Beckism.com

I’m not usually a big fan of the realistic anti-terrorist shooters, but Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the Xbox 360 (and other systems) is growing on me. My cousin has always been really into the Rainbow Six series, and he convinced me to buy Vegas 2 this week and attend an Xbox party with him and a bunch of his Xbox Live friends on Saturday.

It was a blast. Xbox Live already has voice communication going for it, but it’s so much more fun to actually be in the same room with the people you’re playing with. There were a bunch of people at the party (about 14-15 playing Vegas 2 at any given time, and a few others doing their own thing for whatever reason). Definitely more fun than hooking up to matches with total strangers who all too often turn out to be idiots (or twelve years old).

As for the game, Vegas 2 seems like a pretty standard entry into the tactical shooter genre. It only takes a few shots to kill you, taking cover behind walls, boxes, and so forth and peering out as you wait for an enemy is a standard tactic, and half the time when you get killed you have no idea where it came from (thanks to said hiding and peeking around corners). Normally I find these kind of games really frustrating; I was introduced to shooters (specifically online multiplayer shooters) playing Aliens vs. Predator which was filled with claustrophobic maps where your best survival tactic was to simply never stand still, so retraining myself to approach the map one room at a time is difficult.

The controls for Vegas 2 also threw me off. They’re quite different from most shooters I’ve played, and vastly different from Call of Duty 4 (which I’ve been playing recently).

Where Vegas 2 stands out is the variety of multiplayer options available. The entire campaign can be played through cooperatively, either via Live or split screen, and the various multiplayer gametypes are quite fun. Particularly appealing is the fact that if you can’t find enough people to pull off a good team deathmatch, you can do a “terrorist hunt” which allows you and up to three friends to fight bots on the multiplayer maps. I really enjoy coop games and the occasional bot fight, so the variety of options available in Vegas 2 is great.

I’d definitely recommend Vegas 2 if you’re looking for a good tactical shooter with great multiplayer options. It might not be anything special in the sub-genre of realistic anti-terrorist shooters (I wouldn’t know), but it’s the first one that I’ve been able to get into, and is a lot of fun to play with friends.

I can’t believe that I haven’t blogged this yet! Last weekend I noticed Apple was selling refurbished iMacs for a steeper discount than normal, and after a little soul-searching I bought myself a refurbished 24″ glossy widescreen iMac. I hadn’t intended to buy it for a couple months, but I couldn’t pass up $400 off.

It arrived on Wednesday, and after spending most of the day migrating stuff over from my MacBook Pro I was able to start using the iMac for work on Thursday. It is now my work machine, and I’m a multiple-Mac owner.

I am ecstatic about the iMac. The screen is huge (which was why I wanted one; I’ve been getting frustrated with my ability to do detailed graphics work on the MacBook Pro), and absolutely gorgeous. It’s perfect for the image work that I need to do, too; when I started using it Thursday, I instantly noticed some fairly severe JPEG artifacts that I’d missed on the laptop. I am continually impressed with Apple’s design ethic, and the iMac is a great example of why Macs are a better choice than just about any other computer out there.

The move from a single computer to computers that are designated “work” and “personal” has been an interesting one. I decided before the computer arrived not to use Apple’s migration assistant to move my data. The iMac has plenty of room, of course, so synching my home account wouldn’t be a problem space-wise, but frankly my Home folder is a disaster. I try to remember to use AppZapper, but there are possibly hundreds of unused preference files from apps I installed once and never touched again, not to mention the hell of my desktop and downloads folders. My documents folder is slightly better off, but still suffers from a number of folders that third-party software dropped inside without consulting me.

In any case, migrating to a new computer seemed like an ideal time to clean things up, so I did everything by hand. Took a while, but the spotless iMac desktop tells me it was worth it. I also discovered some tools to ease multiple computer problems, but I’ll share those another time.

I love my MacBook Pro. When they came out, I knew the fifteen inch, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro with an Intel Core Duo was my dream machine, and even though it took me a while to get one, I’ve never looked back. I’d suffered with a 700 pound eMac for so long that I’d forgotten how beautiful a Macintosh can be.

Fast-forward to late 2007 when I’ve graduated from college and somehow managed to acquire an income, an apartment, and a widescreen TV. My TV is also a thing of beauty. Thirty-two inches (which is the perfect size for my living space), 1080p high definition, and a gorgeous shining black surface. It’s a Sharp Aquos 32″ HDTV, and if you’re in the market for a television at that size, I highly recommend it. Beautiful picture, perfect for gaming (which is why I bought it), and the built-in speakers are quite good, as well, which is a major plus because I hate the neighbors thanks to their sound system, and wouldn’t wish to become what I despise.

With two such wonderful gadgets in my house, naturally I wanted them to get together, so I went out and bought an HDMI cable and an audio audio cable to connect the MacBook Pro to the TV. As best I can remember, it worked great the first few times I watched movies.

But the last couple times, as soon as I plugged in the audio cable, the TV started outputting a high-pitched whine through the speakers, which was extremely annoying.

I figured it might be the audio cable, but that didn’t make much sense; it was new and worked fine a few times. Magnetic interference seemed like a long shot, since there was nothing electronic nearby except the TV and the computer itself. Before I rushed off to buy a second audio cable, I decided to consult the internets.

After a little research online, I found there was some info about whining MacBook Pros, but it all had to do with the computer itself whining. Fortunately, Daniel Jalkut had quite a lot to say about CPU whining in MacBook Pros. I tried his QuietMBP program, and surprisingly, it fixed the whine through the television speakers.

Here’s where it gets fun: the QuietMBP program basically uses up idle time in the CPU by running pointless data through it. You can control how often the program runs stuff through the CPU with a slider, and you’re supposed to set the slider as high as you can to alleviate the noise (lower numbers = smaller gaps between CPU usage = more power consumption). I started dragging the slider, and the whine started changing pitch in real time.

Seriously, I could have played music with the damn thing. It was bizarre. Why the heck does a piece of software that’s supposed to help with CPU-related whining change a whine going through external speakers? Why have I never heard a whine through either my computer’s speakers or my trusty JBL Creatures? What god of electronics did I offend, anyway?

It’s baffling to me.

Now that I’m sensitized to the whine, though, I’m realizing that I do sometimes get a strange high-pitched whine when my MacBook Pro is running off battery. Why it took almost two years and a TV to bring this to my attention, I don’t know. Possibly because the eMac was basically a jet engine with a screen on it (think noise, not speed) and my ears have been ringing all this time.

In any case, if you’re experiencing problematic whining when you hook your MacBook Pro up to a pair of external speakers that otherwise behave well, it might not be your cable, your speakers, or really anything involved with getting audio from your Mac to the outside world. It might be your CPU.

Go figure.

I’ve been doing some writing exercises, and I’m finally back in the short story zone. So keep a weather eye out for the first piece of new short fiction on Beckism.com in quite a while.

Obviously, this post itself is largely pointless (”oooh, fiction is coming! Be excited or something!”), but I published it because I have a question: are people going to be totally weirded out if I publish short fiction full text, just like my non-fiction articles? I’ve got a system in place that will let me use an excerpt or teaser (Dirt Man is currently using it), but I want people to read this stuff, dammit. And I know when I’m a first-time visitor to a blog, I almost never click through a “read more” link.

Your thoughts are welcome and appreciated. And if no one speaks up, then I’ll just quietly start slipping bits of fiction onto the site, because I miss making stuff up and putting it online.

XKCD on in-store music and marching bands. Aside from making me laugh, this comic was quite recognizable to me (I’d be the one on the floor).

Not only was I in marching band, but I’m a percussionist. Double whammy.

I’ve been eyeing the MediaTemple hosting plans for a while, and after a weekend of being unable to edit any of my sites because of intermittent downtime and crippled FTP, I’ve finally made the switch. I’ve read lots of good reviews and a few bad ones and I’m not too happy with the downsides of shared hosting but have no need for a virtual server, so we’ll see how it goes. Given my past experience positive experiences with MediaTemple support (my employer hosts with them), I suspect that I’ll be very happy even if they can’t deliver on perfect uptime. I’ve found that quality support is better than delivering on pie-in-the-sky promises every time. Plus now I can finally use PHP 5 (and be able to run PHP 4 side-by-side if necessary), which is pretty freaking cool.

The migration was super easy (although I haven’t moved beckism.net over just yet, so there’s more to do), and hopefully you’ll be seeing better uptime and speed from my sites in the future. Because they were down so often and so sluggish before. Oh well. I’m a nerd, and a terabyte of bandwidth impresses me, even if I’ll barely use a fraction of it in a given month. At least now I can host the Things screencast myself without fear of running out of bandwidth.

The only question that remains is how to gain enough readers (even temporarily) that I’ll actually be able to use MediaTemple’s vaunted performance burst technology.

I admit that it’s unlikely. But a man can dream, right?

I’ve been having a hankering to write some short fiction and throw it up here on Beckism.com, but for some reason every time I start a story its pacing and plot jump into a novel-length plot.

That damn senior thesis ruined me for short fiction. I never really appreciated before how difficult it can be to write something cohesive in a thousand words or so. Guess I’ll just have to finally finish Season 1 of Dirt Man. (It’s only been what, three years in the making?)

Recently my boss started asking for more graphics editing and it was the perfect excuse to buy a Wacom graphics tablet, which is something I’ve wanted since college but haven’t thought I’d have a use for. I’m not really the artistic type. The drawing below (which I drew yesterday after work and probably speaks loads about the state of my unconscious) pretty much epitomizes my abilities:

I opted for the 6×11 Wacom special edition, which is a sleek black color instead of their standard gun-metal gray and is huge (and a widescreen ratio!) without completely depriving me of desk space. The actual tablet is gorgeous, and over the past week and a half I’ve fallen completely in love with it. I had thought that tablets were only useful for drawing (hence my years-long hesitance over buying one; see above), but it also stands in as a great alternative to mousing (or, in my case, trackballing — which, incidentally, sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is). And, to be honest, although I’m no da Vinci, I find drawing the occasional diabolic clown a lot of fun.

But the real reason my introduction to tablets has been so great is because it’s opened up a whole new realm of software that I never before had a reason to explore.

Scribbles was the first thing I downloaded, of course. The program has some issues (no eyedropper, inability to move single layers around, etc.) but it’s still one of the most brilliant interface designs I’ve ever seen, and it makes drawing a quick after-work diabolic clown far easier than it should be.

ArtRage, on the other hand, was a program that I’d never heard of until I went looking for cheap, easy-to-use drawing programs, but it’s fantastically cool. I haven’t really found a use for it yet, but who doesn’t want to be able to use paints and canvas on their computer? Just swooping the paint brush around makes me feel so classy.

Then there’s Sapiens. I took a look at Sapiens when it was originally released and had absolutely no use for it. While I love the concept of circular contextual menus, I’m a hardcore LaunchBar fan who likes to keep his hands on the keyboard. When I’m using the tablet, though, LaunchBar becomes pointless because it’s a long trip back to the keyboard (and I have to put the pen down). When I realized that, Sapiens was the obvious choice for a mouse launcher.

And of course xGestures, which I’ve used for years, functions great with the tablet. (The key: large, steady strokes.)

The last thing that I’ve been finding myself using the tablet for has been taking notes (primarily useful during phone calls when I only have one hand available). Unfortunately, I have not yet found my perfect solution for this. SketchBox is a cool piece of software, but the stuff you sketch isn’t searchable. inkBook promises searching, but is less than stellar in actual use (just try using the erase tool and watch it casually destroy stuff you never touched; not fun). Circus Ponies Notebook 3 looks promising (and, considering past Notebook versions, will certainly be far more polished and feature-rich than inkBook), but it isn’t even available in beta yet.

I’ve tried using Apple’s Ink technology for note-taking, and while it’s mind-blowingly amazing that it can recognize my handwriting (which is legible to a select few people in this world), the technology’s implementation is a little too clumsy for quick text entry.

So the hunt continues, which, to be honest, is how I like it. I am admittedly a bit addicted to software demos. And I am, at least for the moment, hard-core addicted to tablets.

The day after Thanksgiving, I stumbled across a deal that seemed too good to be true: Office 2004 had a $100 rebate that day only, and if you bought any version of Office 2004 you could get Office 2008 for the price of shipping. With Amazon markdowns and the student/home version of Office 2004, that came out to around $40 for Office 2008.

I only need Microsoft Office every now and again, so I couldn’t pass this up. My girlfriend has never owned Office for Mac (and also doesn’t need it very often), so I had someone to give the extraneous 2004 install to; life seemed perfect.

At the time, the promotional materials claimed that Office 2008 would arrive sometime in early February. I figured they wouldn’t be prioritizing these copies of Office (they’re certainly not getting any profit out of them), so this seemed reasonable.

But like all things having to do with ridiculously good deals and rebates, things haven’t been quite so easy.

The other day, I got an absolute jewel of an email (excerpted because for most of the email, you really shouldn’t care):

Thank you for your recent order. The product listed below is currently out of stock. […] The new expected ship date for your product is 2/25/2008.

If you still wish to receive this product, if available by the new expected ship date shown above, please let us know by responding to this e-mail and placing an X in front of option #1 below […] If you do not respond to this e-mail or contact our customer service department within 30 days, your order will be cancelled and a refund issued, if applicable.

If you wish to receive the product when it becomes available, even if after the expected ship date, you may update your order by responding to this e-mail and placing an X in front of option #2 below.

Delayed shipping date? Okay, I can handle that. I use Office maybe once a week, if that. It’s mostly future compatibility that I’m worried about, and so far no clients have been sending me .docx files that Pages can’t handle.

But the latter two paragraphs are real jewels. Although I have ordered the product, filed all the forms correctly, and paid them the cost of shipping, I still need to actively respond in order for them to actually send me my copy of Office 2008. Not only that, but if I’m in a hurry and just “check” the first option, they’ll only send the product to me if they meet the Feb. 25th shipping date.

When I asked my Magic 8 ball whether they’d make the Feb. 25th shipping date, it’s response was “Don’t be such a fucking idiot.”

I certainly don’t think I’m entitled to all that much in this particular transaction with Microsoft (after all, it’s practically theft; I’m not sure why they created the deal in the first place), but the underhanded ways corporations try to exploit people’s inattention to detail is still pretty sickening to me. What do they gain by this, anyway? A small amount of positive press when the deal was around, and then the hope that they can trick the people who took advantage of it into passively opting out by forgetting to respond to an email?

Microsoft, consider this a bit of bad press to try and offset anything you originally gained. If you’re going to delay the shipping date, fine. Regardless of whether the product is actually back-ordered, I can understand why you’d want to deliver it to the people who are forking over several hundred dollars first. But cheap tricks like the above email aren’t doing you any favors.

Then again, since when did Microsoft care about what people think? I really should stop expecting to be treated like a human when I’m interacting with Microsoft. It just brings me grief.

Update: it finally arrived! See my opinion of Office 2008 now that I’ve got it in my grubby little mitts.

For whatever reason my girlfriend was a big anime fan growing up, and the other day she decided to revisit her formative years by watching Sailor Moon. Sometime during college she had obtained a season or two of Sailor Moon that weren’t aired in the U.S. (some guy in Canada evidently translated them and then sold them on the sly), so she pops one in and starts watching. Since my desk is right next to the TV, I’ve been halfway watching some of them, too.

I knew that anime could get pretty strange, but I wasn’t prepared. This is my favorite part:

Feminine-looking man (part of a trio of rock stars) wanders onto the scene of a teacher-cum-villain trying to discipline his erstwhile student. Rock star is justifiably pissed off, and decides to do something about it. Fortunately, he has the ability to turn into a Sailor Soldier.

I don’t know how familiar you are with the series, but from what I can gather, Sailor Soldiers are all female. So the dude transforms into a lady. A rather skimpily clad lady. Whatever, I can dig it.

And then he performs his (that is, her) super-power:

If you’re not sure you’re reading that subtitle right, feel free to click the image for a bigger look. And it’s not a funny translation, either. All the super-powers are English words, subtitled because the Japanese don’t really have the same sounds in their repetoire (”Sta Gentarue Utaras!”).

That Sailor Moon follows this up with a Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss seems like a bit of an anticlimax. Once you’ve been hit in the teeth by the gentle uterus, a honeymoon therapy kiss is a walk in the park.