Battlefield 2142 arrived yesterday. The previous series, 1942, were a lot of fun. It was primarily a multiplayer game, but the single–player mode was perfectly fine for spending lots of time and not getting bored. 2142, however, doesn’t seem as fun. Maybe I prefer more realistic WWII type action than futuristic battle with electromagnetic shields on vehicles and EMP disrupters and that sort of thing. It also doesn’t seem to have as many maps. Or it could be that I bought 2 or 3 expansion packs for 1942, so I’m thinking of all those maps combined. 2142 also requires you to have an EA online account, which it connects to when you start the game to keep track of scores and shit. I don’t care much about playing online or what my ranking is, I just want to play single–player games.

The worst part about 2142 is that it’s what I’d call a fake port of the Windows version. It uses Cider and WINE to execute the Windows binaries. It does seem to run fairly well, but it’s far from perfect. Always the curious geek, I opened the app package to see what was in it. The Resources folder contains another app package. Weird. When you launch the game, it does some weird voodoo—I assume it launches the contained app. What I see is the splash screen, then the standard “Battlefield 2142 has unexpectedly quit” dialog, yet the splash screen is still there and the game continues to load and run. After I quit the game and try to relaunch it, it just sits there spinning the SPoD. I checked Activity Monitor and saw a couple new processes, not parented off of the game; one had “wine” in the name and the other “cider”. I killed those processes and the game then continues loading like it should.

As a developer who works on a cross–platform project every damned day, I can tell you that this is a load of unnecessary shit. It’s not like they have an entire UI to write for the Mac, because there is no standard UI—it’s all game UI (no menus, windows, controls, etc). That leaves the bulk of the code, which is driving the graphics and sound, and the graphics portion is largely portable because it’s no doubt all OpenGL.. And now that they only have to compile for Intel, they no longer have a lot of crap to carefully inspect for byte order problems.

IMO, the time it takes to develop and build an actual Mac binary much more makes up for the suckiness of using the fucking emulator/executer type shit that doesn’t seem to be all it’s cracked up to be. Why? Because of user experience. My experience so far with 2142 is very unpleasant. From the looks of the app packages and some of the folders contained therein (one folder has 2 folders named c_drive and g_drive, obviously Windoze drive naming idiocy), it looks like it took a lot more work to actually make this work on the Mac than if they simply compiled a real Mac version. It obviously doesn’t run as well as a real Mac version would. Lame slackers.

Um, weird. Here are some very creative places to get tatoos. Not at all safe for work. The Willy Nelson just kills me. Not sure why anyone would want Willy on their woohoo, which makes me think it’s just body paint.

Huh. Scratch the audio problem being fixed. I guess it just takes a while for memory to get into a certain state or something. Fuck.

Woohoo! My replacement video card arrived this morning. That was quick. I swapped it in and tried X–Plane. No more crashing or weird screen crap! Oddly, I also wondered if the old card was doing something that was causing audio playback problems when the CPUs were taxed. I haven’t been able to listen to iTunes while compiling in Xcode since I got the Mac Pro. Amazingly, that problem seems to also be gone. I’ll keep iTunes playing all day to make sure, but goddamn if that won’t be nice to have fixed. It’s weird that a video card could cause audio problems.

We had a neighborhood end–of–Summer party Saturday night. A good time, as always. The majority of the evening was spent on Geoff & Caroline’s new porch, ya know, the one that could support a tank. At one point Kim noticed Geoff counting how many people were on it. Knowing how strong he’d built the base, she kidded him and asked if he’d calculated how much weight was on it. There were 25 at one point, which is probably a few people short of 2 tons. Here’s a shot from later on. That’s me on the left doing my best to push the column over. He still has to replace a bunch of siding. I helped him today with some trim at the capitals. Ain’t nothing like a big ass porch.

Kim’s had a hankerin’ for an open–face turkey sandwich. She found a diner about 20 minutes away. We went there tonight. Lots of older ladies running the place. Lots of seniors seemed to frequent the place. Great food. I had an incredibly good pork tenderloin sandwich, served on toast instead of a regular bun. That made it tons better, because I didn’t fill up on all that bread. I came with some nice crisp lettuce. All I added was salt and it was perfect. We got some pie to go; apple for me and blueberry for her.

I think I’ve whined before about how my video card is overheating and can bring the computer to a freeze when playing games and such. I did some more searching and found a number of people complaining about the same card, ATI Radeon X1900 XT. There’s a version 2 of the same card that addresses the problem, and Apple has been replacing them for people who bitch. So I called them up and got Hadji. Even the goddamn hold music is Indian, which is excruciatingly annoying. Any way, they’re sending me a new card. Woohoo! Now I can go back to flying X–Plane when it’s over 80° in the house. Actually, the room temp doesn’t even matter now; it was 75° in here and the card still fucked up.

Also ordered Battlefield 2142. About time there was a new shooter available for Mac. Now if they’d just release a decent racing sim. The only thing out there is Need for Speed Carbon, prominently featuring tuner cars, drifting, and crime. Fuck that shit. What the world needs is another great racing sim. I suggest CanAm, complete with all the incredible, historic cars from the old CanAm series.

Shit, Call of Duty 4 looks very good. Watch the trailer there. Wonder how long until they do a Mac version.

Sure it’s inefficient as hell, but why not plop a couple jet engines on top of a diesel–electric locomotive to make it go faster? I mean aside from the noise and heat and all that extra fuel weight and the general dumbness of it all. But if Mad can put a steam engine in a zeppelin, then any combination is fair game.

Well I’ll be damned. Why didn’t Armstrong or Shepard or any of the Apollo astronauts tell us what they really saw when they saw the surface of the moon up close? Go here and zoom all the way in.

BTW, Google Earth now does the sky as well, complete with constellations and all that jazz.

Today I whipped up a guitar hanger. It was getting to be a mess down there with 3 guitar stands and the Dean upright on its big stand. It was the first opportunity I’ve had to use the free 18V hammer drill that came with the impact driver Kim got me last xmas. I used both tools to hang it on the block wall. Thanks, Kim! I added it to the woodworking projects page—link on the left cuz I’m tired.

I got the sandwich for the desk glued up. Pictures of the clampfest. Speaking of clamps, I picked up 4 of Rockler’s 12” clamps last weekend. You can never have too many, plus the 8 I already have of that size are some shitty ones I got from Harbor Freight. The thin and soft face pads either came off immediately, or are being cut right through by the sharp edges of the crappy clampface. And the handles are small and hurt when you really crank on them. The Rocklers have nice thick handles with molded grips, and much more durable face pads.

In other news, Kim & I drove up to Maple Grove (here office is up there) to visit a new music store called American Guitar and Band and a new Guitar Center. The GC is much larger than the one we usually go to, and other one is just guitars, basses, and band instruments. How dare they leave out drums! It’s more boutique–like with a wider variety of brands and even one–off customs. ($20k for this? Looks kinda ugly to me. I’d rather have this $5k 1935 National dobro. I loved this Rusty Deville by James Trussart, which looks like aged steel.)

She’d played a lower end Schecter around last xmas when I was going to get her a 5–string. She really liked how light it was, because her G&L is a fucking truck and her back and shoulder hurt by the end of the night, even with her really nice padded strap. They had half a dozen Schecters at GC today. She liked the Stiletto Studio 5–string best. Good choice, since the Studio is a higher end bass than the Stiletto Custom with its bolt–on neck and only 2–band EQ. (Sheesh, “only”. Used to be they all had tone knobs that would simply roll off the treble.) Plus the Studio has a bubinga face on the body. You can never go wrong with bubinga. Plus it’s fun to say. Bubinga. Bubinga. Bubinga. I got a nice SKB case for it. They figured out that molded plastic cases and riveted–on metal feet just don’t play well together. Two of those fuckers have already ripped out of the case for her G&L, and it’s not like she throws it around and gigs constantly.

So now she can play All Day and All of the Night and have a low D to go to. :) I was boinking around on it tonight. It feels really nice. The neck is smallish for a 5–string, and it’s 2 damn octaves! (They put 3 dots on the 24th fret instead of just 2, probably just to say, “look at me and my 24 frets”.) The cool thing is to feel the B vibrate through the body against your chest.

On the X–Plane forum site there were pictures and talk of a Snoopy’s doghouse that you could fly. Basically the “doghouse” part was just a custom cockpit, and the aircraft part of it was a regular plane with totally transparent paint. That got me thinking about what other weird flying things there were. There was some cartoon that was like Wacky Racers, but with planes. Then I thought of the Mad magazine zeppelin. X–Plane does airships too. Took a while to get all the parts modeled. I captured a small movie of it here. Note the proper engine sound.

Birds in X–Plane also make a nice windshield decoration. Now they need to add an option for Mythbusters frozen chickens, although they’d need to add a checkbox to the System Failures window for “Pilot dead”.

My iLife ‘08 upgrade came today. Excitedly, I installed it and tried the new stuff. iPhoto’s “events”; eh. They’re the same as rolls, but seemingly split up in weird ways unless you go change the prefs so it stops doing that. I rarely shoot “events”—I shoot photos, often only 2 or 3 at a time, then upload them from the camera, like for woodworking projects. I don’t consider that an “event”. At least you can still click the Pictures item on the left and still view all your pictures at once like used to be the default view. Maybe somebody will find a way to get rid of the Events item altogether. The Edit in New Window pref seems to be useless. I only managed to get a new window a couple times. The rest of the time photos opened in the main window.

iWeb updates are what I consider non–existent. 3 “web widgets” and some new themes. The raw html widget is a much–needed addition, but Google AdSense? Who the fuck wants to puts ads on their web pages? The Google Maps widget would be much more useful if it would connect to your Google account and list your saved placemarks so you could instantly choose one to use in the map.

Haven’t played with Garage Band yet, but the ability to control fx in the timeline sounds like a good idea. The instant band thing or whatever it’s called, I don’t really care about.

Now we get to iMovie. Let me just start by saying yuck. Gross. Putrid. Stupid. It fucking sucks. Gone are fx, most of the transitions, the timeline (who ever heard of a movie editor without a timeline?), the ability to open iMovie HD ‘06 projects (it can import them, but loses almost everything, and—in the case of the one project I imported—the goddamned content)… Basically, it’s no longer a movie editor, but an idiot wizard for slapping a bunch of your stupid kid’s birthday party footage into something that will make the grandparents say “oh, isn’t this lovely” when you send them the DVD and they finally figure out how to get the TV set to see the DVD.

So if you liked iMovie HD ‘06 and expect to do more with ‘08, you assume wrong. They did manage to release version 6.0.4 of iMovie HD, so at least maybe they fixed some annoying bugs and we can still use it.

Jesus tap dancing christ, Apple. What the hell is wrong with you these days? First you dropped Carbon after saying you wouldn’t in favor of that ugly ass Cocoa, and now you take useful products out of iLife and still charge the same for it? That’s so incredibly un–Apple of you. Get yer shit together fer fuck’s sake.

Jeez, I screwed up both url’s to the X–Plane screenshots. I done fitzed ‘em now.

Mac vs. PC, South Park style. (The audio’s a bit hard to hear without turning it up.)

My X–Plane 8.6 update arrived yesterday. Along with much more realistic 3D modeling and texturing and flight modeling, they added scenery for the entire world; 7 DVDs or 55G worth. They also added flocks of birds that hang around airports and get spooked when you’re taking off. Here I am just after takeoff in the enormous flying wing bomber I made. You can see that the birds took out 2 engines whose props are feathered.

The random hot air balloons also got increased realism. It looks like I made this guy fall out when I buzzed them in my B–17. (Not really—many of the balloons have these same people in them.)

Very NSFW, enjoy the super nipples of Tiffany Joy. Holy carp.

After a few busy weekends, I finally got time to get back to work on the desk. Yesterday we were both tired and wanted a veg day. It’s so good to do absolutely nothing except stare at the TV for a day. We went through a few DVDs we’ve had for months but never got around to watching yet, like season 2 of The Outer Limits. One episode featured William Shatner as an astronaut working on what they called Project Vulcan. It also had some line that had 3 beats, much like “to explore strange, new worlds, etc…” A few more episodes into season 2 we’ll get to the one called “I, Robot” with Leonard Nimoy.

Anyhoo, I got the 2x4’s planed to the right thickness and cut to length. Got 2 of them glued to the bottom half of the plywood sandwich and left them clamped up. I get to use my deep–throats, which can reach somewhere around 18–22” in from the edge. Awful goddamned handy on rare occasions like this.

Somebody sent a bunch of photographs from the bridge collapse scene. This one made me laugh. I never realized that priests had a standard pose of concern.

I haven’t done any research to find out if the paper clip is actually included with the iPhone, but it’s pretty damned funny. Funnier yet is that there’s an open source Google alternative, complete with bugs that you need to read. (Click on each to see the details of each bug. I even added a comment to the first one.)

I just love the internet. Here’s a site that documents everything a big orange cat named Jeff kills and mostly eats. The photography is very good. The subjects can be pretty gory. At least check the gallery for pictures of Jeff. He’s a big boy—reminds me of Gordo. (That’s the only picture I have online of Gordo? Odd.)

Kim’s mom called a while ago to tell me about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis (specs and some “before” pictures). Then her sister called and asked if it was by us (um, no, that would be 18 miles away). Neighbor Rob said he had 4 relatives call. Luckily Kim doesn’t have to take that road to get home from the airport tonight, although the other roads will be taking on all that traffic, plus the people leaving the Twins game.