Before I came to Japan I decided to write down the CD keys for my games into an encrypted file just in case I decided I wanted to play — namely for Starcraft and Diablo 2 — and then when I actually did get here a friend of mine and I decided to play some Starcraft for old time’s sake, but since I didn’t have the game CD with me, I simply downloaded the game online “illegally”, but used my own CD key to play. Risky and stupid, but from Blizz’s perspective, no loss really.

Just now, I went and created a Battle.Net account and started adding all my games to it. You can add any Blizz game you’ve bought simply by inputing the CD key for the game in question into a text box and the correct game will pop up and be permanently added to your BNet account. Not only, but you can now “download client” directly from the BNet site… so as in my case, I *wouldn’t* have had to bring my CD keys in a secure encrypted file, and I *wouldn’t* have had to illegally download the game from some torrent site, because all I’d need is already there, on my BNet account. Awesome move by Blizz there.

I also added my WoW accounts (note the pluralis — though in honesty, neither one of them is currently activated), which felt awesomely nice, because it is incredibly confusing to have two separate accounts for the same game. Now I just use my BNet creds to login to whichever it is I’m playing. Presuming I actually start playing again, some day.

I find myself thinking “so how many cool new things am I missing out on today, simply due to ignorance?” quite often these days. I don’t nearly spend as much time with the computer as I used to, and the time I spend I sit on “DND” on Pidgin studying kanjis about 99% of the time, but even when I was using the computer for more or less most of the day, I still had that feeling that I am missing out on cool things.

And thus, a meme. Make a post on your blog listing up to 5 sites or services that amuse you/intrigue you/help you the most at the moment. This list (at least for me) always changes, as I tend to discover new things, or grow bored with old ones.

Or as in the case with dictionary.com … I had enough of the god damn ads. It’s as if they added a new banner or “text-ad” once a month for the last year. I used their dictionary service very very satisfied for I can’t count how many years (from before my Skotos days), but now my faithful “di” keyword in Firefox went from dictionary.com over to dict.org, which is quite ad-free, thank-you-for-asking.

So my list of 5, backwards because I’m hip that way:

5. dict.org — a free dictionary, and by free I mean very free, as in free of ads and stuff

4. smart.fm — I have been lagging behind recently, because I’m nearing closure on my kanji studies and that’s taking up most of my spare time, but this is a cute site for hammering Japanese (or whatever language it is you wish to study) vocab into one’s brain.

3. gmail — boring, I know, but gmail is actually sort of new to me. I went with POP3 for the longest time, but when my move to Japan started drawing near, I realized that it was just stupidity not to stop with the POP.

2. VISA exchange rates page — call it a blessing, call it a curse, but at least it tells the truth. Most of the time*. Oh and yes, this is above gmail. That says something about my economic situation, I’d say.

1. Zero Punctuation — this guy makes my day. Totally. He reviews games (PC, console, etc) and as the title suggests, he speaks very very fast and very angrily, most of the time. You’ve gotta see it to understand. Even if you don’t know any of the games on the list, just check one out anyway.

Now your turn. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel all gooey about having started a meme, I’m asking you to do this because I’m honestly curious about what the people I know are entertaining themselves with that I have yet to discover. Call me a greedy bastard.

*) Once about a month ago I went there and saw that the yen had dropped like a rock in the ocean. It had happened overnight, and it was a matter of something like a 30% difference in “price” for me right there. So I scampered off and withdrew money, and when I got home, the amount withdrawn was not at all matching up with this new, glorious number. Turns out the Visa site screwed up somehow, because the day after it was all back to “normal”.

The midsummer weekend I ended up spending at my buddy’s place, playing GameCube games. I started out by wasting the Friday playing Resident Evil 4 which, in contrast to Eternal Darkness, pretty much sucked. A retarded story, the same old zombies, the same old dilemma (“oh no I don’t have any ammo…”). The only new part about it was the President’s daughter who followed you around. I accidentally stabbed her to death once, as I was trying to stab open a barrel (those barrels have stuff in ‘em, dude!)…

Then I went over to Eternal Darkness and ended up staying until I finished the game (with lots of hints from Kenneth). It’s a game based in the Lovecraft world, with the Ancients and all that. The main character is the granddaughter of an old lad who lived in an ancient mansion, who had been found dead as the game begins. Alex, the granddaughter, decides after two weeks that she’ll get to the bottom of it on her own, since the cops seem clueless, so she decides to explore the mansion and doing so, she finds the Tome of Eternal Darkness. As she reads on, the story unfolds, and you take on the roles of various people in various ages, starting with Pious Augustus in ancient Rome. Each character you play finds the Tome of Eternal Darkness, and thus “finds out” about all the things that happened up until that point. By doing so, each character gains the abilities that you have gained so far.

No game set in the Lovecraft world is complete without the aspect of insanity, and they really pulled that off awesomely in this game. You have “the usual” health and mana, and you also have sanity which “drops” as you encounter monsters or see/do things that affect the human mind. In the case of Alex, she gets more and more insane as she reads the Tome and the game story progresses. Luckily, you eventually get the ability to “recover” sanity using a magic spell.

As I played that game, I recalled hearing the Skotos people for Lovecraft Country talk about how Nintendo wanted to patent a game aspect for insanity. I’m pretty sure this is the game they were talking about, and as always when I hear things like that, I marvel at the stupidity of software patents. If it wasn’t for that, I’d definitely recommend this game to the Lovecraft guys, as it’s a huge source for inspiration, and made me want to jump in and start playing Lovecraft, for possibly the first time in my life (I’ve not been a fan, but I’m becoming one after this ).

Then again, I’m sadly outdated in terms of the latest-and-greatest in game design, having been a linux user for a decade, and more or less abandoned hope on games entirely. This game is 3-4 years old I think, but to me it was a really cool experience. But if you haven’t tried this one out and if you have a GameCube OR a Wii with a GameCube controller (they’re compatible), I suggest you do!

If you like YouTube and such, Democracy Player is totally awesome. Like a TiVo without the flaws and DRM and such. Total “coo” factor. It’s available for linux/mac/windows. If you haven’t tried it out, do so!

3 days late, but in light of Microsoft’s abrupt statement that they hold a bunch of patents which are breached by Linux, Sun’s CEO wrote a very nicely worded thing about it on his blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20070521

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/307digit_number.html

Oops. What did I set my encrypted password wallet to again…?

(Sorry for the “spam” btw — the mechanism for discovering changes hiccoughed when I switched servers so the 10-15 or so last entries were suddenly re-submitted to the globe.)

Yesterday I switched to DreamHost and today I am switching even more. (I didn’t realize I could have more than one domain on a single account — d’uh!) So, this blog shall perish for a little while as it is moved over to DreamHost. See you on the flip side!

I just bought a regular home phone earlier today. Bye Skype, it was(n’t) fun. I ended up using my cell phone 100% of the time in the end, because Skype gave me crapshit quality 99% of the time, and it was a major pain to keep the computer running just in case someone wanted to call. It was neat to have a US phone number, and if anybody wants to call me, I will have that number for awhile longer, so just lemme know and I’ll turn it on for you, but otherwise, I’m done with it all at least for now.

Once I move to Japan that might change. I might reenable my phone number and all that stuff, so people in Sweden can call me still, like mom.

So I tried it out. It works under linux, to my great surprise, and it doesn’t seem to take any performance drops. Aside from a few glitches (can’t go into “Video Options”, or the game locks up for example, but that’s what manually editing the config file is for ) it’s actually working flawlessly.

I totally don’t have time for it in reality, but it was fun giving it a short ride on a trial account. In case I do decide to start playing “for real” though, which realm(s) are people on?

Sysadmining has its downsides. But I’m back, and I’m bigger than a breadbox.

Two even.