Mkava's Ramblings

Had a bunch of folks over yesterday for all day gaming. Well, sorta. First people starting getting in around 4 or so, when the event on my Google Calendar that I shared with everyone was noon to midnight+. =P Either way, people started showing up and we started playing Halo 3 while I made some awesome home-made pizza (started the dough at like 2 so it’d be ready to go in the oven at 5). Making pizza took longer than I thought but when you have two pizzas coming that are literal mounds of toppings and goodness, you can’t rush it. Either way, after pizza we really set into playing.

Tons of Halo 3 was played. Some off-and-on gaming was done by folks who weren’t playing Halo at the time. Eventually around 11:30pm we got 6 computer rigs together for Rise of Nations. 3 v 3 gets a bit hectic, especially for the folks whoever never played a RTS like RoN before. Either way, it was a lot of fun. Especially when Cody didn’t have a missile shield and everyone kept dropping nukes on his head.. even people on his team. It’s amazing what a little nuking can do the the Armageddon counter… going quickly to zero. Game 2 ended the same way but with only 4 people playing in a Free-For-All game. 30 minutes of people and most people were ready to start development of the last tech and start attacking each other. Using the turn-and-burn tactic with nukes isn’t as effective as it could be, especially when its Nuclear ICBMs and not just the normal missiles. Things seem to die in a much larger area with those ICBMs. Hrm. With everyone calling it good at 4:30am, it was a fun 12 hours plus of gaming, and totally worth it. Looking forward to the next one in probably a half month, this time hopefully on campus though. =)

I may put some photos up soon, if I can get them off my only camera (my phone…). Not too many but enough to warrant a little effort.

People who came: Zach, Cody, D, S, Drew, Sam (and his girlfriend Amanda), Joe (even though he just hung out and didn’t game much), and obviously myself. Hope everyone had fun eating my awesome pizza and playing games with friends. Even Amanda who really looked like she didn’t want to be hanging out with a bunch of geeky gamers. =D

Until next time.

Had to post this after seeing it on Slashdot on this article: Open Source Music Fingerprinter Gets Patent Nastygram.

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I’ve been slowly setting up different useful development tools over the last few weeks (namely a local and remote Version Control System (VCS) and local and remote task/bug tracker). Even if they are not ready to be shown off at all, I wanted a place to yammer about my projects’ development without having to completely make a new blog or jump through any more hoops with WordPress plug-ins to accomplish the same thing I did in about 5 minutes of hardcoding (I hate it, but nothing does what I want.. >.<). So I now have a development blog as part of my usual blog. Even though I would love to make my own blogging software, and that is likely a future project, I just want to be able to yammer away without staring at too much code just yet. So now I have this and it’ll do until I do accomplish that. A separate development blog would be awesome, but why waste the effort at this point, neh?

I made a separate hard-coded element on the navigation bar that will link to the Development Blog category. Simple, but effective. All of the posts related to the dev blog can be found there, always.

So in the future, I’ll have posts for my development blog. They likely won’t show up on the front-page, and even more likely not to appear in my Twitter account. But for now, things can work as they are. =) I look forward to yammering about my slowly-progressing projects. =)

Found this in this article, thought it was not only awesome (I’m not an Al Franken fan) but did drive home the worries of this sort of occurence (own the content and the pipes… Hulu is owned by NBC Universal at time of posting) and the loss of Net Neutrality (which is…. awesome, right, and undeniable right in my mind).

What really amuses me is I didn’t vote Franken in when I voted in Minnesota last. Feel like a dolt for not knowing all his views last time. :/

Video after the break.

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Appeals Court Rules On Internet Obscenity Standards

This frightens me beyond means.

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