[deprecated] muddyhorse

Buy.com recently had a great deal on some games and battery packs.  One of the games included was Crackdown.  Here’s a quick review, after playing about half the game.  I get the feeling that Crackdown is one of those games everyone’s heard of, but few have played.  It’s never had a mega promotional campaign, but it’s a solid, well put-together title.  To sum up my feelings about the game: it’s a blast.  And it gets blastier the farther along you get.

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While looking around for an online loan amortization creator (nice one here), I came across a Google ad for the Nexus One, the “Google phone” that there’s been much buzz about.  Apparently, it just came out today, while the great Snomaggeddon blankets the world (or at least Missouri) and I’ve been oblivious.

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NTLM proxies are relatively common corporate web proxy. It takes special software to pass through it, unfortunately. One must essentially log into an NT domain to get to the web past the proxy. By default, web browsers are the only software on Ubuntu Linux that know how to perform the complex handshake. Many core tools (like apt, etc) cannot do what they need — and your system can’t download software updates.

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Well, we’re going to try out the WildBlue through Dish Network for internet.  *Sigh*.  It feels like a defeat.  I have only heard good things about Satellite internet from one person, and all the anecdotes online are negative.  But at least it is something.

Chickens are delicate creatures, sometimes dying for no good reason.  Unfortunately, they are also delectable creatures, and find themselves in harm’s way.

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Play Achievement Unlocked

This game makes me so happy.  Did I mention that I got all 1250 achievement points in Mass Effect?

Memorial day weekend, we broke the ban on Wal-mart.  Why, you might ask?  Because of Nibbler.

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Continuing the Java build systems discussion, today I want to focus on Maven, what it does well and what it does that frustrates.  We’ll get a little taste of the minimum expectations for a new build system as well.  Note:  this page may be subject to edits, as I come across more pros & cons of Maven.

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We had to go through a number of steps to support the combination of Maven + OSGi + Spring + JavaFX-1.1 in our Swing-based application. This document describes all the steps and technology we’ve gone through to get it working.

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Two recent posts on the java-weblog circuit spurred me to motion:

Maven Adoption Curve (Alex Miller, coworker at MetaMatrix)
Maven and Ivy (Ryan Senior, coworker at BJC)

I was trying to think of the ideal build system.  I won’t pretend that I’m going to get there in this post.  Instead, I’ll enumerate what we do every day and what we need from a build system so as to start thinking about the ideal system.

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Note: This post is probably wildly uninformed. Welcome to weblogs, everybody!

Then: Bush was reviled and derided for telling people to “Go shopping” after 9/11/2001.
Now: Americans are ruining the economy by saving their money!

Then: Americans don’t save enough.
Now: Americans are ruining the economy by saving their money! (OK, that was mostly a dupe, but still…)

Then: John McCain called for the TARP money to be used to buy up the bad mortgages. He was called an idiot, that was a stupid thing to do.
Now: Let’s make a Bad Bank to buy up all the bad assets!

Anyone? I’m not saying that the “thens” or the people who said them were right, I’m just saying that there’s a bunch of idiots running the country.

I just want to wish incoming President Obama all the best. He has made a lot of noise about changing the way things are done, and I hope he can stick to that.

Along those lines, he has made a lot of announcements that, frankly, haven stolen the thunder of my 2012 campaign, like a bipartisan cabinet and lobbyist restrictions. And I will be truly grateful when he brings me my internet.

Just to get a post in Dec 2008, I’ll drop a quick post here. That means I’m doing regular updates, right? 😉

I have some draft game reviews sitting around, I’ll get to them soon.

Have a good 2009!

My wife found a cheap copy of the Orange Box, from Valve.  It actually contains 3 full games (Half-life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal) and two large expansions for HL2 (ep. 1 & 2) — a lot of content.

There was only one reason I wanted the game:  Portal.  I heard from friends and reviews about the thing, so I had a feeling I’d like it.  I did.  Great writing and mind-bending (but not too mind-bending) make for a fun game.

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It was brought to my attention that I forgot a game review of Portal, so I thought I’d lump several games in today that I’ve been meaning to review but haven’t yet.  This is in order of me getting each game, starting with last Christmas.

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This is a silly, pointless blog post to see how LinkedIn deals with blog posts.

One less secret I have to keep:  see Riot Games to Summon ‘League of Legends’ in 2009 – MarketWatch.  That’s for anyone who is curious about what my friend Scott has been up to and/or the game I interviewed to work on.

I can’t believe I missed the press releases, but such is life.

The main community site is at http://www.leagueoflegends.com/

I wish them the best.  The game is fun and has a lot of teamwork potential.

Too Human is an action RPG for the XBox 360.  Sillicon Knights developed the title on-and-off for almost ten years.  The game combines features from several other well-known action RPGs.  To sum it up in a sentence, Too Human combines the frantic gameplay and hordes of enemies from the Diablo series with the weapon stylings and combos of Sega’s Phantasy Star Online.

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This post is sparked by the recent SlashDot article: How Close Were US Presidential Elections?.  And the recent presidential and vice-presidential debates.  And listening to folks in general.  Just some observations regarding political beliefs and behavior:  people don’t listen to one another, people talk past one another, people ignore that which doesn’t fit their world-view.

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I frequently say lots of very strange things that seem unrelated to the conversation at hand.  That’s because I’m running a quite detailed conversation in my head at the same time.  I’ll try different comments and responses, and evaluate the expected responses based on relevancy and humor.

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