Mike's Weblog :: Mike Neir's Page

Thursday marked the release of the newest installment of the Half-Life saga - Half-Life 2 Episode One. It picks up the story shortly after HL2 ends. The basic story is that the player (as Gordon Freeman) is caught in City 17 with Alyx, one of your cohorts from the first game. Following your actions at the end of HL2, the reactor powering the monstrous Combine Citadel is overloading, and you and Alyx must escape in short order.

Valve did a great job with this one. For a good portion of the episode you're without any weapons except the gravity gun. Therefore, you must rely on Alyx to clear enemies while you clear other obstacles. After you finally find weapons, the game goes underground, and you're forced to fight many uglies in pitch blackness, with things only illuminated by the occasional emergency flare and your trusty flashlight.

After a while, you finally escape to the surface, but the fight isn't over yet. The Combine is after you with a vengeance, mostly due to some information that you and Alyx have taken from them. Towards the end of the episode, you meet up with some other civilians fighting to escape the city, and you help lead them to safety.

The episode ends rather abruptly, but the story isn't over. Its my understanding that Valve intends to keep releasing additional episodes, each continuing the saga of humanity's struggle against the Combine. I'm looking forward to the next one. This episode was only about 4-6 hours long playing-time-wise, but it was a lot of fun.

After a couple of fun and enjoyable Thanksgiving celebrations, I've dropped back into my funk. I've seen tons of theories on how our body and personality goes through cycles of various lengths, so I figure I must be at the ass-end of all of my cycles right now. I'm tired, cranky, and have like, zero patience. These things are all great traits to posess when you're dealing with less than patient customers, which are often less than technically competent as well. It's also detrimental when you have a puppy that's following you around like, well, a puppy, constantly craving attention. I've never dealt well with 'clingy' things, be it people, animals, or objects. I need space, especially when I'm in moods like this. Having a dog yapping for attention every two minutes defintely doesn't bode well for my space requirement. It also doesn't help when you're greeted to a ringing phone the instant you clock in on a monday morning, with a person complaining about your personal workplace nemesis - email problems. Yes, email is nice and convenient, but people, please realize that you can live for a few hours without email. The first email call was bad enough, but the next two calls in a row were both about email. The other ten or so calls about email totally pissed me off, and that mood didn't really lift until this afternoon. Grr.

Not much else to talk about... I've beat Half-Life 2 a couple of times, and the ending is kinda of anti-climactic. I've been renewing my relationship with Counter-Strike though, which is good and bad. I was pretty much addicted to CS for a long time, and only since I've moved up to Lansing have I really stopped playing it. Well, the newest version of CS based on the Source (HL2) engine, and it's really sweet, so I'm playing again. Oh well. The fact that I need to set up my laptop to play keeps me from playing too often. I'm also trying to quit Mountain Dew again. I kicked that habit for a few months last summer, but then I worked my first midnight shift. My triumph turned to tragedy and I had relapse. Hopefully I can kick it again. I've been clean for two days!

My dad sent me this image the other day, and I had a good laugh over it. Hopefully you will too.

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economially feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

Here I am again, "overdue" for a post, but I really don't have all that much to say. Work has been ok for the most part, except for thursday. I had traded up Greg for the 4pm-12 shift since he had something to take care of that evening. When I came in Steven was pretty bent over some things, and the whole office was kinda grumpy. Crappy day I guess. One of the servers was acting up, and it was determined eventually that there was some faulty hardware. It had acted up before, so I thought it best that the old machine be retired in lieu of brand new hardware, just to make sure that the problems didn't continue. Building the new server went pretty quickly dispite the fact that the phones were ringing pretty regularly, but the data transfer certainly did not. It turns out that the main hard drive was the faulty part of the old system, and it caused the transfer to crawl. About 3 hours into it, I did the math, and projected that the transfer would take about 30 hours. Definitely not acceptable, so I decided to restore from the previous day's backups instead of trying to salvage the current data. Restoring the backup data still took a while, but it was a lot quicker than the original data. When my field triage was complete and I was ready to put the server back on the rack, I sat down to clean out the ARP cache of the core switch that server is plugged into, I noticed my monitoring system going haywire. I put the server back on the rack and took a peek at the monitoring server, and the main hard drive appeared to be dead. It was already like 5am at that point, and I didn't feel like dealing with anything else, so I just went home and fixed it on friday. The drive wasn't really dead, but it is certainly acting weird. I'll have to keep an eye on it. One cool thing happened thursday... I was able to fix my monitor, which had crapped out on me a few days previous. It turns out that it was just a couple of cracked solder leads leading out of the power plug to the rest of the circuitry in the monitor, and gobbing some more solder across the broken area fixed things up fine. I was kinda surprised at the reaction I got from the guys at work... they seemed super impressed at the fact I had fixed it, even though it was a very simple fix. It was a 10 minute job, and about 8 minutes of that was waiting for the soldering iron to heat up.

Thanks to a couple guys at work being sick, I've got another one of my coughs. They always do a pretty good job of making me miserable, and this one is no exception. My abdominal muscles get worked so hard when I cough that I probably do the equivalent work of two or three situps each time I cough. I should market this to all the smokers of the world... "Cough your way to fitness with Mike Neir! No longer do you have to waste your time with those OTHER workout plans! Now you can kill yourself and prolong your life at the same time!" Hmm... maybe not. They also give me wicked headaches when I have a good coughing spat; headaches that pain medications don't fix. I actially left work early on wednesday due to the headache that I had worked up. Sleeping doesn't work out too well either since whatever is in my lungs tends to shift around, causing endless coughing fits. And to think... this will probably only be going on for another two or three weeks. I can't wait.

Another cool thing happened this week I suppose... Half-Life 2 was released. It is officially the hottest game ever. Doom 3 is graphically stunning, and scares the shit out of me when I play it, but HL2 is a much more complete package overall. The graphic detail is stunning, but what may be even cooler than that is the physics engine. Things pretty much behave how they would in the real world, which isn't always easy to replicate in a game. Wood splinters and floats on water, rocks sink. and even more impressive, the human (and unhuman) forms in the game act and react realistically too. I had a few long gaming sessions this week and I was able to beat it on easy mode, where simply looking at the bad guys really hard seems to kill them. I'll play again on a harder skill level, and I'm sure I won't have as easy a time of it. For now, here is a screenshot of the game showing the game's female sidekick and some extras as well.

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