March 2009

Garriottwatching 2009
Submitted Thursday, March 26, 2009 - 6:45:16 AM by Klaitu

What's Richard Garriott up to?

I think he's still on a high from his space flight, but here's a video:



Nobody Move
Submitted Thursday, March 26, 2009 - 2:39:30 AM by Klaitu

My server may have just exploded due to bandwidth consumption. It's hard to say for sure since one measuring stick says I am over cap, and the other measuring stick says I am under cap.

So, if the site disappears, don't worry, it will be back in April.

If not, then please continue enjoying shenanigans!



The Essential Battlestar Galactica
Submitted Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - 6:42:43 AM by Klaitu

Now that the series has concluded, I've had several questions about the finale. So, I decided to write up a "just the essentials" list of Galactica episodes. That way, you can get the story of Battlestar Galactica without wading through some of the lame episodes!

Season 1:

The Miniseries
Episode 1: 33
Episode 2: Water
Episode 3: Bastille Day
Episode 10: The Hand of God
Episode 11: Colonial Day
Episode 12/13: Kobol's Last Gleaming

Season 2:
Episode 1: Scattered
Episode 2: Valley of Darkness
Episode 6/7: Home
Episode 8: Final Cut
Episode 9: Flight of the Phoenix
Episode 10/11/12: Pegasus/Resurrection Ship
Episode 17: The Captain's Hand
Special Miniseries: Battlestar Galactica: Razor
Episode 19/20: Lay Down Your Burdens

Season 3:
Episode 3/4: Exodus
Episode 10: The Passage
Episode 11/12: The Eye of Jupiter/Rapture
Episode 18: The Son Also Rises
Episode 19/20: Crossroads

Season 4:
Episode 1/2: He That Believeth in Me/Six of One
Episode 3: The Ties that Bind
Episode 6: Faith
Episode 7: Guess What's Coming to Dinner
Episode 8: Sine Qua Non
Episode 9: The Hub
Episode 10: Revelations
Episode 11: Sometimes a Great Notion
Episode 13/14: The Oath/Blood on the Scales
Episode 16: Deadlock
Episode 17: Someone to Watch Over Me
Episode 19/20/21: Daybreak (Series Finale)

If you watch Battlestar Galactica in this sequence, you'll hit all the important storylines while skipping independent stories, or stories that get repeated by another episode later on. You'll save yourself about 35 hours of viewing in the process.



When Reporters Get Bored...
Submitted Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - 1:13:06 AM by Klaitu

They interview hobbits.





Battlestar Predictions Results
Submitted Friday, March 20, 2009 - 10:26:25 PM by Klaitu

You might remember I made some Battlestar predictions 3 or 4 episodes ago. Well, the final episode has just aired, so it's time to put my predictions to the test!

1. Starbuck is a Human-Cylon hybrid baby

I got it wrong.

They decided to keep Starbuck's origin a secret, never explaining exactly what she is, or how she got to Earth. In fact, the only thing they really reveal about her is that she's not quite ordinary.

2. The Galactica itself will not survive

I got this prediction half-right. The Galactica does not survive. I thought it would go out in a blaze of glory fighting the Cylons, but it didn't.

3. They will settle on a planet

I got it right. They do settle on a planet, and they do call it Earth.

4. Laura Roslin will die

I got it right. This one was not hard to predict because from the very first of the series, it's always been known that "A dying leader will lead them to the promised land"

5. Anders, Starbuck, and Hera..

Are all plugged into some kind of cylon internet. The same thing that the hybrids are plugged into. The cylon internet is probably run by "god" or the cylon god, whatever his name is.


This one isn't answered in the series, so I could still be right or wrong.

6. The "Shocker" ending

At the end, probably the very end, it will be revealed that whatever planet the people land on turns out to be Earth, like our Real Life earth, and that the story of Battlestar Galactica happened either in prehistory, or 6000 years ago. They may even go so far as to having "history repeat itself" by having someone on "our real earth" create the "first" cylon.


I wasn't right in every detail, but I got pretty close. Instead of 6000 years, it's 150000 years. Suprisingly, they didn't go with the defeatist pessimist route that the cycle is unbreakable. It was remarkably upbeat for Ronald D Moore.



Resident Evil 5
Submitted Saturday, March 14, 2009 - 1:38:47 PM by Klaitu

Yeah, you probably heard it was coming out. It's one of those big hits with all the media attention, you know, on account of the franchise.

Ever since the demo for the game was released, the "gaming community" has been freaking out about the controls, and how they're pretty much identical in every way to the mega-hit Resident Evil 4, so I was curious as to how the game would play out.

Personally, I'm a fan of the gameplay in RE5. A lot of people found it frustrating, but I like that you have to make your shots count. There's no strafing with the trigger button held down in Resident Evil. There's no duckjumping to try to avoid bullets or any of that nonsense. There's actual strategy involved.

That being said, there is a downside to doing an identical copy of RE4's gameplay.. everything is a bit dated. RE5 sports a cover system sort of like gears of war or Uncharted, but it doesn't work quite right.

The other big deal that everyone was curious about with the AI. I've read a few reports of people having problems with the AI companion, but other than one particular part where she just wouldn't keep up with me while running, I found the AI to be quite competant. In fact, the AI's aim is deadly. I gave her a sniper rifle, and she headshotted pretty much everything within sight. All you gotta do is make sure she has enough bullets. I don't know what problem people had with the AI, but so far as AI goes, I thought it was pretty well done. Obviously not as good as a human, but then again.. what is?

The rest of RE5 is pretty much what you'd expect from a Resident Evil game. Zombies. Monsters. Mutating creatures that gush fluids. Same ridiculous over-the-top boss fights.. I mean.. who doesn't want to shoot a rocket at people in a volcano?

There's even a crippletron!

Anyways, if you're one of those FPS people who are into.. fragging and spawn points and clans and whatnot, you probably won't like RE5. If you liked RE4 and feel like you want to play another 9 hours of that, then RE5 is perfect for you.

Overall Score: 8 of 10



Wonder Woman
Submitted Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - 4:32:17 AM by Klaitu

This is the 2009 animated Wonder Woman movie starring Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion. (It seems like Nathan Fillion is popping up everywhere I look these days)

The film depicts a version of the origin story of Wonder Woman. It's the same general version as depicted in the 80's TV series.

Steve Trevor is shot down over Paradise Island, the home of Wonder Woman and the Amazons. The latter have voluntarily confined themselves to the invisible island in order to get away from men, whom they assume are evil. The film is set in modern times.

There have been a plethora of origin stories for Wonder Woman, and like all DC characters, her powers are not well defined. The character gets reinvented over the years. You can add this to the list of reinventions.

The best way I can describe this film is "unsatisfying". Though I am a dude, I have always thought that Wonder Woman was a pretty cool character.. but in every incarnation, it seems that whoever is writing the character isn't sure what to do with her, other than to compare her to "normal" women, and have her bicker with Steve. The only character points to be resolved are that of the minor characters.

Maybe I was expecting too much out of an animated direct-to-dvd feature, but in the character development department, the film doesn't deliver.

Actually, the film does a lot of not delivering. The animation isn't particularly good. The story isn't particularly good. The music is nonexistant. The voice acting is adequate.

At any rate, also on Paradise island is Aries, the God of War.. quite literally. The olympic gods shackled him with some bands that suck his god powers, and the Amazons keep him locked up, guarded by the same Amazon woman for thousands of years.. and you know where this is going.

Meanwhile, Steve fights some.. evil fighter jets.. from where? I don't know. He's flying a modern plane that looks like a F-22, and he fights black jets that sort of look like Mirages. I don't know who the US could possibly be fighting over the caribbean who has mirage jets.

Anyways, Steve gets shot down and he crash lands his plane on Paradise Island. The Amazons, having no idea of flight technology (but still possessing an invisible jet.. go figure) are suprised at his arrival.

So, fast forwarding a bit.. Aries escapes, and Wonder Woman and Steve go after him, trying to stop him. Of course, they don't stop him until them power bands come off him and he gets his powers back.

Which leads to a giant confrontation in Washington DC.. perhaps the most ridiculous confrontation ever: minotaurs and wyverns staging a protest at the Lincoln memorial! Yeah, you heard me.

Where did Aries get Wyverns and Minotaurs? I don't know. How's he get them to congregate at the Lincoln Memorial without anyone noticing? I can't explain it.

More importantly, why does the US army just sit around allowing minotaurs and wyverns to roam free? I thought this is why I pay taxes! So that my country can be free of mythological creatures!

Oh, and another ridiculous thing. Aries supposedly gets his strength from the power of "the fear generated by war" but later, in true supervillain fashion, he gets horns and lightning powers and crap because the US government fires a nuclear missile at Paradise Island...

Now, what possible fear is there from a nuclear missile fired from the US to a place that doesn't know what nuclear missiles are? Especially when they won't even know it's coming until it gets there.. and yet instantly, Aries does his transformation thing.

Again, maybe I was expecting too much out of a Direct-to-DVD animated movie, but Justice League: New Frontier was pretty good, despite that whole lame bad guy thing.

Wonder Woman is more lame than that. It would probably be a good movie for like 8 year old girls.

Overall Score: 5 of 10



Castle
Submitted Monday, March 9, 2009 - 11:46:07 PM by Klaitu

What the crap is Castle? Well, I never heard of it before.. at least, not before today. You see, it's a TV program on ABC.. you know, the network that nobody watches.

However, it does star Nathan Fillion as the lead role, so I checked it out.

It's a cop drama where a tough female cop tries to solve murders, and Nathan Fillion tags along and annoys her by solving everything first.

Yeah, you saw it the first time when it was called "The Mentalist" but this one has Nathan Fillion, so that makes it better!

I don't know that the series is any good, but the pilot episode was pretty neat!



Good Advice
Submitted Monday, March 9, 2009 - 4:28:59 AM by Klaitu









Web 2.0
Submitted Monday, March 9, 2009 - 12:41:03 AM by Klaitu

I recently got a question from a family member who is, like most people, only involved in the fringes of technology. It seems my family finds me weird (go figure) and every time I go to a family gathering or see one of them I haven't seen in awhile, they always ask me "How is school going?" and "What is it you do again?".

Well, this time the question is "What makes Web 2.0 different than Web 1.0, and what does that mean?" I thought it was a pretty interesting question, though not exactly timely.. so I thought I would lay out what this Web 2.0 stuff is all about in non-technical terms.. not that any of my family actually reads Special K.

I could start with the history of the Internet, but I won't go that far. Suffice to say that the government invented the Internet for the military, but it grew to include universities, and eventually in the 1990's it exploded into what people think of today as "The Internet" or "The World Wide Web".

To understand Web 2.0, you have to understand the original. When the web first started out, it was a method for people to publish information, and other people to read it. For the most part, this process was one-way. In example: I make a website, and then you read that website. This is the era around 1995, when America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve all provided dialup internet access and e-mail over the internet.

In this era, websites were of a more simple design (because dialup is slow) and the internet wasn't as pervasive in society as today.. but then came the "dot com giants".

Giants like ebay and yahoo. People started using the internet to do things instead of just using the internet to send baby pictures back and forth, or read mandarin chicken recipes.

The internet just sort of.. progressed from there. There was a push to make things more "interactive". Message boards became popular in the late 1990s. Message boards are a sort of community e-mail where people can discuss things in a public forum. You post something, someone reads it and replies about it.. and a conversation happens.

Then there was the "dot com bust" which I won't explain in detail here, but it took down a lot of internet companies.. and then we started to hear about "Web 2.0".

So, what is Web 2.0 and how is it different? Here's the deal, web 2.0 is a design philosophy. It has nothing to do with different technologies. It's using the same technology in new ways to make things "integrated" and "more interactive than ever".

I'll use Youtube as an example. The part of youtube that most people recognize is that is is a place you can find videos of.. just about anything. That's the "web 1.0" part. Also on Youtube, you can post your own videos, write descriptions for them, and have other people comment on your videos. You can also comment on other people's videos, and rate them on how much you like them. The way you rate the videos influences how much advertising that video recieves, and the most popular videos get put on the front page of Youtube, and exposed to the most people.

Web 2.0 happens when the web allows people to collaborate as a community.

Amazon.com is another example. Sure, you can go to amazon and just buy something. That's the web 1.0 part, but you can also rate items that you own, and write reviews of items, which influence other people. When you buy something on Amazon, the computer enters that into a database, and then makes recommendations to other people based on what you bought...

For instance, if you bought and Orson Scott Card novel, Amazon could recommend to you a similar author such as Robert Heinlein because it knows that people who buy Orson Scott Card stuff also buy Heinlein stuff. It's the same way it knows that if you bought Spider Man 1, you might also want Spider Man 2 or Ironman. That's web 2.0.

Another thing that is web 2.0 is Facebook and Myspace. In web 1.0 we had geocities webpages which were complicated and difficult to understand for the basic user. They also weren't interactive.

Now you can share videos and pictures and music with tons of people, or comment on someone else's profile as easy as cake. That's web 2.0.

In recent years, Web 2.0 has achieved a sort of cult status.. no longer being relegated as a design philosophy, Web 2.0 is now a force of nature. Sites take the idea of Web 2.0 and take it to a ridiculous extreme.

There are sites that can take a text message from your phone, and then repeat it out to millions of people. There are sites which feature nothing but camera footage from a guy who has a webcam on his glasses. There are sites that are a sort of "web war" where you trick people into clicking on a link, and the link counts how many people you tricked into clicking on it.

At the end of the day, Web 2.0 is just a popular idea of how websites should be run. It is characterized by complicated webpages which are machine-generated. A web 2.0 page uses computers to aggregate data and control what each user sees based on what they have done in the past. web 2.0 pages often allow users to offer their opinions of other people's work. In general, web 2.0 pages make it easier for individuals in a community to contribute to the site.

Personally, I'm split on web 2.0, depending on how it's used. Amazon uses web 2.0 to an effective purpose, for example.. but most web 2.0 sites are designed to let boring, ordinary people express themselves and feel like their opinion matters, even though it actually doesn't matter any more than it did before the internet was invented.

As for the irony of that last paragraph appearing in what is essentially a blog post, I'll say this: I'm under no illusion that my opinion matters, or that any one really cares about it. I write Special K for my own purposes, and if other people want to come along for the ride, they're welcome to.



Reinventing It All
Submitted Sunday, March 8, 2009 - 11:50:06 PM by Klaitu

Have you ever noticed how people tend to reinvent things that are exactly the same as other things that were already invented?

Some of these things are obvious.. Remember when the iPhone came out? Now check the market for smart phones with touch-screen interfaces.

Then there's the case in video games. Grand Theft Auto 3 came out, and suddenly everyone and their dog has an open-world city game (Saint's Row, Mercenaries, That Simpsons game, Hulk, Superman, Spiderman, etc)

And I'm not including things like remakes.. Battlestar Galactics and Battlestar Galactica, or the Star Trek movie which is a remake of the original Star Trek TV show.

I noticed this earlier when I was doing a test for my Cisco Academy course. The chapter was about how businesses used leased lines to connect to switched telephone circuit networks. Basically, instead of having to run wires from one business campus to another, you can just use a provider's network.. a network that just happens to work exactly like the internet, except it's not the internet, it's a "provider network".. Sure, it works exactly the same way, but everything has a different name. They have entirely different protocols that do the same things as protocols you've heard of before, except they have a different name.

The book spent a lot of time trying to teach how things were done "in the old days". Imagine you have a business that consists of a headquarters and 5 branch offices. Apparently "in the old days" companies would pay to have special phone lines installed to go from one office to another.

The thing is, this is ridiculous, and I don't know why anyone would ever consider doing this when you can instead just go through the telephone company's line and achieve the exact same result.. even in the past.

Let me try a different analogy. Let's say you wanted to send e-mail to someone who lives across the country. You could pay someone to physically run a special phone line all the way across the country, or you could just plug your computer into the internet and do it that way. Why would anyone ever consider running a line that long?

Nowadays, everyone uses the not-stupid method of going through a providers network, which makes me wonder why I had to learn how the pathetic old system worked to begin with.. which makes me wonder, what's so great about a telephone network anyways? Am I supposed to be excited that telephones now work the same exact way the internet does?

Way to go Telephone people, you totally reinvented something that was already invented.



Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog
Submitted Sunday, March 8, 2009 - 10:58:08 PM by Klaitu

I caught this web series quite some time ago, but I never really got into it. The problem I have with web videos is that they are almost always in the most atrocious flash format, and despite being in "high quality" or "HD" they seldom are.. and more likely are in a tiny window on a white screen.

Dr. Horrible was such a webseries.

Recently, Dr. Horrible was released on DVD so that people who don't like to squint could see it.. and it made all the difference in the world.

Anyway, the afore mentioned Dr. Horrible wants to join the Evil League of Evil, but to do so he has to pass an initiation. his nemesis, Captain Hammer opposes him at every turn, and caught in the middle is Penny, a girl that Horrible met at the laundromat (who becomes Captain Hammers girlfriend).

Oh, did I mention that Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day were heavily involved with it? Liz Vassey is in it too.

It's cleverly done, and actually being able to see every detail of it brings out how clever it really is. If you haven't seen Dr. Horrible yet, you should check it out! Hulu has it for free.

Overall Score: 9 of 10



Not Quite Star Wars
Submitted Sunday, March 8, 2009 - 3:31:05 AM by Klaitu

The force is not strong with this one..






The Watchmen
Submitted Sunday, March 8, 2009 - 3:10:18 AM by Klaitu

Who watches the watchmen.. on saturday mornings before their parents wake up?