Sometimes I ramble here, sometimes I ramble at my blog on TV.com. It depends mostly on what I'm talkin' 'bout, and I refuse to say "Willis" to complete the cliche.

...

Dammit.

• 18Dec 05

  I might love Deus Ex too much

  I just made this post on the Deus Ex message board. Let me share it with you:
  
  I never really thought about how much I enjoy Deus Ex. I didn't think of myself as a raving fanatic until I stopped and thought about something I did yesterday. Lemme 'splain.
  
  See, a while ago someone asked me somewhat jokingly if Shifter would run on the Mac version of Deus Ex. As with 80%+ of the world I do not own a Mac system, so I responded that I honestly had no clue, but theoretically it should work. But that got me thinking. Theoretically there could be some guy out there right now who desperately wants to play Shifter on his Mac version of Deus Ex, but can't because he's not sure if it'll run. So I did something yesterday....
  
  I bought Deus Ex for Mac off of eBay, and I'm bidding on a used G4, all for the sole purpose of playing and modding Deus Ex for Mac. No other reason, no real need, just some curiosity as to how Deus Ex for Mac is.
  
  I disgust myself, but also intrigue myself at the same time. I'm like my own violent car wreck. Go me.
  
  That is all....
  • Posted Dec 18, 2005 11:15 pm GMT
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• 16Dec 05

  The best part about finals is that they only happen once each semester

  Y'know, you'd think I'd learn. You'd think that after 5 years of college I'd have learned by now that finals are crazy-go-nuts. You'd also think that I would have expected my last two semesters to be a lot more intense than the previous semesters. Ahh, but I didn't, and my mod suffered.
  
  But that's all behind me now, at least until next month. Now I have time. Time, I tell you! Time to code and play games for periods longer than an hour. Time enough to actually remind myself why I decided to major in Computer Science in the first place. (For those of you who don't know, that's because I like to mod and code games) Okay, well technically I have one more final on Monday, but that's Monday and tomorrow isn't Monday. (For those of you playing the home game)
  
  So it's back to modding Shifter. (That's for Deus Ex) Perhaps I can finally get around to doing something that should have taken me all of 10 minutes and place a few new weapons I added.
  
  In other news, I bought F.E.A.R. almost a month ago and I haven't even played it yet. See what I meant about school being crazy?
  • Posted Dec 16, 2005 9:00 pm GMT
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• 14Jul 05

  I'm here, and now I'm impressed

  So, here I am. I don't mean that in some sort of crazy existential(sp?) sense, like "is this glass of water really here," or "is my cheeseburger ever going to be here?" I mean this in the sense that now, finally, I've entered the wonderful world of Bloggity. Blogosophy. Blogness? And in such a curious place, too. It is rather fitting, though; so much of my life focuses around TV. Entertainment in general.
  
  Anyway, before I start rambling endlessly about what I came here to rant about, let me preface this by telling you a tiny bit about me: I'm a computer geek. As a computer geek *and* TV fan I've discovered a wonderful world in which the two combine, wherin TV shows can be recorded and ported to various handy computer formats. With the amount of recordable media I have, size is rarely an issue. But sometimes things need to be small and highly efficient, like a Japanese bathroom.
  
  Enter what has prompted me to rant: I just discovered to my surprise that Real, the company widely known for going completely out of their way to make their format as un-convertable as possible, and who have oft-times run afoul of the law (or lawyers anyway) have made available -- for free -- a version of their RealProducer software which meets my needs almost to a T.
  
  Now don't get me wrong, I am by no means a Real lapdog. (I'd be lapcat in any case, but that's another conversation entirely) I've long despised Real for years, but I have been forced to grudgingly admit that their codecs are pretty decent. When space and size become an issue, very few codecs perform as well. (Though I can think of some that perform better) So imagine my surprise when the company performs an about-face of their previous "pay us for everything BWA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAA" tactic and gives us, the end users, something we can actually f%$#ing use.
  
  Now don't get me wrong, it's still kind of limited. You can't resize your video, which is a significant problem. On the other hand, the software does support the AviSynth format, though not officially. For those of you who don't know, AviSynth is just a way of pre-rendering something as a fake AVI file; it's nothing more than a text file and a dll or two. But it lets me resize the video as I see fit, and does an outstanding job of it too.
  
  So why does this matter to me so much: because it's another *free* piece of software that works very well and protects my starving-college-student bank account from harm. It's not as useful as, say, DIKO, but it gets the job done. I like being able to encode to as many formats as I possibly can. Now that list of formats got bigger.
  • Posted Jul 14, 2005 1:45 am GMT
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