Author: admin

In the D drive: FlatOut. It’s a racing game made by Finns and published by Brits. It’s sort of like _Burnout_ meets Big Red Racing, where instead of driving exotic supercars, you run rally races with rustbuckets. And the crashing is utterly exquisite: if _Burnout 3_ is Hooked on Phonics, FlatOut is Hooked on Phonics: The Miniseries.

In particularily nasty head-on collisions, your driver is actually thrown out of the windshield! (They even have sick little stunt games to play the yuks up – like the one where you use your poor battered body to knock over ten pins in a oversized bowling alley.)

My only peeve is that the game becomes exponentially harder as you progress. A analog stick for the throttle control is pretty much mandatory to beat the Silver stage.

In Silverlotus’s D drive: Guild Wars. A MMORPG with a twist, made by ex-Blizzard luminaries and published by Koreans. I bought it for her on Saturday afternoon, and she’s already logged 10 hours. She’s happy that the game does away with a lot of the grinding and annoyances she experienced playing Asheron’s Call. For example, she doesn’t have to wander around miles and miles in the underbrush looking for quests or towns; you can instantly transport yourself to any town, and all quest-giving NPCs reside in these towns.

And because all the wilderness is instanced for just you and your motley crew, you will never journey to battle the Death Panda That Can Only Be Slain by the Chosen One, only to find a dozen people already there waiting for the Panda to respawn. Even the PvP people get their own private battlegrounds to fight each other.

You don’t have to worry about people stealing your items or looting your body, because items are reserved for pickup by you only, and you keep everything when you die. And if you don’t feel like assembling a team together, you can recruit NPCs as henchmen.

This weekend, Silverlotus told me, “My purse is too small!”

I looked at the bag. It didn’t seem to have shrunk in size. But no, she insisted, she now had more stuff to carry. Just the essential stuff, mind you, like the cellphone, iPod Shuffle, Handspring, a notepad, and the usual toiletries.

Personally, I think this is my queue to stop buying her gizmos. She had experienced a moment of fashion twin zen the other day when she met a lady with the same handbag, only bigger; Silverlotus wished hers was just as massive, and the lady wished she could have purchased the more compact size.

All of this has made me notice something. As women get older, they accumulate more stuff, and their girl-sacks slowly get larger and larger, which is why you see octegenarians hauling tote bags around. I suspect that, in the future when healthcare and biotech has elongated the average human lifespan to 200 years, we’ll see bicentennials lugging purses the size of 5 gallon drums on their cybernetic forearms.

My old alma mater, McMaster University’s Faculty of Engineering, has launched their own podcast service called Radio Fireball.

In the new school year, they’ll be introducing a new engineering degree called Software Engineering and Game Design. Dunno how it will stack up against specialist schools like Digipen or Sheridan’s computer graphics programs, but it sounds pretty neat. It complements McMaster’s four existing engineering super-degrees: Engineering and Management, Engineering and Society, Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

McMaster is a small school without the celebrity status of UofT or Waterloo, but they can still run with the big boys.

Just got back from a conference from the surprisingly sunny, windless Quebec City. We stayed at the Chateau Frontenac and partook in the charming surroundings of Vieux-Quebec. Oh, and it’s very hilly. You could see why the French and British fought to control the city; Fortress Quebec made defending the mouth of the St-Lawrence River (aka La Riviere St-Laurent) a cinch.

At the Frontenac, we stayed on the Gold club floor. They have a lettermail chute running down alongside the elevator shafts, and ashcans with the Fairmont logo embossed in the sand.

Two weekends ago, I paid my parents a visit. I needed to practice some driving, and they needed me to spruce up their computer and insult me on random transgressions in my life. (The first words my mother said to me was, “What’s wrong with your face?”) They recently saw the light and ditched AOL and switched to Sympatico DSL Basic, and needed help configuring their mail.
Oh, and the computer is a WindowsME machine. Oh joy.

While I was installing Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, my dad complained that he couldn’t play this Chinese mohgoung movies* on any of his DVD players or DVD drives. I explained to him the whole regioning copy protection the DVD manufacturers and moviemakers cooked up so that all the movies you buy in China (Region 6) or elsewhere wouldn’t play on a North American DVD player (Region 1), or vice versa.

He replied, “Hell, they are trying to stop me from playing movies I legitimately own with crippled DVD players? So now, not only have lost my DVD business, I’m not going to buy these expensive American DVD players either.” A friend of his had lent him an inexpensive, region-free Chinese-made DVD player.

No truer words have been spoken.

__*Mohgoung movies are popular Chinese films that feature acrobatic kungfu experts and soap opera plotlines in medieval settings. This one featured a woman that could cut piano wire by flinging a pebble and a bearded old guy who could smash swords with his cane in midair. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is of this genre.__

We saw a young couple beside us actually do these things when I took Silverlotus to the Yamato Japanese Restaurant in Yorkville for her birthday:

# Don’t give strange cheapskate drink requests, like “iced tea with a teeny, teeny, tiny bit of cranberry juice in it.”
# Don’t ask the waitress if you can have the teppan fried rice without the rice (“And give me twice the vegetables instead.”)
# Don’t pretend you’re rich by idly inquiring about the kobe beef special, find out it costs $75, and then change your order to the teriyaki special.
# Don’t suddenly announce to the waitress bringing your onion soup in beef broth that you are in fact a staunch vegetarian, and then instruct the waitress to dump it out and give you a nice miso soup instead.
# Do not then proceed to eat your salmon main dish (didn’t you know? fish grows on trees!)
# Don’t walk out leaving half of your painstakingly prepared teppanyaki meal untouched.

With those words, __Star Trek: Enterprise__ and the Star Trek franchise as a whole, came to an abrupt conclusion.

After watching the series finale, “These Are The Voyages,” I couldn’t help thinking that Berman and Braga designed this episode to be more of a tribute toward themselves, rather than their fans. After all, the episode chronologically takes place in __Star Trek: The Next Generation__’s seventh season, aka 1993 – the glory days where it seemed the final frontier of the franchise seemed limitless. They even revisited that tried and true hackneyed plot device – the holodeck.

Sadly, the cast of __Enterprise__ became bit players on their own show. And as I watched TNG’s Commander Riker, roleplaying as the confidante chef in a holographic recreation of the NX-01, rubbed elbows with this cast, I sadly realized we knew more about Riker’s id than Reed, Sato and Mayweather combined. They seemed to be cardboard cutouts than people in comparison.

So why has Trek died not with a bang, but with a whimper? Some say it’s the abysmal scripts. Others blame a saturated geek’s market of __CSI__’s and __Smallville__’s, a multitude of strong science and fantasy shows to choose from. I say it’s that character development and high concept sci-fi has been replaced by banal phase pistol gunfights and bare midriffs.

I own both the TNG and DS9 Technical Manuals. I continue to contribute to Memory Alpha. Star Trek inspired me in my adolescence, back when it wasn’t hip to be a nerd. For that, I say thanks. May it return, strong than ever, somewhere…out there.