If I still read it, I would have known about this earlier, but Michael Jantze ended The Norm, apparently as of this last Monday. The story is that his wife is trying to raise money so that Michael can make the comic strip purely online. This, combined with PvP’s “free for newspapers” deal makes this an interesting time for print comics. Let’s hope this is the start of change in the industry.
But let’s not hold our breaths.
Quake IV. Not being made by id, but based on an id engine (Doom 3, obviously). It’ll look good, but will it be good?
Update 09-16: Just FYI, it's being made by Raven Software, makers of games such as Jedi Outcast, Soldier of Fortune, and Elite Force. All of those were fun games, to say the least. That bodes well.
I think it’s been about four years since I purchased blank CD-R media, but somehow I have more discs than ever. This project to make a disc spindle lamp makes me want to burn a lot of them quickly.
New Line has yet to announce an official release date for the Extended Edition of Return of the King, but the rumor is that it’ll be December, and the exact date will be announced in the next couple of weeks.
More interestingly, here is an incredibly long list of the added scenes. Spoilery if you don’t want to know what’s going to be in it, but let me say this: wow. Almost every single major and minor scene that I missed will be included. This is going to be an amazing movie.
Read the story about Gabe's son's birth (it's the second post on that day, titled "My son"). Here are my first two thoughts:
In the second level of Doom 3, “Administration” (just as you arrive at the Alpha Labs), you come across a PDA (as you do frequently). One of his emails on the PDA is a spam. The website it mentions exists, and even provides you with a cabinet code. That’s genius. I haven’t looked for the cabinet much, but I’ll have to remember to try it.
The goal: Running a marathon before my 30th birthday. The next step: A 10k. The New York Road Runners call the 10k the “perfect racing distance for most runners”. The NYC Marathon training schedule for first-time marathoners might be a good place to start, even if I’m not looking at an actual 26-miler until next October at the very earliest possible.
The Darien Road Race would be a good one to run (trying to stay in the running-for-charity theme), but I don’t think I’d be ready for that by next weekend.
Katy, M, Nomad, and I — in that order — ran a 5k road race this morning. Congrats to Katy for getting 49th place, placing her in the top half of the finishers!
Update 09-15: Here are our results:
| Rank | Name | Time | Pace/mi |
|---|---|---|---|
| 49 | Katy | 24:31 | 7:54 |
| 69 | M | 26:38 | 8:35 |
| 75 | Nomad | 27:25 | 8:50 |
| 97 | Logan (me) | 32:36 | 10:30 |
| Full results | |||
Amail, Bmail, Cmail, Dmail, Email, Fmail, Gmail, Hmail, Imail, Jmail, Kmail, Lmail, Mmail, Nmail, Omail, Pmail, Qmail, Rmail, Smail, Tmail, Umail, Vmail, Wmail, Xmail, Ymail, and Zmail
It’s old, but this quote from Gabe Newell is pretty interesting. “We’re doing [the CS:Source Beta] before we RC Half-Life 2 to give us time to fix any issues that surface … We also get information back from the engine when it crashes … So don’t think of this as a CS:Source beta as much as it is a Source engine configuration and compatibility test.”
Leave it to Wikipedia to teach me a ridiculous amount of stuff about a simple thing: in this case a fricken power plug.
In January 2001, shortly before his Inauguration, The Onion published an article called “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over’”. Little did we know how true the details of what was meant to be satire would be.
Wow. Listen to George W. Bush cover U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”.
I’ve ranted a couple times recently about how tantalizing interactive physics — like that seen in Doom3 and Half-Life 2 — is. True full interaction is the next big step in gaming, like the jump from Duke Nukem’s 2½D to Quake2’s 3D. The day I can (in-game) set a house on fire with an RPG, or level any wall (made of an appropriately destructible material) with a gattling gun will be a good day.
I’ve heard that Red Faction, released three years ago, had something the marketrons called Geo-mod. Anyone play this game? I’d like to get my hands on it..
The Geiger Counter on Planet Half-Life isn't archived or permalinked, but it's got a good discussion of the current plan:
Valve has announced that they will be delivering an RC (release candidate) to Vivendi around the 15th of this month. That does not mean that HL2 will be out immediately thereafter. Vivendi will still have to approve the RC, a process that could take another two or three weeks, depending on their QA department and how fit the RC is to be released. If it were rejected, Valve would have to cook up another one and submit that for approval. Once an RC is approved, we should get a "gone gold" announcement. Those of you who preloaded HL2 and intend to buy it online would *may* be allowed to purchase it shortly afterward and start playing it once you've downloaded the last few files (I'm still not certain whether Valve contractually obliged to wait until it's on the shelves - I don't have Fragmaster's psychic spy network). For those of you still intending to buy a physical copy, it would be at least another few weeks before the game hit the shelves; duplication, packaging and shipping take a while.
The "RC on September 15" information comes from this Gamespot story.
Three years ago, NASA launched the Genesis mission. The satellite spent more than 1000 days orbiting the sun, collecting particles that are part of the solar wind. By the time the return capsule enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it will be travelling twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Then it will be caught, in midair, by a helicopter.
All of this to bring less than a half of a milligram of stellar matter to the ground.
Update 09-08: The parachute (that I forgot to mention was supposed to open during reentry, before the probe was caught by the helicopter) failed to open, and the Genesis return capsule slammed into the ground. Breaking news stories on Google News.
Jeopardy is showing new episodes again, and Ken Jennings has won show number 39 in a row. My favorite among some KenJen statistics: The last time that Final Jeopardy was mathematically necessary (i.e. the last time Ken did not have more than double the score of the next-best contestant) was June 29.
Update, 09-08: Huge KenJen spoiler.
Lots of numbers are special. 2 is the only even prime. 28 is perfect. And if you’re patient and know a lot of esoteric mathematics, you can find something special about every number.
There’s something big wrong with plutor.org right now. Things aren’t rebuilding right, and some templates got reverted weirdly, and there are all sorts of other issues probably related to the Moveable Type update I did last week. I’m going to do an export-and-clean sometime this week to fix it. Please be patient.
M, Mari, Chris, Nomad, and I just got back from our trip to the family camp in Maine. It was a fun time, but it was pretty dang chilly all weekend. Here’s a few of the highlight photos.
Update 09-08: Chris has posted a few of his pictures from the trip, including their visit to Boothbay and Popham Friday morning.
I just upgraded Moveable Type to version 3.1. The upgrade borked because Postgres 7.2.1 doesn’t support “ALTER TABLE foo ALTER COLUMN bar SET NOT NULL”. I had to do some jimmying by hand, and now I’m getting strange errors in strange places. Let me know by reply or by email if you see anything seriously sketchy.
Only one article so far, but I plan on following this Hacking Congress column. I’m quite interested in statistics and large data sets and screenscraping. Like I needed to tell you.
This is one of the few sci-fi short stories that really sticks out in my mind: The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Despite the reaction this will provoke from Chris, I will take this opportunity to go off on a tangent on Sir Arthur (probably best known for writing the 2001/2010/2061/3001: A Space Odyssey series). Although I love that short story, and 2001 was pure genious (more elaborate than the movie, and really shines a bright searchlight on Kubrick’s obfuscations), most of his other stuff that I’ve read was really dismal. The book that he’s said he’s most proud of — Childhood’s End — ended about a hundred pages before the back cover.
Not only do I have dreams like Roast Beef’s in today’s Achewood (substituting ‘Google’ for ‘Yahoo’), but in fact the whole story feels like Onstad is stalking me.
