Metal Gear Solid 4 is a ridiculously good game.
Even by itself, it’s an awesome experience just previously unseen in video games. Global conflict has become the sole economic pillar. You play as Old Snake, a grizzled battlefield veteran with one final mission: assassinate the leader of the world’s private military corporations (i.e., mercenaries), who happens to be your genetic twin brother. Nuclear deterrence, nano-machines technology, genetic manipulation, and world superpower conspiracies, they all weave into an alternate universe with events drawn from the annals of modern history.
Forget the princess in the other castle.
Engineers suck at communication.
Really, for all the smart people who can read a core dump and juggle twenty pieces of information in their head while debugging driver code, the ability to talk to the common user (bah, who needs users?) is surprisingly rare. Sure, engineers can, for the most part, communicate with each other with usual lingo and acronym symphony, but “dumbing it down” to the understanding of a normal person seems to almost be beneath some developers.
Yea, it’s not a criticism unique to the software world; every hobby or industry has its own terms and linguistic barriers of entry which, if put into song, resemble an international music festival.
Note: The following is a rant provoked by some truly douchebag neighbors I’ve been living next to for the past year. Not that any of this will change seemingly ingrained behavior, but It is pleasantly therapeutic.
Ever stop to wonder how considerate you are to the people around you - strangers and acquaintances alike - and what kind of an opinion they have of you?
I think of consideration as a kindness scale. One end is total selflessness: making others happy is the goal and others’ well-being is the priority. Totally opposite is complete selfishness: being aware and taking advantage of situations, disregarding feelings and opinions others may have.
Essentially, doormats and douchebags. The rest of us are (hopefully) somewhere in between. I’m guessing that, much like driving ability, we see our own personalities as the perfect balance between d&d.
Oh hm, I haven’t updated in a while. Work’s been keeping me busy, and when I get off - usually late - I’m prone to lying around, watching an episode or two of Scrubs, and general vegging in front of the TV.
‘cept nowadays, Pan is no longer with me (yea, I posthumusly named her).
The story’s not that interesting; I posted once or twice, half-heartedly, on Craigslist just to see whether anybody was interested in the older, slightly scratched up girl and gauging the price buyers were willing to pay. Craigslist, of course, is full of cheapskates, and I did get a good amount of insultingly low offers, but ultimately someone with genuine interest in the set and had the means of transporting it (giant pickup will do the trick) took her away.
So now I’m really just staring at a wall.
Wow, IE6 is even more annoying than I remember.
Oh, you know: Internet Explorer 6 is that one browser Microsoft released with Windows XP, easily the most popular browser in the world and also probably the least secure, target of phishing scams and spammy toolbar add-ons, providing only the bare minimal features of the modern browser.
Did you know that on the web development side, it’s somehow possible that working with IE is even worse? Its bugs are well documented; IE ignores all the effort put into standardizing browser rendering behavior and happily follows its own rules, thanklessly adding countless hours of development time to any website hoping to display competently on the (sadly) most popular browser in the world.
To add insult to injury, those of us who have upgraded to Windows Vista and wish to mold our creations on Microsoft’s (supposedly) latest-and-greatest platform have absolutely no way to run IE6 on the operating system. The current workaround is to download a full image of Windows XP and load an entire virtual machine so we can run…IE6.
All this is just a long way of saying that my site does not display properly in the dreaded browser (the right toolbar get shoved to the next element, i.e., the bottom of the page) and after spending an hour I am no closer to figuring out how to deal with the annoying bug.
The moral of the story: don’t use Internet Explorer.
The default theme I had on v5 was nice…and generic, so I figured it’s about time I revealed my own JPEG-heavy, pixel-aligned theme after a few weeks spent putting it together. It’s obviously far from being finished; beyond the main blog interface, other areas need tweaking (lack of comments) to complete revamping (pictures).
In light of my decision to use Wordpress, I forget why designing a site was supposed to be more fun than coding the backend. The graphical nature of designing a website is certainly appealing, but all the pain of tweaking margins and paddings to make pixels align perfectly and looking up hacks to get around issues specific to a browser (hi Internet Explorer) came flooding back with a vengeance.
Alright, this post is going to be a bit of a rant. Ye who hateth technical details on website construction, pass not this mark.
