Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

My recent drubbings at the hands of more experienced COD4 players got me thinking about the age old time versus skill debate. MMORPGs tend to fall into the "time" camp with progression dependent on hours (days!) played while shooters tend to be more "skill" dependent with keen reflexes and sharp tactics required to win. Call of Duty 4 is bit of a hybrid. Players level up over time unlocking new guns and perks. However the game is well balanced and an upgrade in one area will incur a penalty somewhere else. Experienced players don't really get more powerful kit they just have a greater choice of ways to play. Better commentators than I have mulled over this issue so I won't attempt to rehash all the usual arguments. Michael Sng offers a good analysis in his Arson and Arsenic blog . All I will say is that for me the distinction doesn't make much difference. Ultimately time based or skill based both boil down to commitment. How committed am I to putting i...

To celebrate the fixing of my PC I fired up Call of Duty 4 again for a bit of online multiplayer fragging. I was pleased to see that there are still plenty of servers and players around. I was vaguely aware that some patches had been released for the game but being more used to MMORPGs I assumed that my game was automatically being kept up to date. A quick google search however determined that the latest version of the game is 1.5 while I was still playing 1.1. It was a little surprising that I that could still play with an out of date client but I set about patching it straight away. This turned out to be quite a nuisance to do. The game has no built in patcher so I had to find the patches on the net by myself. Then I found that the the latest patch (1.5 ) is an incremental one which requires that the game already be patched to 1.4. Finally I was frustrated to discover that neither Infinity Ward (the developer) nor Activision (the publisher) host all the required patches. Some furth...

A cloud has (touch wood) been lifted from my digital existence. For the last few weeks my computer has been acting up. It started crashing randomly. The events ranged from programs crashing unexpectedly to the desktop all the way to forced reboots. I have been tearing my hair out trying to get to the bottom of it but the intermittent nature of the fault made it almost impossible to track down. On several occasions hope rose after a change appeared to grant several days of uninterrupted computing only to be dragged down once more by the hieroglypic vomit of Microsoft's blue screen of death. I wasted many hours in failed debugging attempts focussed on the most obvious suspects: a recently changed graphics card, a new power supply and a modified chipset heatsink. I diligently performed anti virus scans, chkdsk scans and memtest scans all to no avail. Nothing I did gave me conclusive evidence of the cause of the problem and the intermittent crashes always returned. To tell the truth t...

How do you manufacture polyethylene ? Which German King was the founder of the Hapsburg Dynasty ? How do you solve a quartic equation ? Twenty years ago it might have taken me several hours in a good library to answer those questions. Today I can do in a few minutes sitting at any computer in the world. The internet gives me access to a vast archive of information but the interface between me and most of that information is a search tool. The better that search tool is the more readily I can find the information I want and in a very real sense the smarter I become. Therefore I must thank Tipa for pointing out a free Beta of SearchMe a new visual search engine. It shows you pictures of websites responding to your search rather than text descriptions. I don't know if it will replace Google but it is fun to play with and is particularly handy for finding pages you have seen before but can't quite remember the address. I can't get it to work with Firefox tabs yet but it is...

Wow. Just Wow. Last post I told you about the pirate adventure that Bill Harris constructed for his six year old son. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and I couldn't wait to read how it all turned out. As expected Bill's piece about the day of the adventure makes great reading but even I was surprised at just how great it is. What I wasn't expecting was that the core of this piece is not about the wild excitement of a six year old who thinks he has just dug up buried treasure. The real heart of the piece is Bill's painfully honest description of the moment when he realises that in creating the greatest adventure of his kid's life he has also set the youngster up for ridicule at the hands of the cynical old men of first grade. It is a terrific piece of writing and I am not sure if I have ever read a better insight into what it is like to be a man and a father.

A mysterious package arrives at the door containing a tattered piece of parchment that looks like a map to buried pirate treasure. If you haven't been following the story of Bill Harris's elaborate plot to create a real life adventure for his 6.7 year old son then get yourself over to Dubious Quality now and read all about it while the story is still hot. Bill has laid his plans with the loving attention to detail of a true nerd. It is all coming to a climax in a few hours (the morning after a "full moon"...) and I can't wait to hear how it turns out. Bill at this moment I almost wish you were my dad.

My NWN2 "main" is a level 10 wizard. He was a bit squishy for the first couple of levels but soon gathered a collection of powerful area of effect spells. At normal difficulty setting the game became too easy because damage does not break crowd control. My wizard could wade into a bunch of mobs, stun them all and fry them all with few aoe spells. I upped the difficulty to hardcore rules. This allows mobs to hit a bit harder but the most significant change is that area of effect spells now damage friend as well as foe. This friendly fire aoe certainly adds a new element of strategy to the game. Position and timing become critically important if you want to avoid incinerating yourself and your team. Fallen comrades are resurrected after each battle so you could play a sacrificial strategy stunning and killing friends and foes alike. That strategy doesn't sit well with a "good" character alignment though and it is risky. Mobs often break loose from crowd control a...