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Finishing the StarCraft II campaign

I have finished the StarCraft II campaign today. In Normal mode... Yes, I know, I should have done it in Hard mode, but I've been at it for over a year in Hard mode, and was making very little progress (ok, it had mostly to do with the fact that I was stuck, and had stopped trying)... so I tried again in Normal mode, and there I make regular progress and finished it eventually.

StarCraft II is fun, but I haven't tried the competitive games yet: the fact that they're played at Faster speed tells me that I will not do well in ladder games :-( It's a bit too quick for my fingers.

But it's fun to complete the campaign scenarios & play some cooperative games against the A.I.

And now, it seems that the next expansion StarCraft II - Heart of the swarm is on its way... of course, it will come out after Diablo III which will come out on May 15th!

P.S. So many version 2, version 3, or version 10 games these days... need a few fresh version 1 concepts! (heck, even Diablo 1 was a reheated rogue/moria clone :-)

P.P.S. 2 days off coming up, but lots of work to do regardless. Let's get that schmilblick moving :-)

/misc | Posted at 00:28 | permanent link

The Avengers

We went to see the movie The Avengers this morning.

Wow.

A truly fun movie: 143 minutes of high energy entertainment.

Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, brought together by Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. to fight the bad guys. It's over the top comic-book style... a great success! We enjoyed it tremendously.

If you've ever liked superhero comic books, I recommend that you see this movie.

P.S. As ever, my favorite Avenger is Iron Man. The whole gang is fun... reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons in my youth.

P.P.S. It's unusual that an American movie is released in Europe before it is in North America... not sure why the studios (or rather the distributors) chose to do so this time.

/misc | Posted at 23:57 | permanent link

Almost one month without a blog entry

Well, it has been almost a month to the day since my last blog entry. Lots of work at the office, with long days (waking up around 03:00 on a occasion) have been keeping me very busy.

Things have been moving forward with my microserver and my ZFS experimentation. I have also dug up Starcraft 2, which is interesting (and somewhat frustrating at Faster speed).

More later.

/misc | Posted at 12:27 | permanent link

Blogging on a leap day

So... 2012 is an Olympic year. It is a leap year. 2012 is divisible by 4, but not by 100 -- unless it was divisible by 400 (which explains why Y2k was a leap year). So there you go, I can blog on a February 29th.

Don't forget to check your watches today... all of the ones with simple algorithms for computing the number of days in each month will probably get it wrong. Of course, you should be OK if you are wearing a German Junghans radio-controlled watch that synchronizes nightly with an atomic clock signal in Europe, Japan, or North America (see more here)... or if you are running ntp software on your machine (see more here). Funniest thing about ntp is when Tony and I installed a GPS antenna on top of the building in London to get a time signal for our global ntp servers -- we had some fun explaining why we needed a GPS receiver on a building :-)

Always synchronize your computer clocks with ntp... there's no reason not too.

Oh, and since there still time... just check out the 10000-year clock here and here.

Update: woah... check this out: a major outage of Azure apparently caused by a leap year calculation problem! This is impressive: as an industry, we've been struggling with date/time problems for 50 years or so, and we're still making leap-year or summer-time-change mistakes in 2012. Sheeeeesh!

/misc | Posted at 00:51 | permanent link

Jean Dujardin, The Artist, an Oscar...

So... it has come to this.

/misc | Posted at 21:06 | permanent link

4 wins in a row for the Montreal Canadiens

I listened to the hockey game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs last night on ''internet radio''.

Montreal won 5-0 which gives them a 4-games winning streak (haven't seen too many of these this season!). NHL hockey is fun, but it's always particularly fun when Montreal beats Toronto or Boston :-) (Now, of course, these guys probably feel particularly smug when they beat the Canadiens, but I'm not going to worry about that :-)

/misc | Posted at 03:14 | permanent link

Watching the superbowl on TV

It's nice to be able to watch Superbowl XLVI on TV, right here in Paris. The TNT channel W9 is showing the game direct from Indianapolis. It's a bit late (actually, it was already tomorrow here in Paris, as the game started :-) but it's quite nice to watch!

2nd quarter's almost over, and the NY Giants have been dominating the game from the start... but the score is only 9-3: the Patriots still have a chance if they get their act together.

...it is cold in Paris (-5 Celcius), so it's nice to watch the game under a warm blanket... I may drift to sleep during the halftime show though: my alarm clock is set for 04:40 in the morning.

Update 1: 10-9 for the Patriots at the end of the 2nd quarter. Hey, game's not over! Not the time to fall alseep yet!
Update 2: good, enjoyable, halftime show by Madonna! An impressive performer who knows how to put on a show.
Update 3: 17-15 Patriots at the end of the 3rd quarter. The Giants have been leaving too many points on the field: it's going to be tough for them. Good game so far... let's see if the 4th quarter keeps me awake :-)
Final update: Giants win 21-17. What a game. Off to sleep now.

/misc | Posted at 01:37 | permanent link

Listening to music

I still purchase music CDs and DVDs -- I guess that makes me somewhat of a dinosaur. I do listen to music online (through Spotify) which allows me to listen to a whole bunch of tunes that I do not have at home but fondly remember from the '80s, the '70s, or even earlier. I also rent movies in iTunes to watch on my iMac or my PC... however, on iTunes, I only use prepaid cards: I don't like leaving my credit card number for recurring purchases... especially since I find that Visa and MasterCard will agree to a recurring credit card charge even if the credit card expiry date has passed. It used to be that you would need to submit your credit card info again, once it has expired, but no longer: they'll just charge you anyway. The first time this hit me was with Apple's MobileMe service: I had let my credit card lag beyond expiration, since I did not intend to renew for one more year, but they still charged my card. Annoying to say the least: clearly not a implementation of the Principle of least astonishment. :-(

Anyway, this being said, when watching movie content, I should ideally set up a Mac Mini or some sort of Apple TV in the living room so that I can watch rented movies (i.e. downloaded content) in the comfort of the living room. Haven't done that yet.
Something on the To Do list, I guess, but kind of low priority.

/misc | Posted at 23:33 | permanent link

Listening to Montreal Canadiens' hockey abroad

All native Montrealers have hockey in their blood. When living away from home, you can listen to the games on internet radio, either in French on fm98.5 at http://www.985fm.ca/webradio/ or in English on Team990 at http://www.tsn.ca/Montreal/listen/.

This is a real lifeline when one feels too far from home... of course, having maple syrup in the house also helps ;-)

/misc | Posted at 02:25 | permanent link