1408

I saw the director's cut of 1408. A really interesting film. Very Lovecraftian. I enjoyed it.

Yuwie

I found a social community site, like Facebook, but this pays you for the traffic you generate to your profile. At the moment, it isn't as good as Facebook, but it pays and there's quite more ads around which is a bit annoying.

But check it out and form your own opinion at Yuwie.

Call of Cthulhu session

I and my friend had another Call of Cthulhu session the weekend before the last one and it was pretty fun. I didn't quite achieve the same flow of events as in the first session, but you can't have action the whole time or soon the action would be dull. Call of Cthulhu is mainly about investigation after all. But I have to say I'm fond of the mix they got in Dark Corners of the Earth. Was so much action in that game though it left your knees weak.

Unfortunately now my friend is travelling to India with his company, so it'll be another couple of weeks before we can play again. Another enthusiast has shown interest in participating by then.

In the meantime I'm studying, new coureses started this week and playing Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Struck the mother lode!

Well, maybe not quite.. But I finally reached 4 bux in Gomez.. Only another buck before I get payment, but it will be a while.. but I guess it is always something. I could always retire...

New blog

Today I started another blog where I write in swedish, so it is mainly for the swedish audience. So I'll write in both places as it strikes my fancy, but in general I'll reserve the international matters for here and the swedish stuff for the swedish audience there.

But check both places!

To my other blog.

Robert D. Anderson & The legacy of Cthulhu

I tried it out a little bit, but all I can say is that you probably have to be a true die hard fan of Call of Cthulhu to enjoy this. The bugs put me off it after a short while so I didn't play much of it, but for a fan made product it was impressive. But I think I rather play through Dark corners of the earth again than invest my time in this game.

On the first level you find a submachine gun and your character refuses to take it, saying he didn't like what they did in Chicago.. Then in a couple of rooms later, a german soldier kills you when he spots you in 2 seconds with full auto from an assault rifle... So guess your character likes the tough odds.

Call of Cthulhu

At last, another roleplaying session. It wasn't looking good, since none of my friends were able to make it except one of them. But we decided to go ahead and play anyway and it really turned out great. It worked really well and it was an exciting session with action and scares. I returned to the storyteller's chair after a very long hiatus and I personally think I did some of my best work.

It could be Call of Cthulhu is a good game to play like this because it in many ways focuses on the individual and their mental degeneration.

Hopefully we can set up another session soon.

Party

Yesterday we had a family party where we enjoyed some crayfish. It was a pretty fun event. It had been arranged by my girlfriend, but sadly she fell ill just prior to the party so she couldn't participate. But we're planning to redo it once she is better so she can participate. We werent the only ones partying though, later after I got home I heard a neighbour placing music for the entire neighbourhood.

Before the party I also watched the movie Bloodsport. It is still a pretty cool movie.

The return of Isa

Yesterday was quite a hectic day. While visiting my dad my mom's dog, Isa, mysteriously vanished and despite us calling out and going looking for her she didn't make herself known. Granted, she has a habit of walking off, but rarely on her own or for very long. But yesterday she didn't show up for 6 hrs so naturally we started to fear the worst.

Although sometime during the night she came back, but she was injured and had trouble walking. So we can only speculate in what has befallen her.

Excavation

Today we continued with the work on our property, moving some rocks and stumps. It's coming along quite nicely now though, despite the lawn being pretty much destroyed because of the big excavator and all the rain having turned it into a muddy slope. We barely got the excavator out of the mud.

Today my g/f passed her driving theory exam, so congratulations to her!

I've nearly beaten Fallout 2... And the phone lines are partially not working here; I can phone out, but you can't phone here. Telia said it would take them like a week to fix. Not too great.

More rain

It keeps raining and raining and raining. So not terribly exciting to write about. Yesterday, I made lasagna and varnished half the ceiling in the room we're renovating for the second time. So we could move the bed in there tonight and sleep there for the first time. Big room compared to our old bedroom.

Apparently cow farting is singled out now as the #1 factor for our alledged demise in what is known as the global warming. So if you own a cow, try to keep it from farting since this will apparently save the world.

Storm update

So I survived through the storm. Wasn't much of a storm here really, but it rained a lot for a very long time. So now I',m hoping for better weather, but doesn't seem like it will improve for a while yet.

Storm warning

Storm warning here in Sweden. They're fearing it will be as bad as in Germany and England, so all had been advised to stay indoors. Where I live it has been raining non-stop since about 3pm, but we are not flooded yet.

Javascript calculator

A very simple javascript calculator I made.

Legacy of Cthulhu

I was over at CDON going through their release list to see if there were any new interesting games and I saw that they have now released the fan made Call of Cthulhu game that I stumbled across a while back. If you're a die hard Cthulhu worshipper, it might be worth checking out.


Legacy of Cthulhu

Excavation

Looks like we did step up and move some rocks, boulders and do some landscaping after all. Damn hard work however.

Ultrasound

Today my girlfriend had an ultrasound examination and we got the first glimpses of our baby. Quite an exciting experience. According to the nurse everything seemed fine. Expected date of birth is 23 december +/- 2 weeks.

Yesterday my dad came by with his excavator and we pulled up 3 stumps. We were supposed to move some rocks today, but since the weather is nice maybe it will be postponed.

Update

Today I updated my blog to the new templates, but in essence all it means for now is that the archieve browsing was improved. Though it means it is easier to update in the future.

Thunderstorm

There was a really intense thunderstorm early this morning here. It was pretty much straight ontop of us too.

In other news I completed my biggest translation project yet a while back; a 68 page analysis of a survey funded by the EU.

Since then I've been replaying Fallout 2 though and you will be pleased to know I will have it beaten soon. It's been rewarding to replay it mainly since it was so many years ago I played it last, so you've had a chance to forget some stuff.

Since I watch Battlestar Galactica now, since they air it friday nights when I watch TV. I don't watch much tv in general so I have trouble following series unless they air them pretty late at night. So I had to dig out an old classic called StarLancer and have been replaying it some. I never got around to beating it so it lingers on me. It is the predecessor to Freelancer and made by the Wing Commander people. It never really sold very well though, but I saw that at least a few years ago it did have a pretty strong following.

Too bad the niche games seem to be the best, but since their following is too small the games get no sequels. Starlancer didn't sell well enough for them even to bother making a patch, so I had to spend some time troubleshooting to get it to work on Windows XP. I finally got it to stop crashing though.

Sometimes the best action is to do nothing

I was reading in a swedish paper in a column how a writer was criticizing Bono for the work he does for the poor being counter-productive. In the comments I found a lot of people writing things that it is better to do something than nothing, but I thought that it must be better to do nothing than do something wrong. From studying decision making and decision support I've also learnt that an often neglected decision is the decision to do nothing.

I found a short and interesting article on the subject though that I recommend:

http://www.paulstips.com/brainbox/pt/home.nsf/link/28082006-Sometimes-its-better-to-do-nothing

Final Fantasy 3

I've moved my old Final Fantasy 3 site and it is now availible at: http://web.telia.com/~u41306659/

The old address still works, but as some of you might now I can no longer access that one.

Swift hacker response

I don't know if this is actually related, but it would seem too coincidental not to be. Apparently the Pirate bay is facing the risk of being put on a filter list of sites that are unaccessible in Sweden. This because they alledgedly have/link to illegal material on there according to the Swedish police.

Now tonight a few swedish sites were hacked and were changed to seem like they also were on the same filter.

News here in swedish.

Transformers

I saw Transformers today and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. It was an alright action movie, but I felt it deviated a bit too far from the original story and it had too little heart and character development. Other than wanting a new story I don't see why they deviated from the original story with the crash of their ship and the battle for energon. The new one didn't seem to add much.

Like with many adaptions it felt like they had a script and then they threw the famous brand on it to make it more sellable. The product placement in this movie was utterly shameless.

The most redeeming factor was the returning voice actor for Optimus Prime. That was cool.

They also made the same mistake of Terminator 3 by not having any of the original theme music; even T3 had it in the end (which was too late). At least they had the transformation sound effect still.

In the original series as I recall the Transformers were the main characters and you followed the story through their eyes, but here the humans were the main characters and you related to the unfolding events through their perspective. I think I prefered the original take.

The Transformers were also a bit unecessarily detailed compared to the comics which made it hard, mainly because of overzealous zoom ins, to tell them apart when they were fighting. It was a far cry from the human like fist fights and shootouts from the original.

Fitness

An old friend of mine is a nutritional expert and he has started a blog here. Might be worth checking out if you're trying to get into shape. There are a few valid pointers.

Earn pocket change

I used to be a member of a service that paid you for online time, but after a while they lowered the payment so much so the processing power probably cost more in power than what you earnt from it. But now I got an email that they raised payment by 60 %, so it might be worth taking a look at again.

With full processing time you can earn like 1,15 bux/day, so no huge amounts still.

Link here

The bigger money is pretty much in the referals.

Fallout 3

It seems the information released so far about Fallout 3 has been rather disturbing. At least if you were looking forward to a game that remained true to the first two games.

Here is an excellent article http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=37054 that raises some valid concerns.

On another note, I started playing Fallout 2 again. It is still good. Usually old classics you remember aren't as good as you remember them, so you get bored after a while - but this didn't seem to apply to Fallout 2.. Maybe because it has such good replayability.

Otherwise I'm working on a translation and my summer course in java programming for mobile phones.

Midsummer's eve

Yesterday we finally had another Call of Cthulhu session. My character got to try out to cast some magic, but the storyteller was quite evil so it didn't quite go as expected. But I'm gonna send that demon back when I uncast the spell!

Today was midsummer's eve, so we had some festivities. It was pretty nice.

Fallout 3 teaser

I watched the Fallout 3 teaser and it looked alright. The theme and mood seems to at least lean towards the original.

http://fallout.bethsoft.com/index.html

Set for preliminary release in fall 2008 it is a very long wait. I didn't think they would announce it so far in advance. The StarCraft 2 announcement seemed to have a pretty much finished game for instance; so while still possible I doubt there will be over a year's wait for StarCraft 2 to be released.

Programming progress

So the last couple of days I've been working on an assignment and its been going pretty well. I need to implement a student registry in EJB. I decided to make a servlet and jsp pages as client.

So far you can add, modify and search for students... Now all I need to do is add the courses, grades and course assignments.

The overall structure is something like this:

MS SQL Server -> EJB -> Servlet - JSP

Bachelor thesis

Now my bachelor thesis has been published in the University library, so anyone who feels up for it can read it here: http://biblioteket.ehl.lu.se/olle/post.aspx?ID=2531

It deals with IT-project management and its pitfalls. We received a very positive response on it like I stated earlier, so enjoy.

StarCraft 2

Wow... Finally. Here's another given for the shelf.

http://www.starcraft2.com

Tide of Apocalypse forum

Added a few new boards in the forum.

http://crona.proboards13.com/

Edit: Board is dead.

Fallout 3

Finally things are starting to happen with Fallout 3... http://fallout.bethsoft.com/index.html It says 19 days until teaser release. Would be cool if they could get it released during this summer, since apparently they've worked a while on it, but most likely it will be another long wait. If they got it released this summer though, I know what I would be doing this summer. Just hope they remain true to the franchise.

The site itself bodes pretty well and the music is cool, but it sounds more like the soundtrack for the summer's action pop-corn flick than the previous soundtracks. They werent as pomp as this music, but more melancholic and gloomy.

Over at No Mutants allowed they also released the Van Buren, Black Isle's Fallout 3 demo. I tried it out, and it was pretty cool. Though it has like 4 years on its neck and is in pre-alpha state.

I upgraded my computer the other day with 2 gig ram, to 3 gig. So now things are running smoothly again.

Spider-man 3

I went to the 18:00 showing of Spider-man 3 in Lund yesterday and all in all I thought it was a pretty good popcorn flick. They sure went into sentimental overload at the end though.

Most annoying was of course the people who couldn't keep their mouth shut, but I've had to endure worse of that though.

Accounting

Day before yesterday I finally took the accounting exam that has haunted me for a couple of years. It is the oldest lingering exam I have, so I hope I passed it.

Water association meeting

Today our local water association had its yearly meeting. The exciting topic on the agenda was whether to invest in a new sewage system, but the majority wanted to wait and see what the future holds before commiting to such an expensive endeavour.

I'm going to a party tomorrow. Hope it'll be fun.

Bachelor exam, passed with distinction

Today we recieved the highest grade possible for our Bachelor thesis in informatics, regarding IT-project success. Some of the comments were, "brilliant", "like clockwork", "all the negative stuff is trivial" and "hard to find anything bad at all..."

I would like to thank the academy... ;) cowriter Stellan, supervisor Claus, examinators, teachers, friends and family for their untiring support.

Also a special thanks to my girlfriend Martina, for being there! We just found out she is pregnant, so in addition I'll be a dad in 9 or so months.

Have a good weekend!

The Great Global Warming Swindle

I saw this documentary about global warming that was pretty interesting and I recommend it.

Basically it puts foward some good arguments for that the theory of man made global warning is false.

http://tinyurl.com/ytc84e

C&C 3: Tiberium Wars demo

I downloaded the Tiberium Wars demo last night. At first I was a bit scpetic, because I was a huge fan of the original C&C that I played for months back in the day, but I think Tiberian sun in the series was a bit disappointing as I recall. I havn't had much time to play the demo though, but so far it seems pretty cool. All in all I'm not quite such a huge fan of the kind of play you see in these kinds of RTS games anymore, since you have so few units and it feels kind of tiny and cumbersome to control any bigger amount of troops than you can select.. So I prefer the Total War approach. But I'll play the demo a bit more and see how I feel about it.

I've got an exam in databases coming up this wednesday though, so unfortunately gaming time will be sparse.

Storm and too many bosses

Hold on to your hats, there is another storm brewing in Sweden. It's been blowing a lot the last couple of days and tonight there's going to be another class 2 storm. So better stay indoors if you can.

I've got that pretty much covered. I need to stay indoors polishing my thesis and study for my IT Law exam this thursday.

In the news, I saw that the swedish tax agency wont provide information electronically anymore to websites like Ratsit who present people's salaries and debts without sending out a notice about x having done a credit check on you. I don't see the problem about salaries being so sensetive, especially since you can get a lot more sensetive public information about people like convictions etc.

In Computer Sweden I read about how a hospital is saving money by having introduced a system that informs the personnel how much procedures and surgeries etc cost, so they're saving a few hundred SEK on tests. Then I notice in the background on a photo a billboard where they have their organizational chart posted. So I see they have like 3 bosses and 1 head doctor for about 12 personnel. Now there I see some saving potential. I bet they thought they were ineffective so they fired 3 nurses so they could hire another "boss" to get things better organized. Geeze. You read daily about people dying because the doctor misdiagnosed and missed that the patient had cancer, so obviously taking too many tests isn't the problem.

Reminds me of the movie hot shots, where the jinxed guy crashes but lives and he is fine until he arrives perfectly well at the hospital. What could go wrong, he says, and then they cut to his funeral.

Cables

I successfully repaired my audio cables once again so I could play some Medieval II: Total War, but there is some static disturbance now or something from time to time, so I'll probably need to open them up again and isolate them better. Sometimes you just have to love dogs!

My mouse also keeps dying during play and it needs to reboot; don't know if it is full of dirt or if the USB port can't handle the power drain... But I cleaned it today, so will see if that solves things.

Tomorrow I and my group have a presentation in a information system management class, on clusters and the Karlskrona cluster in perticular. Exciting... But Porter's article on clusters was pretty good, so that comes recommended.

Monday

Today I had an interview with a recruitment company. I think it went pretty well, even though I was a bit nervous. It was nice weather today in Lund, so we could conduct the interview outside.

I'm still quite sad about my cat. We've had a nice little funeral though.

Now I'll need to repair the audio cables again since our dogs chewed on them again (!), then I might play some Medieval: Total War before or program some C# stuff. Wonder which one to start with.

In memory of Zorba

My beautiful cat Zorba has passed away. I found her on the road having suffered a most unfair end.

I love you Zorba and you'll always be in my heart. I'll miss you so much! I wish you would've staid a bit longer. Sleep well, my precious.

A special request

My friend wanted me to mention him on here and say how great he is... but I'm a bit biased, so I wont! But you can check out his blog at http://arkansas-kendo.blogspot.com and form your own opinion.

Dangerous roads

Its raining and freezing today, so I got to slide a bit side to side with my car on the road today. Exciting. Speaking of exciting, I finally got around to doing the oldest exam I hadn't got around to doing yet, in economics. It felt like it went pretty well, so I'm hoping for that. Next in line are a couple of business administration exams. Perhaps not the most exciting subjects, but at least it's some math and solving math is always fun.

Blizzard and the perils of modern commuting

Today I witnessed a definate weakness in commuting as a blizzard engulfed the region. They say it was the worst blizzard in 30 years. So as my girlfriend struggled to find a cab to get to work since all the trains and public transportation were cancelled I thought that this problem must be quite modern, since all those who live close to work had no problems getting there, while us that have to commute did. So if you want a day off when the blizzard comes, make sure your job is far, far away.

Hannibal Rising

I and my girlfriend had a little outing today and we went to see Hannibal Rising. It was pretty good actually. I was worried for a while that it would end up to be an escalation of the gore in Hannibal, but it was a relief they sort of went back to basics. Just like they did in Batman begins.

Birthday

So I turned 25 the other day, on the 19th. It was a pretty good birthday; my family came by and my girlfriend had made us turkey. It was yummy. I also got a few nice presents, including a nice jacket from my g/f.

I handed in a take home exam on the 18th and found out that I got into yet another business law class, so I'm finally at original goal. When I first started studying my idea was to take business law so I could take the IT-law class as a complement to my primary System developer education. So if all else fails, at least I came thus far.

Also started a class on distributed systems, so I'll be taking .Net and C#. Later part of the class will cover J2EE, so bound to be very interesting.

A roleplaying dilemma

Since I last wrote we've had two Call of Cthulhu sessions and in the last one something dawned upon me. Recently the story has taken a much more action-oriented turn and I'm basically left to watch how my character has less and less impact on matters. The physical die-hard characters are eating up more and more of the momentum, to the point where my character is like one of those healer NPCs you bring out to heal the heroes after the combat.

Obviously I was displeased about this turn of events since CoC is supposed to favor characters with mental and social abilities, not vice versa. Even cops and soldiers in the game are very limited in their ability to pick combat oriented skills. After bringing this up to the keeper he promised some reforms however, so I hope it'll balance it out more. I like action as much as the next guy, but there should be something for us non-brutes too.

This provoked me to see a pattern however that I for some reason have just dismissed as seperate incidients previously, maybe because I have been the storyteller for ages. I don't know if I myself have fallen to the issue I am about to describe, but I like to think I havn't as much since my bias for social and mental characters hopefully play out to the players' benefit when I storytell.

When I play however I've noticed that mental and socially oriented characters are very much disadvantaged when compared to physical characters. My hypothesis regarding this is that most storytellers leave mental challenges and social events to the roleplaying ability of the players, so the players themselves are more on trial than the actual character they are supposed to be portraying. Probably because storytellers find it dull to resolve such situations with a roll; letting the player solve a puzzle with an intelligence roll or convince someone with the persuasion roll. But then out comes the action and then all of a sudden, everything is judged by the skills of your character and the dice. So player with a combat-oriented physical character benefits both from his character's skills but also from his own intelligence, wit and charisma since these things are rarely checked. Simply stated he can use what he deducts out of character since a storyteller wont ask him to roll his intelligence to see if his character actually grasped the clue presented.

Sure, you probably can't balance it as much as it is possible in computer roleplaying games, but maybe at least a step in the right direction can be taken. Perhaps this is just a local problem to my group. I recall one time though where a storyteller actually rolled my character's intelligence to see if he remebered something vital, that I as a player would forget, but my character probably wouldn't have. That is about what I am asking for. That the social and mental checks perhaps doesn't give instant success in every instance, but at least provides some good aid or insight as opposed to not being used at all by the storyteller.

Cthulhu at last!

Yesterday my friend called and announced a session for today! At last... I knew their resolve not to play would weaken!

The new year

The new year celebration passed without too much problems; worst problem being that there wasn't any good music on the music channels.

We enjoyed some good dinner and drink, then watched some tv before the launch. Then the launching of the fireworks commenced, which was a pretty short launch. The launch program has suffered severe budget cuts this year.

I saw some of the end of Dr. Strangelove. Hilarious. Also watched a show called After Dark which was hilarous as well.

On a sadder note my parket fine appeal was dismissed by the local police, so now my option is to appeal it to court. I double checked my law book and I should be right, but I am probably missing something. The police didn't quite motivate why they dismissed it, just that my grounds were not enough. As a result I'm left hanging a bit in what regard they aren't enough. If they would've just pointed me to the paragraph that says I am wrong it would be easier for me.

Now I'm trying to see though if my appeal has any merit to establish if it is worth taking further.

I talked to my Call of Cthulhu storyteller yesterday, but he avoided saying anything about that we were suppoed to play during the Holidays and he didn't say anything about when we were going to play instead. Maybe he considers it such great an evil that if he doesn't talk about it maybe it will just go away!