Help Wanted: Tier II Tech Support

Tier II Tech Support

We a fast paced importer/exporter seeking a qualified candidate to increase the efficiency of our operations and provide tier II phone support to our sales staff of menopausal christian women and financially desperate managers.

Candidate must have

-college degree
-5-7 years experience with Windows 7, Windows Server 2000 SBE and Turbopascal
-CCNA, MCSE, MSCA, A+
-long fingers
-be willing to travel up to 18%
-expert knowledge of HEPAA, BRNI, LPRR, and Kll regulations.

We are looking for a self-motivated, self-starter who is willing to go the extra mile.  You will be on call weekends.  Must have reliable phone and car.   Excellent health insurance and ten vacation days available after a number of years.

Qualified applicants will be invited to a 3-4 day interview in Pittsburg.    Older candidates need not apply, younger candidates must have 5-7 years experience.

Send cover letter, resume, and detailed salary history to Yishda Cemanagi at yishda.cemanagi@GOTECH.biz

Conan vs. Leno: Weighing In

The Abstract Exponent endorses Conan O’brien without equivocation.

Jay Leno was an apologist for idiotic and atrocious Bush policies for the duration of their administration, now he plays the victim.

I watched his Monday night show and it was terrible.  Eating barbecue with Sandra Bullock, with a chef waiting on them hand and foot.  A list of ten questions with Anderson Cooper, which was awkward.  Then something else I couldn’t bear to watch.

I will say what I, and the AE, have been saying for ten years and that is that Jay Leno is out of touch with everyone but Republicans over 50.   He needs to take a break and reconnect, like Seinfeld did.  He hasn’t made me laugh for over a decade and I have found him politically wrong.   He’s grasping for recognition and it’s screwing up the career of a brilliant person.

So Conan, if they move you, leave NBC and go back to the people.  Go back to standup and they will be begging for you next year.

Remember, your humor is all inclusive and NBC is GE.  GE makes weapons.

AE

Screenplays and Stories For All

After putting it off for what seems like a decade, I have screenwriting and short story samples up online in pdf form, just check the menu on the right=>

It is a great day,

Michael

The Idiocy of Microsoft Part 412898028408912

I always have to qualify my disappointments, my many, many disappointments with Microsoft, with certain compliments, like Xbox LIVE is still better than PC or playstation online gaming, once you’re in it just works.

But it’s still as if they make it as hard as possible.   You can’t just have an xbox live card, you must put your card on file, and when you put your card on file, Microsoft is very vague about what they are going to use it for and they charge you when they say they are not going to charge you.   This happened, I had to go to my bank and get a new card with my bank.

Then I wanted to cancel so my card wouldn’t be charged, a dozen different pages at microsoft support said all I had to do was click there and it would tell me how, but none of them did.  Finally I learned from yahoo answers that I have to call a number and talk about waiting on hold!

I was at walmart buying a cheap microwave and thought I would pick up a three month card, but I got a ‘microsoft points’ card instead by accident.  Fine I think, it says ‘Unlimited Gaming Possibilities’ on the card and I know that every time I use a gold membership one month card it says I get and spend points, so I go to upgrade my membership and it only gives me the option to pay with a card.  Can’t pay with microsoft points.

Not very unlimited.   Why exactly can’t you buy xbox live gold membership with the points?  It’s the whole point of the points!!!  So that you don’t have to be charging your card for gaming!!!!

Well I have a blog and I’m going to blog about it.

Holiday Recommendations - AE Seal of Encouraged Entertainment

Pandorum, District 9 and Stargate Universe - We got serious, hardcore science fiction this year and I’m thankful.

Dexter, Californication, Party Down and True Blood - These shows have been excellent this year.  We got mythic serial characters this year and I’m thankful.

Redbelt - This is a very serious movie whose ideals I seek to live up to, there’s no other movie that I’ve ever seen that explains these things.  I’m thankful.  (not to be ignorant, this is a 2008 movie, but I first saw it in 2009 so I’m calling it close enough)

Capitalism: A Love Story, The Age of Stupid and Collapse - There are people out there telling the truth, I’m thankful for Michael Moore, Spanner Films, and Michael Ruppert.  AE thinks Michael Ruppert is one of the greatest men who have ever lived.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 - Despite being a sequel within a sequel, this game is a megalith of alternate reality.  No other recent event in the virtual world compares to it.  Cities could be built around it.

COD4 Modern Warfare 2 - Further Thoughts

By the counter in the game, I’ve played two solid days of MW2 and that’s hardly any at all compared to some.   I thought I would put up a few more reasons why this game is the new standard.

Re-playability - every time I play through the spec op scenarios, they go a different way.  You get to kill sometimes more than a hundred enemy soldiers and use a wide variety of tactics and weapons.

Visual - This game just looks beautiful from every direction, where the previous version definitely had a few rought edges.  Everywhere you look, there are precisely constructed details.  The floating debris is one of my favorite new additions, it prevents you from being able to look for pixel motion to spot enemy players.   Well you still can, but there’s that extra step now where you have to rule out a floating piece of plastic.

Weapons - the variety of weapons and attachments is just awesome.  Want to carry two .357 magnums with full metal jacket rounds as your backup?  Want a fully automatic shotgun with a silencer and motion detector?  Want a heavy machine gun with a thermal sight and a silencer?  The world is your oyster.

Tall grass - I know this was one of my main requests for the second version, more places where Ghillie suits are useful, and although I still wish there were more, there are certainly enough.  One map has poppy fields and another is just a huge field of tall grass.  The ghillie suits really work in this game.

Killstreaks - The ability to get killstreak rewards dropped as resupply is brilliant.  This makes sentry guns and various airstrikes more random.  The AC-130 attack is a great addition to the multiplayer genre.

Awards - finally I’m getting credit for having the highest kill to death ratio and the world is happy.

Here’s the strange thing though, even with all the new weapons and maps, my kill to death ratio is the same as it was in the first version, down to the second decimal.  Go figure.

Grading Infinity Ward on Fulfilling My Demands for 2.0: 80%

Bonus Number 11!  Please open up more buildings in the city maps.  If you have a machine gun, you can open doors to residential homes.

-Check.  There are many more interiors to explore.  They compromised on busting down doors by putting in many, many windows to break.

10. Good camouflage for all teams, no red on Islamacist’s uniforms

-Check.  Although the islamicist uniform remains, the red is much more subtle.

9. Maps where ghillie suits are useful, big maps with lots of tall grass.

-Check.

8.  Complete controller layout customization options so I’m not accidentally punching all the time when I want to turn quickly.  Am I the only one who has this problem?

-Denied.  Although this problem seems to be lessened by the size of the maps, there are much fewer occasions to be startled like that.

7. Multiple and/or adjustable Zoom settings on scopes

-Denied.  Although the thermal scope is a very nice compromise.

6. Hand signals and/or general audible commands

-Denied.  Really aren’t enough buttons on the controller for this.

5. Ability to lean around corners, if SOF can do it so should COD

-Denied.  Although the crawling is improved.

4. More morphable terrain, airstrikes should actually be able to bring down a crumbling stone wall

-Denied.  If I hadn’t already counted the windows, I might have here also.

3.  Bodies should remain on the ground so it gives the sense that there is an actual war going on.

-Denied.  Bodies and dropped weapons still disappear after about a minute.

2. No healing in hardcore mode, hardcore means realistic

-I might have to remove this one from the listing, you don’t heal in hardcore, the damage accumulates, the pulsing red just goes away.

1. Scoring system that reflects kill/death ratio more than kills only and being able to survive an entire round should be the ultimate victory.

-Check.  Although the scoring system still rewards kills no matter how many deaths you get, there is still a nice accolades system, where although everyone wins an award, the kill/death ration award is the most coveted.

4/10.  But the things they included that I didn’t think of are numerous.  The expanded list of killstreak awards, the Bling perk that allows multiple weapons attachments, and the larger size of the maps in general take us up to 7/10.

I’m also going to give them another point for the Spec Ops section which is really barrels of fun, some of my favorite bot gaming since perfect dark.

So for fulfilling my imaginations, I give Infinity Ward an 80%.

And I’m not even going to hold that twenty percent against them, because I know they could have done the morphable terrain and pileable bodies if it weren’t for America’s laggy network.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2: The Greatest Game In the History Of The World

I wanted to reserve judgement before I had played the game for a week, but now I am prepared to say it.  This game is off of the scale.  It is so entertaining it makes me weep thinking about how many hours of my life I will be able to spend playing it.

Call of Duty 4 is separated into 3 games, each of which could be standalone games all of their own and still be worth sixty dollars, in my opinion.

The Campaign is like a movie that you shoot a bunch of people in.  I find myself on the edge of my seat and lately hardly anything does that to me.  It’s like tripping.

Spec Ops is the most incredible bot combat game I’ve ever played.   There are twenty five scenarios and all of them are brutal and can be set on an insane level of difficulty.  The cooperative play possibilities, especially those involving online play, are truly incredible.

The online multiplayer is beyond incredible.  Compared to the original, the yammering has stopped.  In the fifteen or so hours I have played, and I’m level 27 thanks for asking, I heard one person complain about a game feature, AND THEY WERE SHOUTED DOWN.

“Uh, I don’t think I’d be knocking 2.0, man.”

I have never seen anything like it.  The entire xbox live community is in awe and Infinity Ward are wearing hats of money and it looks to me like, in this particular instance, capitalism has worked.

We are having fun and everybody got what they paid for.

Addendum: More coming soon, I am going to go through each of my recommendations from my earlier post and grade Infinity Ward on how well they read my mind.

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare Two Rundown Intitial Impressions 09 Multiplayer Only Pre-19th Level Mercenary Deathmatch

The maps, oh, the beautiful maps.  They are huge.  There is much cover and tall grass and many, many multi-level buildings.  There are more places to hide than you can shake a stick at.

The kill bonuses, oh, the kill bonuses.  The stealth bomber.  The harrier.   The sentry gun.

The new perks system.

The new guns.  The emblems.  The whole thing.

And on launch day, with less than an hour of updates, I played for 5 hours with only one lag-out, which the system recovered from by switching hosts in under 20 seconds.

Truly astounding.

One of these days I’ll feel like the snowmobile ride that the campaign is going to be, but for now, this is deathmatch heaven.

As far as the Abstract Exponent is concerned, this game is an 11.

Now if I can just get my cable modem’s average latency down by about 200ms….

Anybody know how to do that?

More to come on CODmw2.

Fable II: RPG Lite by Microsoft

Last week, I found myself bored at the video rental store, tired of just about every kind of movie or game I could have possibly rented.  You know the feeling,  when you’ve seen every episode of The Wire, Doctor Who, Deadwood and Arrested Development at least twice and all of the movies out there suck except the ones in the ‘Special Interest’ section that you know are going to be about why most everything sucks so bad.
I decided to examine all of the video games for something I might just want to try out, even though I had read the reviews of everything they had and knew that Lord of the Rings Conquest involved a lot of Cheap Deaths and Fallout 3 was really easy.
I found myself, however, in the mood to take a risk.  Sometimes, during this extended stay in a pre-jump drive civilization, one becomes willing to risk 8.99 on the chance to live in another world for a little while.  So there I was with Farcry 2 and Fable 2 in my hands, wondering what kind of experience I wanted.
I thought back to my experience with the original farcry, how I liked most everything about the game up until I started turning into a werewolf. But even the chance that they had actually, really this time, created an open sandbox world wasn’t enough to get me into the idea.
Fable II wasn’t really exciting me either. The last time I had been morally judged by a video game was back when I was playing Star Wars Jedi games on the PC and I never really liked it.  I was always killing things I could have taken an hour to sneak around and before I knew it my character was evil and the cut scenes showed me killing all my friends for giggles.
I had been playing a lot of Call of Duty 4, attempting all of the missions on veteran(which if you haven’t tried is extremely frustrating), and Saints Row 2(but I had the attack helicopter, so everything seemed meaningless), so I decided to step back from the firearms for a week and see if I could come to enjoy slashing and spellcasting.
And be morally judged according to the ethos of Microsoft.
[Spoiler: I'm pretty good.]

Roleplaying games should always be judged first on their ability to immerse the gamer in the life of the character.  Basically, if I find myself thinking about any of my real life problems as I play the game, the designers didn’t do their job.  Fable II succeeds in this area.  You start the game as a child beggar fighting for the chance at a better life while your sister is openly pressured by vagrants into becoming a prostitute.  This gives you a chance to learn the basics of the game, including controls, display and morality.  Then your sister gets shot by the head honcho guy and you somehow survive a fall from a 500 foot window.
So Fable II is not for kids, alright?
So, immersed in my character, I set out into the sandbox world to see what I could do and what I could not do.  As sandbox worlds go, Fable II is a pretty small one.  There are really only a handful of areas and although you can wander semi-freely through them(there are just some plants you can’t walk through), the game rations it’s space out with the story.  You can’t really jump ahead or just explore for very long without completing the missions.  I always wanted to go to Wraithmarsh for instance, because all of the NPC’s said they hated it, but I couldn’t find it.  Turns out you have to learn where the teleporter is, and activate the teleporter, during one of the later missions.
While I was searching the areas I could go to for ways to get into new areas, I discovered that the map was, er, crappy.  First, you have to push start and wait a couple seconds each time you bring it up.  Then you appear as a giant arrowhead on the map, obscuring the pathways you are trying to look at.  On top of that, the map is only annotated with colored symbols and you have to look at the legend to figure out what each of them are.  But that won’t quite help because if there are two ‘x’ symbols on the map marking exits from the zone, there is no part of the map that will tell you which other zone it will take you to.  You have to walk to it, and once there you only have a few steps with the name of the zone this exit takes you to on screen, before it just loads the new zone, which takes 30 seconds.
You wonder if the person who made this map had ever actually used one in real life….maybe that’s why mapquest isn’t as popular as google maps?
Speculations aside, you are going to have to find new areas because each zone has a limited amount of monsters, quests and things you can buy.  If you want to be extra prepared for the next mission, then you are going to have to really work to collect that money and experience.
Albion, the sandbox world, has plenty of treasure boxes all over the place so you’ll find a lot of money, but creatures that you kill don’t drop anything.  So when you kill five bandits who were coming at you with swords and guns, don’t think you can just pick those up and sell them like you can in any other roleplaying game.  Monsters only drop experience.
I can understand how this improves game flow, you don’t have to revisit each corpse and press ‘A’ to pick things up.  You do, however, have to hold down the trigger to collect your experience bubbles, which eventually becomes just as annoying.  It isn’t clear how long you have to hold the trigger down before you have all the bubbles, nor is it clear how long the bubbles will just sit there waiting to be collected before they just disappear.
Microsoft’s implementation of the skill/experience concept deserves some discussion as well.  In a roleplaying system, the designers have to find a way to quantify the progression of an individual through life in a way that legitimizes is believable and fun.  So what are your attributes?  Strength and skill are self explanitory and function decently to define the amount of damage you can take and how fast you are with a sword, but what about magic?
Dungeons and Dragons has Intelligence and Wisdom as your primary spellcasting attributes, and here Microsoft diverges.  Fable designers chose ‘Will’, ostensibly ‘Willpower’ as the primary attribute required to cast fireballs and lighting strikes.
(And here I kept hearing Magenta from Rocky Horror saying ‘It’s a triumf ov your Vill!’)
I can’t help but think that this is Microsoft’s internal corporate sigma 6 style philosophy, that humans alter their environment with the power of will alone, that wisdom and intelligence and any other trait you might have can be summarized by this one.  (There are nazi overtones also, but I won’t go into those.)
Another important aspect of Fable II is the aging system.  After a few missions you will notice how fat you have become.  And you will have scars, venereal diseases and white hair.  However, this will never affect how many women want to follow you around in the towns so long as you have enough ‘renown’, which you pretty much just get for completing missions.  Fatness is really oversimplified and is totally avoidable if you just never eat meat(Fable II is, after all, a PETA friendly game) only the food vendors in Albion only ever have one of each product.  It’s not like you can just stock up.  In town you can buy ten vegetables and ten meats, or you can buy ten vegetables.  So if you want to be skinny, you better need less food(which, btw, you only use for healing).  I didn’t discover this until I was already fat, so maybe I should have read the manual, but who cares, the chicks still dig me because I’m totally famous!
I found myself disturbingly attracted to this ‘fame’ aspect.  For some reason the gender balance of albion is way off, so you find yourself the only available male who isn’t a dowdy functionary or complete deadbeat.  So women just want you in their pants.  The men too.  In fact, it eventually becomes difficult to have sex in a motel room without a dozen people showing up.  Then the guys start thinking you are into them because they somehow thought they were involved in the sex and, well, this game could swing a lot of ways.
So once you have sex with a woman, she wants to marry you and won’t have sex with you again until such a time.  So I had sex once with every woman in the towns and left them high and dry every time they mentioned marriage.  By the end of my week with Fable II, there weren’t any women who would have sex with me anymore and I was mobbed with marriage oriented nagging every time I went to the city to shop for a better giant cleaver.
I really thought about getting married though, it’s not like I was totally opposed to the idea, but these women were just not turning me on.  They didn’t want to do anything I wanted to do.  If I took them with me to any area outside the city, they would get killed by balverines(read: werewolves) in the first battle and didn’t have any sense to stand out of the way.
Nor did my character(or me) and these women had anything in common.  Nor were they particularly attractive or unique.  Their faces looked the same and they were all the same height.  The depth of their characters were just that they liked this or that type of pie and the thumbs up.  And, not surprisingly, they generally dislike hanging out in Wraithmarsh(which should be called Banshee-marsh unless I missed the wraiths)
I just didn’t find a relationship I could really get into in Fable II, and this left me wondering if it was a failure of the game designers or if I was just too picky as a man.  It got wierder when I was at the [real] store checkout the other day and I actually considered smiling right at the cute attendant and flexing my muscles to impress her(one of the npc interaction options in the game that universally causes characters to like you more)  My experience with checkout clerks has been pretty negative in the past, so I was willing to try anything.  Maybe it is just that simple!
This brings me to my big complaint with Fable II, the whole game seems like a training introduction to another game, like World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls.  Or it’s for people who like choices, but not too many of them.  Weapon choice, women choice, location choice, monster types, mission types, job types, everywhere you look there are just too few options.
The same could be said of moral choices, the game only gives you three or four, unless you consider how it counts romance or your treatment of random fowl.  Will you torture to complete your mission?  Will you sacrifice of yourself to complete a mission if it means your hair will be gray for the rest of the game?  Will you accept a mission to vandalize someone’s property or take revenge for a ghost?  And sure, you could kill all the villagers or constantly freak them out.
(this is one of my favorite parts of the game, when villagers mob you and you cast some loud, glowing spell and everyone freaks out and runs away…gosh I wish I could do that in real life)
So what is the point of this moral judgement when it’s so clear what the results are going to be?  What does it mean when I choose how I will morally behave in a video game?  What does it say about me when I try to be as good or bad as I can?
And what does it mean when I just act natural, like I would, as if I could forget there was this screen and console device between me and the imaginary world and the game designers, and Microsoft, who I consider evil, tells me I am fat, diseased and pretty decent?
I thought that in the course of this review I would get somewhat closer to the answer of that question, but it’s been a thousand words and I’m not.
So my search for a categorical imperative continues….

In Short:

The Good

does not scare away the newcomer, auto-targeting, visceral combat, decent story, dog finds everything for you.

The Bad

inevitable fatness, looks like a children’s game but there are condoms, eventually becomes very easy, npc’s all the same, few areas to explore, dog finds everything for you, vendors only have one of each thing (i.e. fruit store has a single carrot), few quests, few items,  just in general a small game.

Recommendation: Rent and if it’s fun then you will enjoy Elder Scrolls of Oblivion.

Recommendations for next version:

-more areas

-more free running(i.e. can jump over all things that look like you can jump over them)

-more quests

-wider variety of npc’s

-wider variety of weapons