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Sharbok
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JP

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February 13

Anna the sniper...

I finally got Anna to give Left 4 Dead a go last night... her stats at the end of the first section... 45 kills, 35 headshots...
That's a low kill count but that kill/headshot ratio is impressive.

She said it's because she didn't know how to look around so just strafed everything at head height but I reckon she's actually been practicing each day while I'm at work.
 
Anyway I think she enjoyed it... which is good because it means we can have ourselves our first ever St. Valentines Day Zombie Massacre.... yeeehaaaw...
 
JP
 
February 02

Damn You Iron Maiden...

I managed to polish off Rock Band's Solo Guitar Tour on Sunday night (on Hard).  It wasn't actually that bad until the last venue and then it had some pretty punishing solos.

I'm now  trying to get my head around the drums on medium mode but I'm finding them fairly punishing.  My hands are fine(ish) but I'm not sure on how to best use the kick pedal... my problem is the front of my calf keeps cramping.  It's no big deal on songs that don't use it as much but on some of the more intense performances it's a pretty big problem.  Any tips?  I think I may be sitting too low.

Pretty much done with Fallout 3 at the moment.  Great game and I'm replaying it with my evil character - Dick the Destroyer.  He's a mean, slightly crazy, pink bearded wierdo, with a thing for big guns, and small children.
The Operation Anchorage add on was interesting.  It was pretty big but it felt like Fallout 3 pretending to be Call of Duty... which it isn't.  It was enjoyable but I wish they'd made it more role-playey, less run and gun.  The Gauss Rifle you get at the end is pretty amazing though.

I'll probably go Back to Dead Space once I put Fallout 3 away.  Nicholas needs to learn how to survive an alien infestation armed only with a plasma cutter... and I'm just the man to teach him.

January 16

The Grass is Always Greener

So my line on databases was always... yeah maybe Oracle is more performant and scalable but SQL Servers tools are more user friendly.
 
Now that I'm back using SQL Server 2000 I'm not so sure anymore.
 
Moving to a new company with a large SQL Server 2000 code base it's handy to be able to find your way around the database easily.  One of the things Query Analyzer can't seem to do is detect dependencies on objects but this is all stored in the system tables and can be extracted easily like so...
 
--
-- Get a list of objects that a particular sproc, view, etc is dependent on.
--
SELECT DISTINCT o1.name AS Item, o2.name AS DependentOn
FROM sysdepends d
JOIN sysobjects o1 ON d.id = o1.id
JOIN sysobjects o2 ON d.depid = o2.id
WHERE o1.name = /* Add your queried item here. */;
 
--
-- Given an object name find all items that are dependent on it.
--
SELECT DISTINCT o1.name as Item, o2.name as DependentOn
FROM sysdepends d
JOIN sysobjects o1 ON d.id = o1.id
JOIN sysobjects o2 ON d.depid = o2.id
WHERE o2.name = /*Add your queried item here. */;
 
In fact you can do all kinds of fun things in the system tables...
Of course this is old news if you're using SQL Server 2005 as there are sprocs provided to do all this stuff for you (only better).
 

Harder, Faster, Stronger

So we were in Greece recently visiting Anna's parents for New Year.  While we were there Anna managed to score some rather saucy adult films from a close relative who I've been warned I'm not allowed to name... or else.
 
Now I reckon that the one of the main secrets to the internets success is the vast amounts of porn.  Because of the internet porn is everywhere... and I think most people at one point or another have sought it out.  But I reckon porn is a pretty solitary passtime... I mean it has a pretty specific purpose right?
 
So I'm a bit unsure about the whole watching porn with the wife thing... it seems a little awkward.
I mean we watched Wanted the other day and occasionally commented on it during the film...
 
JP: 'Bullets can't do that you know... they go straight'
Anna: 'Really?'
JP: 'Yeah but they do spin in the air, it helps stabalise them... helps them go where you want them to go... they do it with rifling in the barrel, hence the word rifle.'
Anna: God JP you're so interesting... take me now...
 
I'm not sure I could have the same calibur of conversation while watching say... Butt Pirates of the Carribean... I'm not sure what would or wouldn't be appropriate to say...
 
JP: She looks as though she's really enjoying that... but I think it looks quite painful...
Anna: Yeah but I like her hair...
JP: Which hair?
Anna: On her head...
JP: Oh yeah that's nice...
 
I dunno... anybody ever watch porn with their wife?... how did it turn out?...
 
JP
 
January 15

Maybeeee... you'll think of meeee...

So I've been playing Fallout 3 recently.
 
Because it was released during the great games rush of winter '08 it faced heavy competition for my time from the likes of Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Mirrors Edge, Left 4 Dead, and Dead Space... and to be brutal all of those games are far more accessible than Fallout 3.
 
That isn't a bad thing... it just means I had to clear my plate a little bit before I really spent some time on it.
 
The premise is that you escape your sheltered vault (where survivors of the nuclear war have been sheltering for the last 200 years) and go looking for your dad to find out why he ran off in the first place.  Once you leave the vault you're cast into the ruins of Washington DC where you can pretty much do what you want.
 
Fallout 3 feels huge... I mean it is huge, not as big as say Oblivion, but it's dense.  The DC ruins has loads of places to visit and the attention to detail in most of them is excellent... you can visit some places and piece together a bit of a story of what happened there just by spending a bit of time looking at your surroundings.
 
The combat works really well too... and above all else it feels like a Fallout game.
 
All in all Fallout 3 is great.
 
I had my doubts about it at first... the whole game looks like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on a city... which is kind of the point but it's depressing on the eyes.  I was unsure about the combat system, and the character animations can be pretty terrible.
But overall it doesn't matter... you lose yourself in it and just stop noticing the little things.
 
I have two critisisms of the game really... and don't let them put you off.
 
Firstly, considering how many interior locations there are, it would have been great to have had more styles of interior.  There are only about 4 or 5 'types' of interior and they all start to look a bit samey after a while.
 
Secondly, because there are so many locations and most have their own little back story... it would have been nice to have an incentive or some sort of unique reward to visit them all.  There are some collectables in some of them but most often you fight your way through some bombed out house and come out with the same kind of stuff that you went in with.  It's very rare that you come out with something really useful that you can't easily get elsewhere.

So is anybody else playing it... if so what do you think?  Were you good, or did you run around the wasteland been a bit of a dick.  I'm been pretty much a good guy at the moment but I think at some point I'm going to create a character called SuperTwat and wander the wastelands throwing hand grenades at people.
 
I'm also going to kill Three Dawg he winds me up.
 
Peace out...