May 2010 Archives

My coping mechanism for stress has been broken for a while now. This means that when I'm stressed out, I tend to ignore things and prefer to focus exclusively on the [probably misidentified] primary source of the stress - and my ability to focus is severely diminished. This results in a feedback loop where I get more stressed out because I'm not solving the problem. I'm also having major issues 'switching off' when I'm not working. This makes doing things in the evenings/weekends difficult and even if I take actually time off, I often end up constantly thinking about work and come back just as worn out as when I left. I don't want to complain about it too much though. It's all my fault. Basically, I'm broken at the moment and this was my punishment :)

I've got a new phone (Nokia N900) and spent a bit of time customising that. I have historically always had retro game ring tones on my phones (the last one was the Leisure Suit Larry theme - the jazz version from Larry 7). The N900 has a lot more customisation options, so I've gone with a Space Quest theme. The N900 has multiple desktops available, so I created a few seamless backgrounds. The one I ended up sticking with was an EGA background from Space Quest 2. It looked suitably retro enough. The VGA backgrounds generally looked more like low resolution/badly resampled backgrounds - although a couple did look pretty cool. For my ring tone, I recorded the theme from SQ3 as produced by the PCjr 3 voice track (I recorded a straight PC speaker version too, but I liked the bass line in the PCjr version better - it was less shrill and felt more ring-tone-y).

Here's a video I recorded of it (first time uploading to Youtube!). Apologies for the crap video quality, I was out of focus it seems and I don't have time to re-record it. I had to use my Nikon D90 as the Screencast recording software I have on the N900 doesn't record UI animation, which was the whole point of having it seamless.

I made it outside for a while on Sunday afternoon. Went for a walk around Douglas and took a couple of pictures with the N900. It was astonishingly nice out. I really enjoyed it. I snapped a few pictures (5 I think) in order to test out the camera on the N900. You can see the rest in the Mobile Uploads set on Flickr if you're interested. I didn't do any manipulation to these, they're straight out of the phone.

I did manage to do a bit of gaming on Friday night and Sunday evening. I played some Mass Effect 2 and did the Kasumi recruitment/loyalty mission DLC. So I now have 100% achievements on that. I then started up Splinter Cell Conviction on Realistic. I had planned on playing some Red Dead Redemption, but even though my order shipped on Thursday, it didn't arrive in time for the weekend. Paul was also most displeased :) (Edit: He's happy now though, it arrived today).

I watched Avatar on Saturday night. It was a fun movie. I can see why people enjoyed it so much. It had a lot of the elements that made Star Wars and Lord of the Rings great. It was a fairly traditional story of Good vs Evil and overcoming odds, the hero's journey and fighting for what you believe in. It was actually quite refreshing not to have to be thinking about the plot too much (in that it wasn't difficult to follow). It wasn't trying to be clever, it was just trying to tell a story. It reminded me of some of the old Disney classics too. The visual effects were astounding.

Sunday night I watched two movies. The first was Terminator Salvation, It was definitely a movie. If it wasn't a Terminator movie it might have been pretty good. It was technically well executed, but the script was absolutely awful. The worst part was they kept doing little homages to the earlier Terminator movies like "see, we watched them and did our homework". But then turned around and left major plot holes like they didn't understand them at all. This shit isn't salvaging anything.

Spoilers Follow: Skynet should not have known who Kyle Reese was, let alone what he looked like. Unless you're telling me that Skynet checked John Connors Facebook page and saw that he listed Kyle Reese as his father. If Skynet knew who Kyle Reese actually was, why didn't Skynet terminate him the instant they found him (thus negating John Connor's existence as they were complaining would happen the whole movie). If it was so Marcus would still see him and get John to enter the facility, why didn't Skynet just falsify the information (or, you know, contact John directly itself). Skynet said Marcus was under its influence the whole time anyway. But regardless, only two people knew that Kyle Reese was Johns father (his mother and him - maybe three if you count him probably telling his wife). If Skynet didn't know who he was, why was he #1 on the kill list. That drives the whole plot and it makes no sense. The only reason I could think of that would explain some of it is the N-jump theory of time travel, but that might be giving them too much credit. There were other issues, but that was the most egregious issue I had with the plot. Spoilers End.

xXx was the other movie I watched. It's an older one, but one I hadn't seen. It was exactly what I expected. Light on plot, heavy on action and drowning in cheese. Coming straight after Terminator Salvation only made it seem better :) It was enjoyable, but I went in with low expectations.

On the gaming front I finished up Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Fun game, but it would have been nice to have referenced the story from the first one (even in passing). I was curious about what happened after the end of the first game. I also missed the openness of the first one. This one felt much more linear and constrained (almost on rails except for a couple of missions), a lot like Modern Warfare 2.

I then started up Mass Effect 2 (I'd been originally planning on Dragon Age, but it wasn't meant to be). I need to finish a run on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements. It's tough work at times, but I'm getting there. Playing as a Sentinel with a bonus ability of Armour Piercing Ammo. The Tech Armour is literally a life-saver.

I keep trying to get something constructive done whenever I have time off, but I guess I'm working myself too hard the rest of the time. By the time I get any time off all I want to do is goof off and do something that allows me to switch off my brain. It is looking like this next week is going to be pretty rough too, I'm actually wishing I hadn't taken Monday off (but I didn't have any idea of the schedule before then). Oh well. I'm sure it'll work itself out :)

On Saturday night I sat down to watch Avatar on Blu-ray. I had missed it in the theatres so I was looking forward to the weekend so I could I watch it. The Blu-ray came with a DVD version of the movie as well, which I thought was a nice touch. Plugging the movie into my HTPC setup, I was greeted with a lovely error from AnyDVD (which I use because my DVD collection is split between R2 and R4 with the occasional R1 DVD). The error explained that AnyDVD had failed to read the disc and I should check the status window for more information. It seemed that the BD+ check had failed.

Not a problem, I thought. It's a Region B Blu-ray, so I'll just turn off AnyDVD and start watching it. I don't need AnyDVD to remove the region coding in this case. My pizza is beginning to get cold at this point, so I just want to get on with the movie. I obviously need to update AnyDVD to support the latest Blu-ray DRM. So I disable AnyDVD and the disc starts playing. After I get through all the copyright and warning notices (and most of a slice of pizza), I finally get to the disc menu, which I see for about 3 seconds before I am booted back to the Total Media Theatre 3 Platinum startup screen with a message stating that my hardware is not HDCP compatible.

It's right too. My HTPC is connected to my Projector via HDMI. It turns out that the projector does support HDCP over DVI-I apparently, but that's not how I have it configured - and I wasn't aware of that at the time in any case. AnyDVD would have removed that requirement, so I decided to see if there was an update. After a bit of searching it turns out they did have an update, it just wasn't rolled out to their website yet (so I had to grab it from the forums). A couple of reboots later and the movie was finally playing. I could finally enjoy my (now cold) pizza. I'd considered plugging the DVD in, but why the hell should I have to pay more for something I can't use? I bought the Blu-ray, so I wanted to watch the Blu-ray. In retrospect, I wonder whether that is exactly why the DVD was bundled.

Fast forward to Sunday. I decide I'm going to continue my second Dragon Age play through on the 360. I connect to Xbox Live and start the game up. I am greeted with a message telling me that the game couldn't connect to the Dragon Age Servers. Fine, I don't need to be connected anyway (my Xbox is definitely online, as I connected to Live just fine). I hit Resume Game and it starts loading. A few seconds later I am booted back to the main menu because some of my DLC apparently could not be found. Strange, as I'm certain I haven't deleted any of it. This DLC came free with the Collectors Edition.

A quick google search tells me that sometimes this can happen and the solution is to re-download the DLC. So I delete the offending file and try to start up the game again in order to re-download. Oh wait, that's right, the Dragon Age servers are down at the moment. Crap. Now I don't have any way to download that DLC again. So. my Dragon Age save game is currently unplayable (unless I started a new game so it wasn't associated with that DLC).

After being deprived of Dragon Age, I figure I'll start up Mass Effect 2. I decide to start up a new character on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements I need. After starting that up I am greeted with a message welcoming me to the Cerberus Network and asking me to enter my code that came with a new copy of Mass Effect 2. You see, they have this plan to incentivise buying new copies of the game rather than renting or buying a used copy.

That's all well and good, but I have already used the code that came with my new copy of Mass Effect 2 when I went through this process the first time I played the game. So apparently it's forgotten that I already have a Cerberus Network activation on my account. I'm hoping that this is somehow related to the same reason the Dragon Age servers were down (both games are published by EA) but I'll need to verify that later. Just wanting to do some gaming and not jump through hoops right then, I hit Cancel as I'm pretty sure I've played Mass Effect 2 without connecting in the past, and sure enough, I can start a new character.

A close call. I was lucky in that case and it all worked out in the end. Wait a minute. I was lucky? I was lucky to be able to play the game (that I paid full price for) in spite of the DRM. Screw that. This would have been lessened somewhat if EA wasn't so intent on controlling the whole process. If they just used Microsoft's DLC strategy, I might have still been able to play (I at least pay Microsoft a yearly subscription fee to keep Live running). But regardless, it illustrates the point fairly well. Pirates don't care if EA's (or Microsoft's) servers are offline or glitching. 

The pirates have it pretty good. They don't have to pay for their content. They don't have to deal with DRM. They don't get told over and over again that they shouldn't pirate the movie they already paid for. They don't have to sit through trailers for movies they might already own but don't have a choice to skip. They aren't at the mercy of an infrastructure that might go offline at any point for any reason (and eventually - indefinitely). They get to experience the content when they want to. It's on their schedule, at their convenience. I'd like to hope that I'm an edge case with my experiences, but it does feel more like "when" DRM goes wrong, not "if".

Until we make purchasing content as easy and convenient as pirating it. What kind of argument can we really make against those that pirate that content. When we make piracy look like a better experience, we can't be doing ourselves any favours with our paying customers. I've heard the argument that "Well, it prevents casual copying". Bullshit. And even if that were true, we shouldn't be indirectly educating the casual consumer on how to remove the DRM so they themselves can use the content. We make piracy more attractive with this kind of crap.

When I say "easy and convenient", I don't mean simply during the purchasing phase. It has to be end-to-end and it should include similar freedoms (that they'd get otherwise). Things like the Gamers Bill of Rights are on the right track (and even Steam and iTunes DRM to a degree - they do a pretty good job of getting the DRM out of your way). The pirates don't deal with DRM, so why are we punishing our customers?