| | Subject: | Huh.... | | Time: | 07:20 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/confused.gif) confused |
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| | Here's a conundrum, how does a baby deer manage to get itself into a barn, through a closed stall door, with fresh grass still in it's mouth, and then promptly die in the far corner? You know what the odd thing is? There are no drag marks, no visible wounds other than what seems like a broken neck... so.. uhm... wtf?? | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment   |
| On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work. | | comments: 31 comments or Leave a comment |
| well first off.. Stormy, one of the horses at the stables, passed away on Sunday. So I attended a wake for him, it was sweet, over 20 people showed up to pay their respects to this horse. :) He was an old arab gelding, rescued from the auction block, he was rehomed, de-wormed, deloused, de-ticked, and was at the stables for 3 - 4 years. Granted I didn't know him for that long, but interacting with him, he definitely had a personality about him.
He was an awesome horse, he loved to be outside grazing, even though he had only 3 teeth because the rest had rotted out, so everytime he ate something it'd be 'squeak squeak squeak' of his gums together. He loved being groomed, and I mean, LOVED being groomed, and overall, he was a gentle soul that will be missed.
In the meantime, I am looking to transfer to Nanaimo, I just.. I don't want to live in Vancouver. I am tired of thecity bullshit, which is only going to get WORSE when the Olympics arrive, which will drive the cost of living up, and thusly increase the amount of homeless people on the street. I don't want to be a part of it. I want my place of solitude.
Vancouver Island seems to fit me, it's a slower pace, and... it just fits. There are lots of rural areas there, and I have met some wonderful friends that have been supportive and given me that little extra boost that I need. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Oh Valve you cheeky buggers, is there ANYTHING you can't do?
Okay, let's start from the basics, for those of you who don't know. Valve's Left 4 Dead is a tongue-in-cheek gesture towards all the thousands of cheap zombie B-movies that have ever sunk without a trace. But, mix in some memorable stereotype characters like Bill (The 'Nam veteran), Francis (The Bikerdude), Louis (The managerial BLAYK GUY :D ) and Zoey (The college chick who did a major in horror movies) and some of Valve's infallible teamwork game mechanics, where merrily charging off alone and acting like Rambo will get you eaten in a matter of seconds - and you've got a recipe for an awesome shooter. What really made L4D1 for me, is Valve's incredible attention to detail on the characters, the zombies, the weapons and the environment. Right down to the film grain filter over your character's vision, EVERYTHING in the game looked and felt like you were battling your way through the raging hordes of zombies and mutants in a cheesy 90s zombie movie. Most excellent!
It's no surprise that L4D1 won 'Game of the Year Award 2008', along with countless other medals and trophies. And from this tremendous success, appeared the unashamedly named Left 4 Dead 2.
Valve seem to have an odd habit of giving names with multiple numbers in them to their games ... (HalfLife 2 Episode 1 ... What, so like, HalfLife 2 the original? NO! DON'T BE STUPID! THAT'S SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! ._. )
Anyway, L4D2 is set in 'Middle America', just like the original was, but this new sequel has a more Southern feel to it. Playing the demo was a rewarding experience. Valve have kept to the classic formula of sticking together with your team-mates, concentrating fire on the bigger mutants and helping your friends out if they get knocked down. They have also added in some new items, weapons, and 'blunt object' melee weapons, to make close-quarter combat much more rewarding. I'm praying to whatever God will listen that there is a 'Guitar Heroes' achievement, where an entire campaign is completed using only electric guitar bludgeoning. There's also a cacophony of new zombies to excite the internet, my personal favourite being 'The Jockey'. A sort of hunched over goblin-thing that laughs like a hyena on crack, leaps onto survivor's heads and tries to steer them into the path of danger. I can't wait to play as that zombie on versus mode and steer some poor sod off the edge of a building. <3
As far as the whole 'zombies in daylight' thing goes, I couldn't help but thinking "So what?" I thought the whole premise of the game was to play off zombie movies. The majority of these happen at night, so why break the stereotype by having the game set in the day? Besides, Danny Boyle's '28 days later' did it first ... I think.
There's a few problems that Valve decided to leave in. Maybe they'll take them out of the main game, I'm just reviewing the demo, after all. My biggest bugbear with Left 4 Dead 1 was that players controlled by the computer AI had an uncanny ability to run out in front of human players who were shooting a stream of zombies running towards them. When the human players are armed with shotguns and the game is on advanced mode and the zombie hordes are coming thick and fast, this can lead to some pretty nasty friendly-fire incidents. You may be thinking "Well Scifer, maybe you should exercise a little gun-control then! :D " Butts to you. I've had lots of my other zombie-shooting friends say exactly the same thing. I'm not the only one having this problem. It's never slightly-to-the-right of where you're aiming or slightly-to-the-left, its' smack-dap DIRECTLY infront of you, completely eclipsing your firing line with barely any reaction time. This happened multiple times when playing with an AI player in L4D1, and I was dismayed to see that it happens in L4D2, just as frequently ...
Still, it does bring some relief to my heart that mankind is not yet advanced enough to create robotic supersoldiers, the like of the T1000 in Terminator yet. Even if computer game characters are not yet advanced enough to realise that erratically jumping out in front of knife-edge-tense humans armed with 12 gauge boomsticks is a BAD idea - ... that's good enough for me.
In terms of the setting, it seems a bit to flat to me, from a dirty greasy foreigner's point of view. I mean, don't get me wrong; I like the whole Southern twang' to the characters, and the music. Hell, I lol'd as soon as someone said the words 'redneck zombie clown' to me. But for this reviewer, having ALL the characters as Southern Americans kinda broke the line between simple stereotyping and localised racism. It'd be like me making stereotype characters out of Irish, Welsh and Scotsman. It's not 'serious' racism because all 3 stereotypes are white males, but there's enough difference between them to constitute highlighting the stereotypes to create memorable characters. Perhaps I just don't know enough about the different brands of Southern folk in the US, but for me, the characters of L4D2 just aren't as memorable as the chaps of the first game.
To me, L4D2 feels like a spinoff. A GOOD spinoff, with excellent gameplay just like its' predecessor, but a parody nonetheless. However, it has enough drive to be released as a standalone game, without L4D1, so in that respect, it's already done what most sequels can only dream of.
If Left 4 Dead 3 was flung into my lap, character design and all, I'd have it set somewhere a bit broader in terms of its' populace, with it still being obvious where in the world the apocalypse was happening, but never mentioning the exact name. Somewhere immensely crowded like Middle-China, or Middle-Europe. In a homage to the ending of the film 28 Weeks Later, Middle-France would be an excellent setting. A pug-ugly Liverpudlian football hooligan, a pale American tourist in a Hawaiian shirt, a long-haired pot-smoking backpacker from Amsterdam, and a female French fashion student who doesn't speak a word of English; sneaking through the Parisian suburbs, battering zombies with stale baguettes in an effort to get to a helicopter rescue from the top of the Eiffel Tower ... actually, that may be worthy of a movie-poster picture ... :3
"If things get nasty, pardon their French."
But on the whole, I really enjoyed the new zombie-filled goodness that the L4D2 demo had to offer. It didn't leave me for dead, only wanting more; which is exactly what a demo should do. And I know I wont be disappointed.
L4D2 gets 4 Golden Badger Eggs out of 5 from me.
It's not perfect, but that's only because of a few tiny problems that are easily resolved through time and development. Well done Valve, you've done it agai- HUNTER!! *BLAM* | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.
Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.
Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.
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Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.
Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(
Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.
( tech details )
status.livejournal.org will, of course be updated before and after the maintenance window. Or else marta will get mad at me. :D
bt | | comments: 52 comments or Leave a comment |
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Jiggilly!