Slaxxor

I feel like blogging again!

Now what to write about…

I could write short stories on a blog… People might steal them if anyone reads them though, so that’s a downside.  Might be worth it.  Just to have something to do.

Just got back from lunch… could blog about Buffalo Wild Wings =/

Nah.  Later.

So I’m sitting here in my US History class staring at the blue and grey theme I’m using right now, and I’m not liking it.  I’ve been looking for a new theme for the site for a few weeks, but haven’t found anything that I liked.  I need a theme with widget support that’s dark.  Those are my only real requirements.  I don’t like the white/light themes because when you’re in a dark room and you pull them up, you are instantly blinded.  C’est la vie.  I found one that looked kinda like the new one Max put up on MaximeRousseau.com, with the buttons that light up on mouseover, but it didn’t really feel right.  Anyway, the point of this diatribe is that I’d like your input on how this blog should look.  Anyone reading this, I would love to hear suggestions about a type of theme, a specific theme, anything I could do to improve the viewing experience.   Sites you could visit to browse themes include
www.Themes.Wordpress.net
www.WpThemesFree.com
www.WpThemeSpot.com

 among others.  If I get at least 2 comments I’ll be happy.  I know someone is bound to read this eventually, so if you do, please, do the right thing.  Leave a comment.

I bought the Orange Box about three weeks ago, and now that I’ve had plenty of time to play with it, I think it’s time for a review. The Orange Box as an overall package really is the best deal I’ve ever seen in a game package. It’s not at all over-hyped. I could see a pack of games of this quality selling for 49.95 maybe a year or two years after it came out, not on the first day. Any one of the included games would be worth $50 to me, with the possible exception of Portal, which is quite short, but a gem nonetheless. For reference, the Orange Box includes Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. If you already have HL2 and/or E1 on your account, they will become available as a gift, which you can give to anyone you like with a Steam account.

Portal: $20 by itself on Steam, or $50 in the Orange Box - **4.5 Stars**

I hadn’t read much about Portal when I bought the Orange Box, but it looked interesting, so it was the second thing I played, after Team Fortress 2. It’s an amazingly well-done first person puzzle game, and is one of the most novel and entertaining games I’ve ever played. You play as an android who is participating in a testing program run by a company called Aperture Science. You are given a gun that shoots portals. The gun (after the first few levels, where you gain upgrades) can shoot 2 simultaneous portals, one blue and one orange. When you walk through one, you come out the other. In order to complete the puzzles, you’ll have to do a combination of walking through portals to access otherwise unreachable areas, jumping through portals (your momentum is unaffected, so if you fall at high speed into a portal on the floor, you can launch yourself out of a linked portal on the wall with great speed), throwing objects through portals, etc. The puzzles are challenging and rewarding, but none are so hard as to be uncompleteable. Throughout the game you are guided by a computerized voice, called GlaDOS. She (yes, she’s a she) helps you learn the ropes and guide you through the tests, and is one of my favorite parts of the game. Some of her comments are so utterly hilarious that I was forced to stop in the middle of the puzzle I was working on and just laugh and pound my desk. I don’t want to give anything away regarding the game’s resolution, but I’ll just say this: watch the credits. The credits feature a song, and the song makes them the BEST credits ever seen in the gaming community, and make the credits an immaculate ending for what I feel is a flawless game. The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is because the game took me less than two hours to complete. It has some replay value due to the entertaining narration and Advanced Maps and Challenges unlockable upon completion, but I was starving for more puzzles when I beat the game. From what I’ve heard, the game was really a test by Valve of the portal gun, which may be used in future games, possibly even a future Half Life game. The possibilities are endless. In addition, if you’re feeling adventurous, there is a fairly simple method that allows you to play the maps from Half Life 2 with the portal gun. I’ll post the link when I get home (at school right now) or it can be found easily on Google. Team Fortress 2: $30 by itself on Steam, or $50 in OB - **5 Stars**

TF2 is really the only reason I bought the Orange Box at all. I enjoyed HL2, but I never was obsessed with it enough to play through all of Episode 1. However, when Valve announced that HL2:E2 would include TF2, there was really no decision. The first videos of Team Fortress captivated me, and now that TF2 is finally (finally, finally, finally) here, it’s completely worth the wait. The graphics are highly stylized, almost cartoonish, but instead of being a fault (some people have criticized the game for its cartoonish style), this enhances the game’s feel and experience. The designers of TF2 stated that because all shooters are destined to be unrealistic in some aspect, instead of trying to make up for it with hyperrealistic graphics, they would exaggerate in the other direction. The physics in the game are also unreal, but insanely fun, featuring Soldiers and Demomen launching themselves into the air using explosions and double-jumping scouts. The combination of style and physics make this game a perfect blend, and the end result is a game that is fun to play and, at times, hilarious. I think that this game is more similar in gameplay to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory than Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, it’s quasi-sequel, is, due to its smaller map size, more emphasized team work, and pure fun to play. Quake Wars is great, but its gameplay is much more like the Battlefield games, with the much larger maps and vehicles. These large sizes can lead to people just rushing to vehicles and trying to play vigilante and kill the whole team themselves. In Team Fortress, Medics team up with Heavies and decimate the enemies, demomen and engineers help each other defend objectives, etc. Teamwork is essential to victory, thanks to extremely well-designed classes and maps. There’s even a few custom maps popping up, and custom-map-dedicated servers. In summary, buy this game: it’s the best multiplayer shooter of the year, and more than likely, the decade.

Regarding HL2:E2, I haven’t actually played all the way through it yet, due to being busy with my “life” and TF2, but when I finish it, I’ll post a review.

Also, there’s a great Flash version of Portal at http://www.portal.wecreatestuff.com. I highly recommend it if you want to see the concept of Portal before shelling out the cash.

I finally did it.  I made my first instructable.  It was very easy, took me about 10 minutes to do.  Hope you enjoy it!  It’s simple but visually pleasing, in my opinion.  That’s all for now

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-create-an-amazing-Enemy-Territory-Quake-Wa/

I finally got around to picking up my reserved copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and it is truly stunning. And I haven’t even played the game yet. I’ll get to that in a second. The packaging is very nice looking, and has a nice heft to it. It’s a thick cardboard shell with a slide-out flip case that holds the game installer DVD, the 10 Collector’s Edition trading cards, a keyboard map, the manual, and the Bonus DVD. Don’t let the fact that it’s cardboard and not metal talk you out of buying this, however. The 10 cards added to the 2 that came with the preorder are now taped on my wall encircling the poster that came with the preorder, as well as a PC Gamer cover I taped up there too. It’s a nice little shrine if I do say so myself. ***PICTURES*** I have the pictures on my Flickr, please take a look. It’s awesome. The Collector’s Edition as well as the Regular Edition include an “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Desktop Map Guide.” This desktop map guide is a neat idea. It’s basically a flipbook that sits on your desktop and shows you an overhead photo (simulated satellite shot) of each map included in the game, with starting spawns, primary objectives, an explanation of what the attacking team must do to win, and finally what class you need to be to complete a given objective. It’ll be a great help when I play the maps for the first time, as I won’t have to waste my time stumbling around and getting run over while looking for the objectives. Plus it just looks damn cool.

The reason I haven’t got to play yet is because my reserved name is being very finicky. The issue is detailed here (post on the Enemy Territory Community Forums) but what it boils down to is they screwed up somehow and “There is a problem with your gametag, it is basically stuck in the database. This issue should be correctable, but we will need a little extra time to get it fixed (we will be contacting the appropriate people asap). We will let you know when this problem has been resolved and you can Activate your pre-order name.” That’s the reply I got on my Activision Technical support ticket. From what I’ve read on the QW Forums, they should fix it within the next day, and I’m hoping sometime tonight so I get to try the game. My friend reserved his name about three weeks ago and his processed without trouble, so I’m guessing that between then and when I reserved mine (June 6, 2007) their servers crashed or they misplaced all their data or something… Point is, I preordered the game specifically so I’d be able to get my game immediately and play under my reserved name (SupremeBeing). Although I did wait two days to actually buy the game since its October 2nd release due to my busy schedule, I should’ve been playing it within minutes after installing it. I’m very dissatisfied with Activision’s conduct of the preorder, mainly because the preorder only requires them to do one thing, and that is to keep track of what name I reserved and then give it to me later. They sent the email to me containing a confirmation link to click when I purchased the retail edition of the game, and when I clicked it, instead of seamlessly letting me take possession of my phenomenal name, it gives me an error saying I have the wrong code or wrong activation code or something like that. D- guys, try harder next time.

I will, of course, update you when I get a chance to play some of the other maps included in the retail edition, but for now, I’m waiting for Activision to get their act together. Fun fun fun.

Thanks for reading though

UPDATE: I submitted a ticket on Activision’s technical support site at about 4:00 that afternoon, and the problem was resolved by the time I got home the next day.  I’ve been enjoying the extreme awesomeness of Quake Wars since then.

This is insane. I haven’t updated Chellberg.Wordpress.com in a week. My last update stated that it was moving here. I’ve submitted Slaxxor.com to all the major search engines, and its content is the same or newer than Chellberg.Wordpress.com, and yet Chellberg.Wordpress.com got like a hundred times more traffic than Slaxxor.com. I don’t know if it’s a bug in the stats plugin or what, but Slaxxor has registered 15 total hits in the last five days and Chellberg.Wordpress.com has registered close to 50. If this remains the case after a few more days, I might find a different use for Slaxxor.com and keep my blog at Wordpress.

Wordpress.com evidently does a great job promoting their blogs, since my Wordpress is consistently higher in Google search results than Slaxxor even though the posts are identicle. Just to clarify, I use Wordpress software on Slaxxor.com as well. I like having my own domain, mainly because I really like the name and because I can upload my own plugins and themes, something you can’t do on Wordpress.com. I’m in a dilemma, I guess. Traffic vs. Control. Epic battle, no? I like having traffic, I really do, so I may just have to keep it here and make Slaxxor.com more of a public blog, with multiple submitters and editors. That might improve traffic over there too. Or I could set up a php page for Slaxxors (see What is a Slaxxor?) with forums and stuff… Who knows. Anybody got any suggestions? Please?

Just to maintain the test, I’m going to delete the “We’re Moving” post from my Wordpress and update it with my latest posts to see if it really is kicking Slaxxor’s ass.

Okay, so the reason I haven’t posted anything new recently is that my computer has basically screwed me over.  I woke up on Saturday morning and decided to plug in one of my spare hard drives to my computer.  This didn’t go so well.  I plugged in the 40gb drive and turned the PC on.  Bios detected nothing, and also my DVD rom had vanished.  I unplugged the HDD, and I eventually figured out that the DVD drive’s IDE cable had come out…on Sunday evening.  Lol… Sunday morning, I turned on my computer, logged in at the login screen (of Windows, unfortunately), and BOOM.  Windows logs me out as soon as I caught a glimpse of my desktop.  I tried logging in to the guest account too, but the same thing happened.  I researched the problem on a different computer, and came to the conclusion that one of my antispyware programs had removed a vital windows file because some piece of adware or spyware renamed it.  This caused the login/logout loop.  The solution was to copy over a new copy of the file from the Windows recovery console.  Only problem was, I hadn’t figured out my IDE cable issue on the DVD drive yet, so I thought I was locked out entirely.  I spent like four hours trying to get my computer’s BIOS to let me boot from my usb drive and stick a new copy of the file into the system32 folder, but it was to no avail.  Eventually I rechecked all the cables in the computer and discovered the unplugged IDE cable, and fixed it.  I tried the solution that was posted in multiple forums, to recopy the .exe into the system32 folder.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.  At this point, I decided to repair my Windows installation in a desperate attempt to get into my computer.  One problem.  It didn’t work.  I repaired the Windows installation, and then when it went to restart the computer to complete setup, my display shut off as soon as I saw the Windows setup screen.  My monitor went to sleep, its little blue light flashing on and off, mocking me.  My thoughts now turned to file preservation/recovery.  I tried Hiren’s BootCD, which by the way is an amazing tool for PC repair, but so far I haven’t been able to access the harddrive, as the file managers seem only to be able to read my floppy drive, the cd-rom, and the 50mb drive it mounts in the memory to operate.  Pretty unhelpful.  I tried resizing my main Windows partition and creating a new one, and then installing a fresh copy of Windows there, but I either had the same problem or it booted the wrong partition.  Who knows.  This brings you up to the present problem, what data I should sacrifice if it is indeed unrecoverable.  There is a slight chance that if I didn’t format my main partition but overwrote the copy of Windows, I could use a file recovery tool to undelete my old My Documents folder, but it’d be quite risky.  Anyway.  That’s my epic saga/chronicle of computer mistakes.  Thanks for reading.

In case you haven’t heard, the greatest thing since Google is Google Docs. It basically sticks Microsoft Word inside your browser, letting you access all of your documents, spreadsheets, and just recently, slide show presentations, all from anywhere with internet access. It’s a fantastic service, allowing multiple people to collaborate on one document with real time updates as they edit the document. I’ve been using it for homework, writing my various attempts at stories, and most successfully so far, my journal. I’ve never had success keeping a journal until Google Docs came along. Now I’m writing in it nightly, and haven’t missed a day in two weeks (since I started). Anyway, on to the project at hand.

To demonstrate the ease-of-use and utility of Google Docs, I’m going to show you step-by-step how to create a spreadsheet and graph to track your vehicle’s fuel economy (gas milage, for those of you with IQs below the room temperature).

Step 1. Create a Google Docs account.
If you don’t already have a Google account, first slap yourself for a few minutes and rethink your life, and then go make one. It’s simple, fast, and the most useful account you’ll ever sign up for on the web.

Step 2. Create a New Spreadsheet.
From the Google homepage, click the “more” button in the top left corner of the screen. From the pull down menu that will appear, click on Documents. This will bring you to the Google Docs control panel. Next, click the New button and select spreadsheet. A new spreadsheet will now appear as a new tab, unless you have IE6 or older, in which case, slap yourself for a few minutes, rethink your life, and get Firefox. Congratulations, you just made your first Google Spreadsheet.

Step 3. Name your spreadsheet and prepare it for data entry.
Here’s the fun part. First step, title your spreadsheet by clicking once in the upper left hand corner where it currently says “Unsaved Spreadsheet”. I’d recommend naming it [Your Car] Fuel Economy or Gas Mileage, but it’s completely up to you. Once you’ve done that, click into square A1. Type into this box the word “Miles”. Next, enter the word “Gallons” into box B1. If the word don’t fit entirely at first, simply click and drag the side of the column to expand it as needed. Enter the word “Date” into box C1. Finally, enter “MPG” or “Mileage” into box D1. If you’ve followed me correctly so far, your spreadsheet should look like mine.

Step 4. Collect and Enter Data
This part may take some time if you don’t keep track of your mileage to some extent already. Here’s what you do, if you don’t already. The next time you get gas, reset your trip odometer. Note: for this method to work, you have to fill your tank completely. Next time you fill your tank, write down or remember exactly how much gas it took to completely refil my tank. For my example, the last time I bought gas I had driven 320 miles and it took 14.9 gallons of gas to fill up my tank. Now, enter this date into the spreadsheet. I would write 320 under Miles, 14.9 under gallons, and the current date under date. Your spreadsheet should look like mine but with different numbers.

Step 5. Insert a math function into the spreadsheet
In order for the spreadsheet to be able to calculate the gas mileage, you have to tell it where your data is located. To do this, first select the Forumulas tab at the top of the screen. Next, click cell D4 and press the “more>>” button on the far right side of the screen, next to Sum, Product, etc. This will open up a small window. Scroll down in the Math category until you see QUOTIENT. Click on Quotient. This will insert an incomplete formula into the cell you selected (under MPG). It will read as follows:
=QUOTIENT(numerator, denominator) To complete this formula, plug in A2 for the numerator and B2 for the denominator. Your forumula should now read =QUOTIENT(A2,B2) Next, press escape. If you set up the formula correctly, a number should appear in box D4. My number is 21. If you get a reasonable number, you’ve successfully set up this part of your spreadsheet. Note: you do not have to repeat this step each time you enter data. Just put your mouse over the corner of cell D4 until your cursor becomes a + (plus) sign, and drag downward to apply the QUOTIENT calculation to all the cells below it.

Step 6. Create your graph.
Here’s where your spreadsheet starts to look cool. Go back to the Edit tab at the top of your screen. Now, select cells C1-D5, or however much data you have entered. Be sure to include the headers. For explanatory purposes, I’m going to add a few more lines of date. Click the Insert Graph button that looks like a pie chart (it’s on the left side of the edit bar). This will bring up a window that looks like this.

To make our graph look right, we need to change a few of these options. First, click the “Lines” button where it says What Type? For the subtype, I recommend choosing the second option from the left (lines with dots). Check the box that says “Use Column C as labels”, as well as the one that says “Use row 1 as labels”. If you like, you can label the horizontal axis Date and the verticle axis MPG. Now that all that’s finished, click Save Chart. Congratulations, you’re finished! If you followed my directions exactly (and I didn’t mess up) your chart should now look like this.

This spreadsheet will let you monitor your car’s fuel efficiency, as well as your driving habits. For example, if you drive consistently faster from one filling to another, you will see a dip in your car’s fuel economy. This will allow you to adjust your driving habits for minimum fuel consumption.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this tutorial/instructable was helpful to you. Tell your friends!

This is the video I was talking about 2 days ago, only this time, embedded! Ha ha!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6ySRRqe1ks]

Today was the Junior/Senior leadership retreat. I expected it to be kinda stupid, no offense to anybody, but I’ve been to some lame teamwork/leadership type activities before. Luckily, this retreat was not stupid at all, on the contrary, it was extraordinary. The speaker who pretty much led the entire event was Ted Wiese. He was funny, smart, entertaining, and poignant. Our first activity was Ted Says. Not Simon Says, oh no, because Simon is dead, and his name’s Ted. It went something like this: he started the match, a few people sat down, and he said “Since I’m such a nice guy, I’m gonna let you guys stand back up, and have a second chance. Why don’t we give them a nice round of applause!” Probably half the people still standing clapped (not me!) and they all had to sit down! It was about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Me being me, I started laughing so hard that it wasn’t long before I got out, but I enjoyed the rest of the activity so much that by the time it was over, my face was literally soaked with tears (yeah, I cry when I laugh. So what.) He then had us do an activity where we all got cards and had to find our match among the rest of the group. My card read “Grace” so I naturally was looking for “Will and”. I found my match on the first try, and we did the little getting-to-know-you activity. All in all, it was a neat way to break up the preexisting social groups. After that, (and these may be in the wrong order, let me know and I’ll correct it) he did an activity in which 3 volunteers (all girls) were blindfolded and asked to eat a “live Canadian newt”, which he described as a delicacy from Canada that must be eaten live. The “newts” were in reality gummy worms soaked in water, but evidently the tactile effect was realistic enough that it felt real. The first girl screamed a little bit, but quickly accepted the dangling “newt”. The second girl screamed a lot more, and jerked her hand away several times, but she too took it. The third girl was already freaking out even before she touched the wet worm, and when it touched her hand, she basically jerked back and refused to take it (after two more attempts…). The point of this activity was that fear stops you from taking action. Although some of this sounds pretty corny, and I’m apt to take anything that’s serious as corny, I felt that Ted effectively taught leadership through these activities, something that many speakers, many of them school administrators, have failed to do in the past. The third activity was an odd one, involving all of us forming a circle and sitting down simultaneously on the knees of the person behind us. It was kinda fun, but in the 85 degree heat, it got kinda sweaty. The point of that activity was that you have to rely on others, and that one person can ruin it for everyone. Evidently, at other schools, one person would fall, causing the whole circle to fall. Not us though! The final activity before lunch was another trust-type activity where we had to lead and be led around the outdoor pavilion-type area by our partners (from the getting-to-know-you activity) with our eyes closed. It made me pretty nervous, but my partner did a great job, and I only ran into one thing. It was interesting, spending about 6 minutes walking around without seeing anything. Unfortunately, without my partner’s guidance, I would’ve most likely drowned in the creek or been hit by a car. Long story short, I’d make a terrible blind person. Lunch was catered by Edward’s Catering (delicious, but the exact same food we had at the marching band competition they catered, chicken and fries) and after people started to get done a DJ started playing dance music. I’m obviously not a fan (see post below) but it was entertaining to watch probably 70 people dance these group dances. I couldn’t learn that if I tried… I have that kind of affinity for music, but not for dance. Afterwards, we did an activity kinda like musical chairs, in which he would yell a number and we had two seconds to assemble ourselves into groups of that number. I got out pretty quickly due to some bad luck, but some people were really tenacious, and hung on for about twenty minutes before he stopped them. The point of that one was that it feels good to be in a group and bad to be excluded/kicked out. The final activity was one involving 4 stages of leadership/membership, where the first was an egg (you had to kneel down and act like an egg “imaneggimaneggimanegg”), the second was a chicken (wings flapping) the third was, oddly, a dinosaur, and the third was a leader (who just had to act cool). The way you progressed was by winning 2/3 matches of paper, rock, scissors. If you won, you advanced to the next stage, and if you lost, you regressed all the way to egg. Unless, that is, you were a leader. It was apparent (to some) from the start that once someone became a “leader” they should just let people beat them, since leaders couldn’t regress. The first time when he stopped us, there were a few eggs, some chickens, and some dinosaurs. After he let everyone else in on the strategy, there were only leaders at the end. I think. He summed everything up, and then the school administrators gave some short speeches, and we had ice cream and a raffle for lanyards and T-shirts and other things. On top of all that fun, I got to go home at 2:35 instead of 2:50! It was a great retreat, and Ted was an awesome speaker. Kudos. Geez, who says “kudos”… What’s wrong with me? (don’t answer that.)

EDIT: Thanks for that comment.  I forgot two things!  *smacks forehead*  There was a hoola hoop demonstration where like 6 people held a hoola hoop on top of their outstretched arms and fingers and tried to lower it to the ground.  The rules were that their fingers had to keep constant contact with the hoola hoop, and their fingers and arms had to stay parallel to the ground.  When he let go of the hoola hoop, it slowly rose up into the air.   This occurred both times he let go.  This was evidently due to the fact that in order to maintain constant contact with the hoop, each person had to apply a slight amount of upward pressure.  All 6 people doing this created a domino-like effect where the hula hoop just flew up into the air.  The point was that what you do affects everybody else?  Maybe?  This was yesterday, so I forgot of course…  The second thing I forgot was the Family Feud thing where we split up into groups of six and basically played Family Feud, guessing the most popular responses to questions, including most popular cartoon dog, food with a nationality in the title, etc.  This one was about team work I think.  Lol.
Thanks for the comment