Random things I've been up to

[giza]

Gah, it's been ages since I wrote an entry about myself. Let's see what I've been up to lately...

• I bought and beat Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The game engine is similar to that from MGS2, but there is now the element of camouflage. You can wear different kinds of camo and hide in grass, against rocks, etc. This makes the game much more interesting because you can lay within a few feet of the enemy as they pass by, and then tranq them in the back of the head. :-) They also learned their lesson about having too many cinema scenes in MGS2 and cut down on the number of cinemas.
• Thanks to my Sony Points, I picked up Sly Cooper for free. I spent time playing it and beating it. I enjoyed the game because there was a wide variety of levels and enemies. Some of the "thief moves" such as sliding along ledges and climbing up poles forced me to be creative when trying to solve some of the levels. The comic-book like drawings for the cinemas between levels was also a nice touch.
• I also snagged Tetris: Worlds for free, thanks again to my Sony Points. Just when I thought there wasn't anything more that could be done with Tetris, someone managed to jazz it up in a new way. In Tetris: Worlds, you find yourself having to evacuate a world of metallic cube-like creatures before their sun goes supernova and wipes them all out. There are warp gates to 6 different planets, all of which are activated by playing games of Tetris. After you finish each game, a few more of these beings make their way through, and they slowly terra form the planet, so it looks more and more inhabitable after each game you finish. There are also different modes of gameplay, such as creating 4x4 cubs, having individual blocks "fall" into any gaps, and having to clear lines at certain heights. This will be a nice game to spend some spare time on over the next few months.
• Somewhere in there I made it down to DC and visited with skiprudder and djfoxy. (Tip: if anyone goes down to DC, be sure to have lunch/dinner at Annie's Paramount Steakhouse. The food and service rocks!)
• A few months ago, my financial adviser left AmEx, so I have an appointment to see a new one in a few days. I spoke to him on the phone, and he seems like a nice guy, but he s-s-s-s-stutters a lot. The really odd thing about this is that he can say complicated financial-speak words with no trouble whatsoever. Maybe he's just really absent-minded. That would be kinda cool. :-)
• I've been downloading various Linux distros via BitTorrent over the last couple of weekends. I've been looking for one to run on my ancient Dell Latitude laptop, which has a P3-450 with 128 Megs of RAM and a PCMCIA Linksys network adapter. RedHat seems have become like a drunken midget with a weight problem, seeing that it's up to *4* CDs now and gives me a bunch of stuff I don't need. Arch Linux looked nice and small, but its Hotplug scripts caused the kernel to hang when scanning a certain address range. Debian unstable was also another candidate, but when booting and installation from the hard disk, it failed to detect the Linksys card, despite seeing it when booting off of CD. Off the list!

  I finally found something that worked for me: a little known Linux distro called Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu aims for simplicity. It fits on a single CD and has a very simple installer. The default installation mode just whacks what's currently on your hard drive and throws all of / into a single partition. For packages, you don't have to go through the tedious package of choosing what you want, it just installs a base set of packages, which also includes X. From there, you can use apt-get to retrieve package builds from their servers and work from there. Within an hour of installation, I apt-getted all the security updates and got Gnucash installed and working. Pretty nice.

  I hope that Ubuntu picks up steam as a distribution, it seems to have a lot of potential, and it has the "Just Works" philosophy, which appeals to me. There's also a TLK tie-in: their current release is called Warty Warthog!

• I've been productive at work the last 2 weeks on the latest project assigned to me. And that's about all the detail that I'll be giving in public. :-)