* For non-Billy-players, that means I've reset my character back to the starting point and worked my way up again 15 times. There are certain rewards to doing that... Albeit, mostly in the first two or three times you do it.
1
How are you doing on completion of stuff? Judging from your player ranking, I'm gonna guess that you haven't tackled r00t yet?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, August 01 2010 05:57 PM (mRjOr)
2
I've done the easy parts of r00t and Pizza Witch. The last three months or so I've been so busy at work all I've been able to do is log in, run megamissions, and log out - and sometimes not even that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2010 10:16 PM (PiXy!)
1
Since you mixed your metaphor ("pull out all the stops"?) I'm not sure what you mean. I thought that was a pretty good episode, one of the better ones in the series. (Even though the bad guy in that episode was a joke.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, July 27 2010 12:20 AM (+rSRq)
Broke my glasses last night, which is always a nuisance. I've only ever done it twice - once one of the lenses just popped out of the frame and hit the floor; this time I put them down a leetle too close to the edge of the counter in the bathroom.
So I went and got my eyes checked - yep, still two - very little change in the prescription except that I now need reading glasses as well as the regular ones.
The cost of the checkup was pretty reasonable, even with all the extra tests they run these days. (And the fancy gadgets means they don't need to use those horrible eye drops any more, which is a blessing.)*
The frames were pretty reasonable too, after I convinced the lady that the $99 frames that I liked were better than the (admittedly somewhat sturdier) $299 frames that I hated.
The lenses, though... Glerk.
I hope these see me through another eight years before I need to replace them.
* I love the widget where you look into the lens and it goes whirrr and a green blur resolves itself into a miniature farmhouse, entirely automagically.
Theres the Hannibal Lector frame that they ask you to plunk your chin into. Followed by the machine that puffs air into your eyeball.
Posted by: Andrew at Saturday, July 31 2010 09:57 PM (cB03i)
2
They also did one that takes a photo of the inside of your eye. Which involves a camera flash going off from about two inches away.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 31 2010 11:09 PM (PiXy!)
3
My optometrist does that the steampunk way.
She holds a lens up to her eye to inspect whilst shining a torch into the back of my eye.
Not to mention the fun of trying out bifocals with the lego spectacles set. It won't be too long before I join you in needing them.
Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, August 01 2010 12:46 AM (cB03i)
1
Could be worse. Could be exactly the same story eight times.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, July 25 2010 12:44 AM (+rSRq)
2
I believe it was almost the same story eight times. (Much as I love Haruhi, I haven't watched S2 yet.)
And I love time-loop stories as well. Particularly the Stargate version of Groundhog Day.
As for Amagami, the first arc of six just completed (each arc gets 4 episodes) and I think they handled it pretty well. Next week messy-haired girl is up, and she looks interesting.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 25 2010 02:50 AM (PiXy!)
1
Probably economy of scale. I bet the DAS is a special order, which has to be sheperded all the way through the production line, whereas the server is off-the-shelf.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, July 24 2010 12:02 PM (+rSRq)
2
I don't know which DAS you were looking at, but if it's the one we build which they rebadge (or heck, most any DAS)... there is quite a bit more to the thing than just a stack of drives.
Dual redundant smart power supply modules, ditto fans, redundant enclosure services modules, redundant internal loops, lots and lots of R&D. It is far more likely to choke itself on some silly internal coding error, than it is to lose your data due to hardware malfunctions... and it is very very unlikely to trip itself on coding errors. Not that they're not there... just that they exist primarily in remote boundary conditions.
Also, the drives will have special firmware, and possibly be the pick of the litter, so to speak.
Posted by: dkallen99 at Wednesday, July 28 2010 02:31 AM (1PFDl)
3
I don't think Dell do special drive versions, though enterprise-class drives certainly do have different firmware than commodity drives.
It does offer redundant controllers as an option, though I didn't configure that. Just having the option increases the complexity and price, of course.
The most expensive component, though, is the drives - Dell's drive prices on their US site are hugely inflated. They're actually about 40% cheaper if you buy them in Australia (though in Australia the rest of the server is more expensive).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 28 2010 03:58 AM (PiXy!)
1
Meh. This sort of hyper-rationalism is usually more revealing of lacunae in the professor's rationalism than anything else. Given the gaps in the array, I'm willing to bet that the author is some sort of scientism-flavored Gaia worshipper, probably with a side of Animal Rights and possibly a garnish of Eugenicist.
Me, I want to know why there's Magick, Wicca, Witchcraft, and Neo-Paganism. That's at least two redundancies, and depending on your definitions, all four are variants on the same blamed thing.
Where's the animism? Pantheism? If you weren't trying to piss people off, you could replace the "Religions" with "irrational" doctrines of the religions, such as reincarnation, transubstantiation, transmigration of the soul, theism, "hard" atheism ("I *know* there's no god, [array of arbitrary scientific assertions] proves it!"), scientism, predestination, free will, etc. Some of the quackeries just seem to be practices which piss off the author - what exactly is irrational about trepanation, for instance? Where's bleeding? Or humour theory?
Also, I'm not sure if the "Zombies" thing is about people who expect Night of the Living Dead or the Haitian abomination, which seems to be a real enough practice of kidnapping and assault-via-drug-abuse & manipulation.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Thursday, July 22 2010 01:29 AM (jwKxK)
2
If you were to periodicise all the different categories of nonsense that our species has invented, the electrons in the outermost shell would exceed the speed of light.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2010 01:42 AM (PiXy!)
3
Mitch's point is quite valid. The author included chiropractice. But my operating surgeon sent me to a chiropractor for post-op rehab, without which I would not be able to use my leg for years, or ever. At least he didn't include Climategate, probably the table is old.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, July 22 2010 12:51 PM (/ppBw)
4
Chiropractors are insane. They believe in a magical energy field called innate intelligence and that all diseases are caused by distortions of this field by what they call subluxations which they fix via spinal manipulation.
Not sure what your operation was for, but chiropractors, when they skip all the voodoo, can be adequate physical therapists for some courses of treatement, albeit unlicensed and poorly trained for that role.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2010 04:38 PM (PiXy!)
5
One should make a distinction between garden-variety chiropractors, who are by and large competent physical therapists with an emphasis on joint and bone adjustment, and the old-school chiropractors, who subscribe to the mad pseudo-religious cant that Pixy is talking about. 90% of the bad reputation that chiropractors suffer from are due to these lunatic quacks. It's *sort* of like psychiatrists and Freudians, but amplified three-fold. And kind of like with psychiatrists, people seem to get addicted to regular chiropractic visits. My supervisor is one of those inexplicable people who regularly go to a chiropractic despite not having anything obviously wrong with them.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, July 23 2010 03:03 AM (jwKxK)
If they were genuine medical practitioners, they would have studied medicine. If you want to be a physical therapist, there are degree programs in that field that don't involve rampant pseudoscience. Or you can do the hard yards and earn an MD, and specialise in that field.
Or you can throw rationality and responsibility to the winds and be a chiropractor. They're not all lunatics, but they sure ain't doctors.
The field of chiropracty has no reason to exist. Where it overlaps actual medicine, it's redundant; where it doesn't, it's ineffective and potentially dangerous.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 23 2010 03:38 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 16 2010 04:39 AM (PiXy!)
3
Who burned you? Walter Jon Williams just did a pretty good murder-mystery about that stupid craze from about six years back that featured large-scale email-style interactive puzzle-rollplaying. I'm not sure if it qualifies as science-fiction, since the only thing even remotely implausible is a rogue HVT widget which strikes me as more of a "five-minutes-into-the-future" than real SF. Especially since nobody's really talking about what exactly happened last May with that five-minute crash in the US markets.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Saturday, July 17 2010 01:15 AM (jwKxK)
4
I was reading the monthly newsletter from Galaxy Bookshop here in Sydney. Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, and Walter Jon Williams all have books out this month with the same basic premise, and that's just from the authors I was actually looking for. Charlie Stross did it recently too.
So the new rule is, unless your name is Philip K. Dick, the topic is off limits.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 17 2010 03:34 AM (PiXy!)
5
How about movie adaptions ? Could we declare a moratorium on adaptions of P.K. Dick ?
Have you read Daemon by Daniel Suarez ? I've just started it. Pretty good so far.
Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, July 18 2010 12:07 AM (cB03i)
1
I love it that all these people are taking this "remix" so seriously.
If Firefly was on during the days of Airwolf it would more than likely
have an intro like this.
Posted by: Ben at Saturday, July 17 2010 07:57 AM (UrZ9Z)
