made it to the first warmup match so there's time to keep digging ...
I've also considered writing this stage of the game up as a blog akin to the Andy Preece one. Since Sandy's family came from that area I could write it up as a fake, yet autobiographical log from the perspective of myself in the game as well as Sandy's ventures into antiquity. With the lack of effort I'm showing on this blog it's not looking like a sustainable idea :( ..
Crusader Kings (4h) - I've been trying a couple of strategies out from the save after holding Spain. Most revolve around bumping off my son's wife as she seems barren, and at 31 time's a-wastin'.
Trackmania Nations (3h) - Cameron's Fave. St Luke's CCG getting closer ..
TF2 (10h) - I've sat out a couple of [QGL] matches, but have had some alternate fun with GU fun maps and 2Fort bashups.
Mythos (8h) - After hearing about this before christmas from DJ Wheat as the successor to Diablo II, I signed up for the beta. It took a while to get in, plus I missed the email that got junkmailed.Plays pretty well and I'd agree with the sentiment that it's a lot more like D2 than others like Hellgate London. Servers are up and down a bit though, and it's laggy from Australia.
Football Manager 08 (5h) - Been mulling over the Gateshead issue and tested a couple of other scenarios to take over the club. It seems unlikely and a waste of good playing time to rush through to the end of a season playing a team I no longer cared about.The optimiser in me couldn't bare to put up with the thumb twiddling. One night I dream-thought about restarting from the beginning of the season. Just ignore the work put into Barrow and move over to Gateshead for a fresh start. As it turned out it was a real fresh start as there was NO-ONE at the club apart from youth players and greys. Not even a coach. After giving Barrow the flick they accepted my offer to coach immediately.
First up, an assistant manager. Without an AM it's really hard to weed through the chaff when looking for players and coaches. you either get useless people clogging up the lists or people that simply won't sign no matter what you throw at them. I found a couple of likely AM's, but nothing like the Wunderkind from Sweden they had under their wings in the mid-season save. The AM that eventually signed had been on my shortlist from my Barrow days. Good judgement all round and a 6 star defensive once all the other coaches take the burden off him.
With the 'interested players' filter back in place the next order of business was to find another couple of specialty coaches. I eventually picked up another 4, but no real standouts as they struggle to teach at 6 stars. Might need a couple more by the time the season is through, but there isn't anything out there that is interested in the position.
Next up is to get a team together. At least I don't have any useless players on the books soaking up a weekly wage, but without any real comparisons every potential player is seen as a 'must buy' by the scouts. I ended up bringing a lot on trial so the coaches could give me some more relevant feedback. After paying heavy for some solid players in key positions it at least gave the scouts something to compare to.
The team looks shakey, but we haven't even made it to the first warmup match so there's time to keep digging ...
I've also considered writing this stage of the game up as a blog akin to the Andy Preece one. Since Sandy's family came from that area I could write it up as a fake, yet autobiographical log from the perspective of myself in the game as well as Sandy's ventures into antiquity. With the lack of effort I'm showing on this blog it's not looking like a sustainable idea :( ..
Crusader Kings (4h) - I've been trying a couple of strategies out from the save after holding Spain. Most revolve around bumping off my son's wife as she seems barren, and at 31 time's a-wastin'.
Trackmania Nations (3h) - Cameron's Fave. St Luke's CCG getting closer ..
Friday, February 01, 2008
Fun maps server on Gamers Underground
Custom Maps server becomes Fun maps server - Gamers Underground: "I've decided to give our custom maps server another face-lift, this time flushing out the maps installed with an entirely new set - not just custom maps, but hilarious, crazy and fun custom maps."
Fun alright. It's been a while since I've laughed so hard at the screen. The rugby map was awesome with 2 teams fighting over one 'ball' (intel case) placed in the middle of the field. You need to get the ball over the opposing line, which then brings into play defenders, turrets, etc. 2nd time playing the map it was ruined somewhat by more than 1/2 the players going snipers, but it's a hoot as scout or rocketboy.
Others like Yaargh and mario kart were fun too for a while, but I think they'll get boring pretty quick without a solid goal in mind. Party hats add to the festivities as well as exploding confetti & balloons for frags.
Fun alright. It's been a while since I've laughed so hard at the screen. The rugby map was awesome with 2 teams fighting over one 'ball' (intel case) placed in the middle of the field. You need to get the ball over the opposing line, which then brings into play defenders, turrets, etc. 2nd time playing the map it was ruined somewhat by more than 1/2 the players going snipers, but it's a hoot as scout or rocketboy.
Others like Yaargh and mario kart were fun too for a while, but I think they'll get boring pretty quick without a solid goal in mind. Party hats add to the festivities as well as exploding confetti & balloons for frags.
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