Peter Hodges

The little guy is sick. Again. This time, it’s pink eye and an ear infection. I took him to the doctor on Saturday morning for the pink eye (obvious to anyone who’s ever seen it) and was disturbed to find that he had the added bonus of an ear infection. He had given me no signs; i.e. no ear pulling, no difficulty swallowing, no fussiness. The result of this is that I ended up going into work today while the wife could provide free child care so that I could be at home with him tomorrow. I detest working on the weekends, but at least this was for a good cause. I simply had too much to do to take tomorrow off.

I’m reading Stirling’s The Sunrise Lands while simulatenously doing a re-read of Tyrion Lannister’s passages in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. A buddy of mine and I are having a good-natured debate about the future of Tyrion and how the foreshadowing may be intentionally mis-leading. If you’ve read the books, feel free to comment below and we’ll chat. Otherwise, go buy A Game of Thrones now. There is no excuse for not reading this book. As a matter of fact, I think Kate might visit you with a baseball bat if you refuse. (Look at that evil face! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

The Sunrise Lands is better than Stirling’s last book. The world is more mature, the characters are more likeable, and there’s a more concrete story to follow. I’ll write a full review later, but so far, it’s getting the thumb’s up.

As you might have inferred, I was disappointed by The Bionic Woman premiere, but I didn’t have a chance to talk about Heroes very much. (Spoilers follow; if you don’t want to read them, skip to the next paragraph.) I have mixed emotions about where the writers went with the story, specifically Parkman’s divorce, Nathan Petrelli’s (yes, he’s alive) descent into despair, and the curious absence of Niki, Micah, and D.L. I’ve read in other places that D.L.’s character will not be back for this season. I guess he bled out at the climax of season one? I’m also not wild about introducing new characters. The ensemble cast was quite large enough, and I was enjoying their stories. Throwing in new characters is just going to make it a hopelessly jumbled mess.

Team Fortress 2 is continuing to occupy my time. I have some concerns about balance issues (the spy and the pyro are currently overpowered), but in a friendly server, these serve as a irritating distraction rather than a game breaker. There are isolated reports of snipers being over-powered, but I haven’t found that to be true yet. I hope to continue to play this, despite a lack of interest from my core group of gamer buddies. It’ll have to continue to entertain me to pull me away from Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which debuts this Tuesday. I don’t expect to get a whole lot of writing done in the latter half of the week.

And speaking of writing, Loss of Innocence is in a major overhaul. Since the first three chapters were serialized here on the site, I’m getting feedback that the first section is a little choppy. The latter chapters are smoother (confirmed by outside readers), but I’ve having to make some narrative changes to accomodate some editorial requests that I’ve had. (No, I don’t have a book deal yet, but my “representation” is having me make changes to ready the book for sale.) I will say that I think the changes compromise my “artistic vision” somewhat, but the bottom line is that I want to sell books. If the publisher wants something that I don’t find too morally reprehensible, I’ll put it in there. As a matter of fact, I might even put out. Any takers?

That’s about it in Pete’s world. How’s life in your neck of the woods?

I’m talking about NBC’s Bionic Woman.

Michelle Ryan smolders enough, even in a hospital gown, to cause heart palpitations. Katee Sackoff (of Battlestar Galactica fame) is brutal, gorgeous, and deadly as the show’s shadowy nemesis. It’s really too bad that the show can’t proceed on just eye-candy.

The pilot was choppy, with too many cliches coming too fast for me to really buy into the story. The dark and mysterious elements felt a little too contrived for believability. The notion of a college-dropout bartender with the werewithal to become a super soldier with just a limited stay in a hospital is also suspect. I would rather have had an episode or two to get to know the characters, establish relationships, then see her transition into the role of the Bionic Woman over the course of another episode or two. As it stands, there was too much that happened too quickly in forty minutes of television for me to be really invested in the characters.

I’m going to keep this on the DVR for one more week to see if the show can ovecome a rocky pilot episode.

These headphones are the shit.

I mean that. The reviews on Newegg seem to be evenly divided between four and five stars, but I’ve found them to be incredible during a single night of usage. The surround sound is as good or better than my THX speakers with rich sound response, crisp sound, and definite directional audio. I tested the set-up with the opening scene of Gladiator, the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King, and the lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin from Revenge of the Sith. In every case, sounds moved from back to front, sometimes startling me.

Next, I tried the new Team Fortress 2 beta. In such a chaotic game, it was difficult to really distinguish the positional audio, but the sound experience was as richly detailed as playing through my normal speakers. Company of Heroes was a better game to test the positional audio. As I scrolled around the maps, I could hear the differences in sound, and each sound had a definite direction and intensity based on my position on the overall map. In fact, I would say that the headphones were better than my 5.1 set-up. I tried Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the stealth spy/shooter from Tom Clancy as a real test of the positional audio, and found that the game scared me more often than not. nVidia may claim that “this is they way it’s meant to be played” but sound does more for immersion for me than graphics.

The last thing I tried was a series of music. I used Dream Theater’s Images and Words album, the London Symphony Orchestra’s recording of The 1812 Overture, and various MP3’s from my collection. In all cases, I found the sound quality to be superb. CD Audio sounds the best, of course, but these headphones have the fidelity to actually allow you to distinguish between high quality MP3s and CD’s. That’s not usual in a headset designed for gaming.

I do have a few caveats: The headphones require a great deal of tweaking in your sound card settings. I’m currently using an Audigy X-Fi card, and I found that I had to change the crystallizer settings, tweak the EQ, mess with the volume settings, and manage the volume levels on the in-line control box on the headphones before I finally found my sweet spot. My initial impression was that the bass response was weak, but after a few minutes of tweaking, the bass was enough to rattle my teeth. It was actually uncomfortable, which is nothing something that I would have ever expected from a set of headphones. The only complaint that I have is that the headset came with a splitter that would allow you to run both your headphones and your external speakers at the same time. Unfortunately, the splitter seems to be mis-wired. When I performed the positional sound test with the splitter in-line, the right and left channels come out of the left cup on the headphones and the left speaker on my THX setup. I’ve taken the splitter out of line and will just manually switch between the speakers and the headphones for now. I’m hoping that an email to Turtle Beach will clear up the problem.

The first of course, is anything that falls under the Patriot Act. The second dumbest thing I’ve ever heard is the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). To be the third dumbest thing that I’ve ever heard puts you in pretty august company. It’s right up there with stabbing yourself in the eye with an electric knife, drinking benzene, and immersing your private parts in sulfuric acid.

Michigan Democrat John Dingell wants to discuss the following points for reducing global warming:

• A 50-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline and jet fuel, phased in over five years, on top of existing taxes.
• A tax on carbon, at $50 a ton, released from burning coal, petroleum or natural gas.
• Phaseout of the interest tax deduction on home mortgages for homes over 3,000 square feet. Owners would keep most of the deduction for homes at the lower end of the scale, but it would be eliminated entirely for homes of 4,200 feet or more.

First of all, conceding that there is such a thing as anthropomorphic global warming (which can’t be conclusively demonstrated by scientists who aren’t suckling at the NSF teat or by those who don’t have a grudge against America), those three bullet points strike at the hearts of those who keep officials in this country elected. Gas prices are already outrageous thanks to price gouging from the likes of Exxon-Mobil and the towel-headed savages in the Middle East. Why in the world would I elect a congressman who wants me to pay another 50 cents per gallon on my 34 mile commute every morning? Screw that!

Why would I want producers in the energy grid for Texas, which runs independently of the national energy grid, and is kept running by coal, to have to pay more “red-tape” taxes? Those taxes will end up costing the energy providers nothing because they’re passed down to me, the end-user.

Lastly, my home is just over 2400 square feet. In the not-to-distant future, I will be using the equity and the increasing property values from my wise real-estate investment to trade upward to a larger home for a smaller house-payment. I don’t want to lose my tax deductions simply because I have the material resources to make myself and my family more comfortable. This just goes to show the classic difference between the two parties in our “glorious” political system. Republicans want to work for what they get; Democrats want to play Robin Hood with the stuff that others worked hard to accumulate for themselves and their families.

My hard-earned dollars belong in my bank account, not some community pool to fund those who think we’re poisoning the environment or to pay for those who are too lazy or too apathetic to educate themselves.

We’re human because we use our intelligence for altruistic purposes, up to and including over-riding our survival instincts for the benefit of others.

Discuss.

The Free Companies live by one code; Honor Before Profit. Today, Chairman Thomas Netherward must judge and seal the fate of one who valued the latter over the first.

“Alchemist - Thomas Preview”
Story by Peter Hodges
Dramatic Reading by Kate Baker
Music: “Am I Not Merciful” by Hans Zimmer

 

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Since when did the number of available chipsets for motheboards suddenly explode like a litter of rabbits?

I’m looking at my upgrade path for the tiny, blue demon that sits under my desk. I used to upgrade every year, but I’ve waited for a while since there hasn’t been a terribly compelling reason to do so…until now. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep abreast of all the hardware trends, and now that I’m trying to get back into them, I’m finding myself somewhat bewildered.

The first thing that I did was to decide on the Intel route. The Core2Duo processors are really fast, economical, and their ability to be overclocked is unparalleled. The 6850, running at 3 GHz is a safe bet. Once I did that, I began to look at my motherboard (mobo) options. There are no less than four viable chipset options right now, each with their pros and cons. Do I want future insurance for a transition to DDR3 memory? Do I want a nVidia chipset that increases the performance of a potential SLI upgrade in the future? Do I want a feature-poor, but rock solid Intel chipset that provides a firm foundation for my computing needs? Do I stick with Asus, who has always given me great quality, or do I take a chance on a DFI board loaded with features and aglow with awesome reviews? Do I need extra PCI slots? Is the on-board audio finally up to the standards of my existing Soundblaster X-Fi? Do I really need two gigabit LAN ports? I mean, come on. Some of these questions are getting to be a bit…ludicrous.

I’ve also decided that I’ll stick with nVidia, despite my complaints about their driver implementations. For now, the performance difference between the existing ATI cards and the current crop of nVidia cards is just too steep to really justify going with ATI. I’m waiting on the rumored 8950 card that’s due in early November, which combines two GPU’s on one card. I’ll also stick with Corsair memory. Four GB should be enough to tide me over. I built a system with budget RAM one time–and I will never, ever, ever do it again. You can’t go wrong with a Raptor 10,000 rpm HDD for a boot drive, and it’s been my experience that a DVD-RW is a DVD-RW. It doesn’t matter what the brand is (aside from Plextor, perhaps), since they’re all made in the same fab in Taiwan.

Shove it all in an Antec 900 with a 600 W power supply and I’m golden.

The total cost, as configured with the required Windows Vista bloatware, and assuming the video card will be at the $600 price point, is just under $1800. So now I just have to wait for the video card to come out!