Tag Archives: game - Page 3

A Tale of Two DVD Rental Services

Posted by on June 3, 2006 1 comment

Back in April I procured an Xbox 360, and decided that instead of paying the exorbitant amount of money for single games that I would sign up for a rental service that would, in the end, be cheaper. I’ve been a member of Netflix for several years and find that it works really very good, except that they do not have games.

I looked around and finally decided on Intelliflix for 2 reasons: They were cheaper than everyone else by a few dollars, and they also had movies including an entire class of videos that Netflix doesn’t carry.

Before I get to my experience with Intelliflix, you should know how Netflix has been working for me. I’ve been on the 3-out plan for several years. When I finish with a movie and put it in a mailbox, they receive it the next day and ship the replacement movie, and I receive the new movie in the mail the second day. On very rare occasions (probably 4 or 5 times a year) it will take up to 5 days to receive a replacement, and even then only 3 or 4 instead of 5. I’ve probably sent back 6 movies that were unplayable for various reasons and only ever had 1 that was broken on arrival. In short, it has been well worth the monthly subscription and I heartily recommend it to anyone. It’s great.

I think the best thing that I can say about Intelliflix so far, is that it does not cost quite as much as Netflix. It takes a minimum of 9 days turn around after putting an envelope into the mail to get something new, and in the 2 months since I started my membership I have received exactly 1 game title and that wasn’t even an Xbox 360 title. The opportunity to view so much, ahem, alternative cinema has been nice but it is not the primary reason that I signed up for their service and I’m starting to get annoyed.

Their website is slow, poorly designed, exceedingly buggy, and really likes IE best. The ratings system is a chore and barely functional. The queue display and interaction is infuriating. They do have one nice feature in that I can mark one of my movies as “in the mail” so they can send out a new item early, but even then it takes up to 3 days (not including weekends) for the next item to be shipped! If they had a decent distribution system in place they would not even need that feature in order to make their system at least somewhat tolerable.

It is possible that if you live within 1 day mail turn around of Framingham, MA you will have a better experience with their service, since as far as I can tell that’s where they keep most of their movie stock. The closest distribution center I have seen so far is in Michigan. Anyone living outside of the Eastern Time Zone, as far as I can tell, is completely out of luck for reasonable service.

At this point I’ve decided to give them another month to see if things improve, and somewhat purely out of curiosity to see if I _ever_ receive an Xbox 360 game, but I am reasonably confident I’ll be cancelling at that point. If you are looking for a service, I would suggest looking elsewhere first.

If anyone has had better service from GameFly or any of the other services that rent games, I’d be glad to hear about it.

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Gotta smash them all

Posted by on May 27, 2006 Comments Off

PopCap Games has a new game out: Hammer Heads. I saw the announcement in their regular newsletter and gave it a try. It’s basically a hideously well done whack-a-mole variant that is good enough that I have already registered my copy.

Damn crack pushers!

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L-Space Login Quotes

Posted by on May 26, 2006 Comments Off

The following is the contents of the login quote file from L-Space:

vaxjo:

this is a test!

Mainsail:

Oh dear..It’s the brain again…Will someone kindly beat me senseless?

Glyph:

And then there was…. well, something resembling a great big mess.

Mainsail:

BBC Reporter talking about the Middle East conflict: “The Lesban..Libbanese…Lesbian Millitant….Oh damn…Lebanese Millitant Group …. “

Laughing Buddha:

I don’t care if it’s free, I want a letter of apology written in blood!

DreamCat:

If I have to read the word “embodiment” one more time I’m going to have to kill someone.

kallisti:

climb troll. er, wait. wrong universe.

curious:

If I could drag myself away from the computer, I’d wonder how wide mine is…

Aeliona:

I have powedered history all across the front of my pink shirt.

Phage:

This would work alot better if I would stop running into walls.

Corwin:

Do you really want a Troll doing a body-cavity search? Think about that.

kal:

You think they’re not going to recognize us when we’re moisturized?

Wil Wheaton:

It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn’t involve Klingon gang rape.

Kallisti:

You can’t eat a solitaire game. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Glyph:

I can also do many things with my feet that I can do with with my hands.

1880′s Tobogganing Etiquette Printed in a St Paul paper for the Winter Carnival:

6. When steering it is unadvisable to seek to get extra purchase by planting your unemployed foot in the small of the back of the lady in front of you.

Mainsail:

There’s nothing like a nice cup of hot, strong tea, with just a dab of cream and a lump or two of sugar…especially when it gets dumped into your lap.

MPR disc jockey John Zech:

For more on passive-agressive monarchs, and their enabling composers…

bash.org:

I beat the internet. The end guy was hard.

Mousie:

I have your laptop and a full bladder…

hypochrismutreefuzz:

I ran out of gluons and fell apart

poi:

well, you start out reading those innocent little piers anthony books. then before you know it you have a collection of water-proof erotica.

Mainsail:

Also, some words of advice: never put words into Google you aren’t prepared to see results for.

kallisti:

i need either a vacation or a chainsaw. oh, decisions decisions…

Mainsail:

It’s time for the adventures of Lars Mitsuison; North Woods Ninja: Off of 35W North, outside of Brainerd, lies the mysterious Falling Lotus Petal Temple and Coffee Shop, secret home of the Moose Clan: a sect of Ninja dedicated to the principals of Honor, Justice, and Ice Fishing. The temple founded by Tokuzo Minowara-san, who meditated long and attained enlightenment on the Eternal Question: ‘Cold enough for you?’ Tokuzo had trained in the ancient art of the Ninja, but got a job as a fry-chef in a diner in Minnesota We join Lars, a young acolyte of the temple, who sits in meditation after the lunch-rush

Dara Moskowitz [CityPages.com, Dish article from 3/12/2003]:

Failed! The way an entire year’s worth of Harvey Wallbangers have failed to erase the memory of that unfortunate incident in Karachi with the fan dancer and the locomotive. Failed!

Macaw:

Immortality doesn’t disturb me any more than flying pink unicorns with pez dispensers for horns do.

from System Performance Tuning, by O’Reilly:

If a process tries to write to a shared page, it incurs a copy-on-write fault.[5]
5. Often called a COW fault; not to be confused with a ruminant falling into a chasm.

mainsail and jenx:

‘Um, but what if I’m a helicopter? Or a tea pot?’ ‘It means you’re short and stout, here is your handle, here is your spout. It also means that you’ll be experiencing continuous light to moderate chop from FL280 to FL410 for the next 300 miles.’

kallisti, watching yet another depressurization scene in Total Recall:

What, is the dome made out the of saran wrap?

LT:

People are not good food. People are not good food. Eating smokers is bad for you. People are not good food. People are not good food. Eating smokers is bad for you. People are not good food. People are not good food. Eating smokers is bad for you.

Dara Moskiwitz, referring to the Minneapolis neighborhood:

If Seward had the nation’s largest per-capita consumption of hemp soap, no one would be at all surprised.

Mainsail:

Such a beautiful day…not a cloud in the sky, the sun is shining…the frozen thump of the birds falling out of the trees and shattering on the sidewalk…

Asher:

This is where cultivating a sharp elbow and an unerring sense of rib comes in handy.

LT:

I’m not sure if that was a meeting or an experience of listening to someone recite the results of MadLibs using only technical terms.

Broog, Alien Film critic:

The mighty cinematic edifice which is the human Jackson’s rendering of Tolkien’s classic novel grinds to its imperial conclusion in the third film, “Lord of the Rings: The Fat Jolly Hobbit Saves Middle Earth And Everyone Is Nice To His Whiny Friend”.

Laughing Buddha:

no more perogis before bed.

Mainsail:

We’ve always had this skill back into the mists of time in my family. It can be a burden sometimes. Like when I dreamt that I was stranded on a tropical island with the Olympic Naughty Pleasuring Team, and sure enough, the very next day I found an unopened jar of guava jelly in the fridge.

One Windswept Rose:

The problem with being IS and saying “we don’t have time/resources to do this” is that people will do it anyway.

Pretend, for a moment, that the database and server resources you should be using is the I94 bridge over the Mississippi – many lanes, fast speed limit, well monitored and patrolled. A truckload of widgets goes across easily and smoothly, usually.

Now, take away the truck & the bridge, but they still want to move the widgets. They’ll take what they can find “Oh, hey, there’s this cable across the river in front of the dam no one is using – if we train a hundred monkey’s to carry a widget each and put them in relays running up and down the river bank carrying widgets across for us, we can do the whole project w/o needing any IS funding. Cool!”

The problems now are:
1) Dead monkeys and widgets blocking the hydroelectric intake.
2) Barge captains running into the lock doors because they got distracted by BoBo.
3) Riverbank erosion and plant damage from widget laden monkeys
4) Large monkey breeding farms smell bad
5) We’ve already upgraded from small monkeys to large (Gorilla), monkeys are still not as good as trucks for carrying widgets

Pryderi:

What ensued was probably the kitty version of the 4th ring to Hell (the 7th being an underwater dog park)…

Mainsail:

If I call in air support, and they send me penguins, and those penguins hit what I really need them to, I will buy those penguins a drink. I will not quibble.

Goodle:

Bush takes XTC, goes to rave
New York Times – 12 hours ago
“He was jumping around, blowing a whistle, and kept asking me if I had any chewy,” says Alison, 19, who danced with the President and his team of advisors at an unnamed club until 4am. “Rumsfeld gave me a kick-ass back rub.”

Sedna Information Page:

We use a 172 Megapixel camera mounted on a robotic telescope to find these things.

One Windswept Rose:

Well, actually, it’s a work-safe splash-screen right now, you need to click through to get to anything Janet Jacksonesque.

Zannd:

I have a soft spot for Land Yachts. I used to drive my mom’s 1970 Chrystler New Yorker (affectionately named “Tank”)…it could easily fit at least 6, plus trunk space sufficient to garage a small car. Definitely a rolling livingroom. And fun to drive. In an Abrams sort of way.

Pryderi:

There are only so many directions I wanna see my naked white ass from.

kallisti:

feet are like cleavage, only… er, wait, no. they’re not.

dieselsweeties.com:

Bacon is a vegetable.

LT:

I have a trebuchet budget?!?! What great news!

Weird Al Yankovic, “Nature Trail To Hell” from the album “In 3-D”:

If you love the 6 o’clock news
then you’ll love
Nature Trail To Hell!
Nature Trail To Hell!
Nature Trail To Hell!
In 3-D!

Wired:

You programmer. Me writer.

Two Lumps as posted by Asher:

I AM TE CAPTAIN OF THE CARPET SHIP!

Wired:

I vote we go lick their babies.

Zannd:

It wouldn’t be so boring if you took my advice and lowered it, threw some fatties on it, dual dump pipes, neons, fake blower and brake scoops, and a honkin bigass spoiler. And did an 80% tint on the windshield, and added a megabass sound system. Sure, it would handle like a pregnant water buffalo on a lowered skateboard with fatties, but hey, it wouldn’t be so boring.

Mainsail:

No, ‘The Madness of King George III’ is not a sequal.

Pied Piper:

You loved the adventure of “The Madness of King George”!!
You couldn’t get enough of “The Madness of King George – Part II”!!
Now, Miramax brings the thrills, the mayham, the excitement that is:

The Madness of King George III

Just when you thought he was down for the Count,
he’s back…and badder than ever…

(cue music: Mark Morrison – Return of the Mack)

He’s out for justice…he’s out for revenge…
he’s ready to fight for his honor, his crown,
and his rule over the Americas…

He’ll risk everything, even his sanity, to get what he wants…
It’s the Return of the King as you’ve never seen him before…

The Action…the Intrigue…the Romance…

Don’t Miss the Thrilling Saga of King George

in

The Madness of King George III

Rated R
Under 17 not admitted without parrots
Void where inhibited

Asher:

Nothing says teh sexay like being covered in jet black velvet… oh, and lots of multi-hued cat fur.

xat:

taking personal responsibility for my orgasms so often leads to being pursued through the jungle by a t-rex. *sigh* ah the perils of modern life.

xat:

That’s the thing that gets me. Saying that dinosaurs walked the earth 6,000 years ago is such an eyeblink in the REAL LIVE ACTUAL timeframe of evolution that it is the same as saying, look out, over there, it’s a velocoraptor crossing Rockefeller Plaza. Oops. There goes Katie Couric. Pity.

kallisti:

beaners might be in love, but chelsea might be in the kind of love that a person has for their dinner.

Gryphon:

While I was growing up, Velveeta was the unapproachable father figure – elusive, and absent. Softer than it looked, it definitely had it’s “yin” side. But it was never to be found. So I grew up without proper guidance, and got into a lot of troubles with a bunch of Kraft American Singles.

Okay, this is the last time I take a daily poll at quarter to three in the morning.

Mainsail:

Great Moments from The Evolution of the Orgasm #327: ‘Thag go all funny there for moment.’

http://www.goats.com:

Theoretically how much porn could you store on a fish?

elsie:

had i known, i could have given crap by proxy!

elsie:

cause nothing says christmas like shaving a dwarf.

kallisti:

what, all that work and jesus gets to be a bellhop?

from RFC4041: Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts:

The key words “SHALT”, “SHALT NOT”, “SMITE”, and “PILLAR OF SALT” in this document are to be interpreted as expected.

Car Talk Listener:

Driving a Mustang ranks right up there with sleeping in a double bed.

Pryderi:

That’s like saying you didn’t invent the plague, you just spread it.

Chilly Willy:

Wait until you see the telescoping crucifix with blinking colored lights… you’ll be hooked!

-anon:

Oh dear God, they’ve discovered random punctuation to go with random lettering. Any minute now, they’re going to bust out the umlauts and I’ve going to go into hiding.

MousiePants!:

Vanna White is getting her star on the Walk of Fame next week. What I wanna know is, will it light up when people touch it?

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From ship to shore

Posted by on May 26, 2006 Comments Off

I heard the announcement this week that the people behind Puzzle Pirates are working on a new game called Bang! Howdy. I really enjoyed Puzzle Pirates for awhile and will be signing up for the beta and hopefully playing some this weekend.

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Finding things in odd places…

Posted by on May 22, 2006 Comments Off

I read a fair number of different blogs and news sources and recently added a whole slew of feeds when I recently bought an XBox 360. This morning, I read on one of those news feeds news about the company I work for: DK is the New Home for BradyGames.

Unfortunately I’ve never seen software up in the employee “bookstore”.

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From the maker’s of Sioux City sodas: White Rock Organics

Posted by on April 26, 2006 Comments Off

While doing some quick soda shopping before a couple of friends stopped by to play some boardgames, I ran into some new bottles at the local Kowalski’s that looked interesting. White Rock Organics soda comes in 3 flavors: Red Peach, Raspberry Creme, and Passion Orange. I got a 4 pack of all 3 flavors and have so far tasted very mixed results.

The Red Peach is actually incredibly good. It is more sweet and intensely flavored than I would normally like, but the carbonation is light enough and the cane sugar they are using is fairly decent quality so the flavor is at least very good. It also really tastes like very good fresh peaches.

The Raspberry Creme, on the other hand, tastes like cough syrup. And, as one of my friends last night pointed out, not even like good cough syrup. The flavor is fruity enough but the intense sweetness and the overwhelming sticky taste of bad vanilla-esque flavor is just horrible. None of us wanted to finish the bottle. I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of the other 3 bottles without offending someone I like, or just pouring them out. I’ll probably give a second bottle a taste to see if it was just a bad bottle, but it tasted exactly like any other really badly fruit flavored soda I’ve ever had. Heck, it’s easily in the same league as Shasta Strawberry, if you can believe that.

I still have yet to try the Passion Orange, though I’ll probably get to that tonight. At this point I’m wondering if I should be looking forward to it with dread or excitement.

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Finally made the plunge

Posted by on April 6, 2006 Comments Off

I finally bought an XBox 360 yesterday. The Target up the street had a whole pile of the Premium systems actually in stock when I popped in. I do feel better that I did agonize over the decision a bit, and I only bought one game (that was on sale) but I’m still feeling slightly dirty about it.

Also, ripping DVDs to an easily useful format to play back over the Media Center Extender is a royal pain in the ass. I should note that I am only working on this for the DVDs that I own and have no designs or intentions to expand that to any that I don’t own.

I did notice one odd thing: It doesn’t appear to be able to find the MP3 files that I have legally ripped from my collection of legal CDs when I’m browsing through the MCE or Media Connect interfaces. Not sure why that is yet, but I’m sure I’ll find a simple answer pretty quickly.

Anyway, if anyone is interesting in adding me to their Friends list,

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About Me

Posted by on August 24, 2005 Comments Off

My name is Nathan Stohlmann and I am a computer geek specializing in software installation technologies and related engineering. I’ve been using InstallShield, Wise, WiX, and various other products to design, build, and maintain scripted and Windows Installer based installation packages for the past 8 years and really think that I’ve found my niche.

I am currently working for Pearson VUE and am relatively happy there but have started to think about what I want to do next.

I’m a fan of LEGO bricks and enjoy building with my modest (by some pretty odd standards) collection of parts. I am active in TwinLUG, a Twin Cities local LEGO User Group (LUG), and maintain the group’s web presence at twinlug.org. I am primarily a Technic builder but in the past year or so have spent most of my time working on contributions to Micropolis and maintain the official specification.

A note about spam that appears to have come from my domain, cavort.org. It appears that at least one spammer has been using various addresses @cavort.org as the purported sender of the messages. Please believe me when I say that if I could have that person in this room right now they would leave the room with an extremely funny walk. I do not send spam. This domain has never sent spam. It’s not me and I am terribly sorry if you got crap from that shmuck, but there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it at this point.

If you wish to contact me please use my gmail account if you know or can derive it.

Find me on Flickr!

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Okay, so it’s not Sunday night, but here is the no…

Posted by on January 26, 2004 Comments Off

Okay, so it’s not Sunday night, but here is the notes from the Book Discussion Panel from Supercon 11 this past weekend. I’ll be cleaning it up later and adding more notes.

Douglas Adam
	Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Terry Pratchett
	Thief of Time
Larry Niven
	Rainbow Mars
	A World Out of Time
Sean McMullen
	The Centurion's Empire
Robert Charles Wilson
	Darwinia
John Barnes
	Timeline Wars Series
		Patton's Spaceship
		Washington's Dirigible
		Caesars's Bicycle
Joshua Dann
	Timeshare
	Timeshare: Second Time Around
Kage Baker
	In The Garden of Iden
	Sky Coyote
	The Graveyard Game
Iain Banks
	The Business

Connie Willis
	Doomsday Book
	Firewatch
	To Say Nothing of the Dog
	Remake
Harry Turtledove
	Guns of the South
S. M. Stirling
	Islands in the Sea of Time
Eric Flint
	1632
	1633
Gore Vidal
	Creation
	1876
	Julian
Harry Harrison
	The One King Series
Robert Heinlein
	The Cat Who Walked Through Walls
	To Sail Beyond the Sunset
	Door Into Summer
Ursula K Leguin
	Rocannon's World
	Semley's Necklace
Joe Haldeman
	The Forever War
	The Forever Peace
James P Hogan
	Thrice Upon a Time
	The Prometheous Effect
Spider Robinson
	The Callahan's CrossTime Salloon
Leo Frankowski
	CrossTime Engineer ****
Mark Twain
	Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
H. G. Wells
	The Time Machine
Michael Crichton
	Timeline
Orson Scott Card
	1492: Pastwatch Redemption
Bruce Stirling
	Mozart in Mirrorshades
Piers Anthony
	Prostho Plus
	Macroscope
Sue Corbett
	12 Again
Book of Kells
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I finally upgraded my phone and moved up to a Sony…

Posted by on January 4, 2004 Comments Off

I finally upgraded my phone and moved up to a Sony Ericsson T610 from T-Mobile. I have really liked my service from Sprint PCS but it was time to change phones and bluetooth was a checklist item for me and Sprint has been dawdling too long on just about all technology fronts. Time to move on. So yesterday after the new phone came active, I put away the Sprint PCS Wireless Web Digital Link for the last time. It got dropped from support so fast I can’t even find any official links for the thing anymore, which is really disappointing. It didn’t sell really well, so the planned 3G upgrade never happened and for awhile they were actually giving them away for free if you really wanted one. It was good to me and I really enjoyed it but going back to a seperate phone is actually a nice change, and since the T610 has bluetooth when I replace my venerable Handspring Visor Platinum with either a Palm Tungsten T3 or Tapwave Zodiac 2 (still undecided) I’ll still have the features I used to use but with a lot more flexibility.

The things that I like about the Zodiac are that it has dual SD slots (1 SDIO compatible) and built-in vibrate function for alarms (though designed for the games it’s supposed to run). The downsides are that it is bigger (not that I’m not used to a huge PDA) and doesn’t have the usual hardware buttons which means that some apps just don’t work. Besides, I don’t think it’s going to be all that successful and the point of this round of purchasing is moving to the outer edge of the land of early-adopters for awhile.

I had been really excited about getting a Garmin iQue 3600 this last summer but there are several troubling problems with that unit. First, the built-in GPS reciever is not NMEA compatible so I would be locked into Garmin’s built-in software and any app that supported the iQue hardware (Did that with the Digital Link already, thanks). Second, my next PDA has to be able to support Bluetooth, preferably built-in and the SD slot on the iQue does not support SDIO. So, no iQue for me.

However it looks like I should be able to do the same functions but with only an extra device using the DeLorme Bluetooth Wireless Earthmate GPS PowerPack! And I’ll be able to use it with the laptop as well so it will be just better all around! And if I don’t want to go Bluetooth (which I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t) there are SD and cabled solutions as well. I’m really looking forward to using Vindigo on a new Tungsten T3 with the map functions kicking in and showing me where a nice little place to eat is and then sending the number to my phone to dial and ask about reservations.

Ah, the wireless future!

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