Rating Pending

I just went to Best Buy at Santana Row (in San Jose) to pick up a game I bought online.  I didn’t expect it to be a learning experience, but it was.  I learned that I should not shop at Best Buy.

Just a few numbers from the experience:

• Time of arrival at Best Buy - 8:30 pm Sunday, November 23rd
• Amount of money spent at Best Buy – $8.65
• Time spent browsing in the store – 20 minutes
• Number of people in line when I got in the “Store Pick up” line – 2 (not counting myself)
• Number of people who cut in line while I was waiting - 1
• Number of people at the counter serving people - 1
• Time it took for me to get to the front of the line – 30 minutes
• Time it took for me to give the girl my name, and for her to find my item – approximately 2 minutes
• Time of departure from Best Buy – 9:25 pm

I waited in line for 30 minutes so I could get my $8 game, and I will not be going back.  Best Buy got a little bit of money from me and alienated me as a customer.

Compare that to the fact that I spent about $100 on Steam this week during which I was visiting with my family for Thanksgiving.  I didn’t have to wait in line, got what I as a customer consider some great deals, and was left feeling very happy.

My experience with Amazon this week was much like Steam.  Great buys and I’m happy about the whole experience.

Man I love the internet.

After, oh, idono, two years?  I’ve finally updated my noodle site.  I had been wanting to do this for some time.  It’s generally the same, but I adjusted the style a bit (it had been bothering me) and, more importantly, I’ve fleshed out the FAQ section more.  I’ve collected all the questions I’ve gotten so far on the FAQ, and I’ll try to keep it updated as time goes on.

Check out the newness here: http://www.lukerymarz.com/noodles/

I have a 2004 Mazda 3, and the battery was finally done after six and a half years.  I learned some new things about “newer” cars (my last car was an ’89 pickup) and I thought I’d share.  This may only apply to Mazda 3, since in the forum-reading I’ve done it sounds like people are a little surprised at the way the Mazda 3 behaves.  So here’s what I’ve learned.

When you disconnect the battery in your car, all the electronics reset.  That makes sense.  What you may not know is that the computer in your car also resets itself.  In the case of the Mazda 3, this means the computer has to relearn how much fuel to give the engine during idle.  So for a few days your Mazda 3 may rev between 500-1200 RPM when idling at stop lights.  It’s a strange experience, but after three days my car is back to normal.

I’ve heard (although it didn’t seem to help me) you can try assist the car in learning the idle by starting it cold and letting it warm up without touching the gas. I attempted this and it didn’t seem to affect things – time only solved my problem, but your experience may be different.

Additionally, the computer in the Mazda 3 does need to be updated from time to time, and I believe you can take it to your dealer to have the computer “flashed”, as they call it.  All they are doing is updating the firmware on the computer to the newer version from Mazda.  This may also help.

So if you’ve changed the battery in your Mazda 3 and you’re worried about the idle, wait a few days.  There may not be a need to start taking things apart, replacing air filters, and cleaning throttle bodies (as I’ve seen recommended).

This is more of a test, but I just enabled automatic twitter posts (using http://yourls.org/) when I post to my blog.  Lets see if this things works!

Alright, it’s not a  true roguelike in that it’s not turn based and you can continue after death if you want, but there’s no need to split hairs.  Transcendence is really fun.  And it’s free.

I might describe it as “Diablo in space”.  You’ve got a randomly generated “Dungeon”, where it’s a series of solar systems connected by star gates.  You pick one of three ship classes, and you fly around, kill stuff, collect the loot, and upgrade your ship.  There’s even a bit of a storyline and a pretty well fleshed out universe.

The graphics might be considered a little simple, but if you can get over that there’s a really compelling game underneath.  Something that’s well worth the zero dollars you have to pay for it.  I highly recommend it.

I just finished playing Final Fantasy XIII.  I say “finished playing” because I “finished” it two weeks before.  I haven’t enjoyed the extra content in a Final Fantasy since Final Fantasy VII.  I think it helped a lot that I essentially skipped Final Fantasy XII.  I played about 4 hours, felt overwhelmed, and quit.

I have a single tip for anyone who is getting tired of JRPGs, but would still like to get through Final Fantasy XIII:

Read the Datalog

I think there is a lot of storyline lost in translation.  Reading through the story recaps every once in a while will get you back on track.  Also note that the character biographies change as the story progresses.  It’ll put an exclamation mark next to the new stuff, though.  I essentially made it my goal to make all the exclamation marks go away.  It’s felt like storyline upkeep to me, almost.

Anyways, just wanted to mention that.  I approve of the game’s responsiveness, too.  All the previous Final Fantasies had too many black screens while things loaded.  Apparently all I needed was a menu that loaded in a reasonable amount of time…

Photos here.  After five years, my good ol’ A8N-SLI Premium has been retired. It had itself a long run, but it’s now been replaced with the following wolf in sheep’s clothing:

Specs are as follows:

• Lian Li A05NB case
• Asus P6X58D
• Intel i7 930
• 6GB 1600MHz RAM at 7-7-7-24
• ATI Radeon 5770 1GB
• 80GB Intel X25-M SSD
• 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green
• Sata Lightscribe DVD burner (I didn’t know about Lightscribe until now… neat stuff)
• Front panel card-reader/fan controller/temp monitor
• Seasonic X-650 modular power supply
• Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler (It’s huge, but it DOES fit inside the Lian Li A05NB)

I’ve posted a gallery of all the parts and the build process here.

I HIGHLY recommend the Lian Li case.  It’s a joy to work with, it’s compact, and it’s light.  It’s also interesting because the power supply goes in the front, and the airflow is back to front.  This is good because the fresh air hits your CPU first, rather than last.

The Seasonic power supply was also a very nice surprise.  It’s my first modular supply, so it has that going for it, but it’s also very quiet.  I should mention also that the packaging is something worth experiencing.  Totally fancy.

And of course, having an SSD make for some really fast startup times (for Windows and applications in general).

I have been playing a lot of Rogue clones lately. Since the original Rogue is all ASCII and keyboard controlled, it’s a bit hard to just jump in and play. I thought it would be useful to put together a list of the Roguelike games I played as I gradually learned to play.  If you’ve never played Rogue before, and you’d like to try it, this list should be a good starting point.  It will start you with full mouse control and work all the way towards full keyboard control.

Info About Rogue

• Rogue is a dungeon crawler game.  Your general goal is to collect gold and items and defeat monsters as you descend the floors of the Dungeon of Doom.  The ultimate goal was originally to find the Amulet of Yendor.
• Rogue was created in the early 80s.  Check out the wiki if you want to read about it.
• Rogue is turn-based, which is usually synonymous with slow in the gaming world.  With Rogue, though, once you are used to the keyboard commands it can play really fast.
• There are a ton of Rogue clones, termed “roguelike” games.  I built a timeline of the more famous ones here.
• You get one life.  When you die, you have to start from the beginning.
• Most roguelikes are free, and a lot of them are open source.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was looking through the wiki for Rogue the other day and though it would be interesting to see a timeline of the major Rogue clones. So I made a little chart as an exercise (and now I know what I need to play). I’ll let it speak for itself:

A Brief Timeline of Rogue Clones

So I finally sat down with Rogue, the game from the early 80s that was the inspiration for many of the Dungeon Crawlers I’ve played over the years. It started with Desktop Dungeons, which I spotted on my TIGSource RSS feed. It’s easy to play, but tricky to master, and it has a surprising amount of depth. Most of the Rogue aficionados would probably scoff at its use of graphics, but it makes it easier for noobs like me.

So I played that for a bit (I’m still working through the different classes, actually), and then I thought “Maybe Rogue is on the iPhone…”. Of course it is! In fact, there’s a free version called simply “Rogue” by Gandreas Software that’s pretty good, and Rogue Touch was $0.99 a few days ago so I picked that up, too. So far I’ve played Rogue Touch more, but I think it’s because I have some “I bought it so I better play it” guilt. The free Rogue has the classic ascii graphics, an interesting glyph-based (you draw commands on a 9×9 grid) interface, and it’s a bit faster to play. Rogue Touch seems a little bit easy compared to the Gandreas version, but maybe it’s just me.

Anyways, now that I’m finally playing it, I can understand why it was so hot when it came out. I’m also starting to understand why some people prefer the ascii version. It’s a lot faster, like vi compared to Word. I’ll probably gravitate in that direction once I get a better feel for it.