Yeah... you gotta love reviews like this

Hard to believe that Alien was created in 1979. A year after I was born and the movie still proves that space is a crazy, dangerous place where no one hears you scream, you can't trust AI and you better damn well bring weapons next time :P

http://gizmodo.com/5313654/alien-making-space-scary-since-1979

From the Full Article:

"Sure, they control the ship using outdated CRT monitors, but Ridley Scott was clearly influenced by Stanley Kubrick's realism in 2001. He just added pants-shitting terror to that realism."

Because it's just so true...

From http://www.qdb.us/205783
chuckstud: C# is terrible
chuckstud: it's like visual basic raped c++ and c++ didn't get the abortion

You know it's funny because it's sorta true :P

Suckage thy name is "Stuck at the Airport"

So here I am after working a full day and getting a lot of business done. Am I at home? No that would be too normal. I am stuck at the Lihue airport on Kauai... it's oh, 641PM and I'm camped out in the Hawaiian Air Lounge waiting for a 9PM flight out.

The flight itself takes all of 25 minutes. I will have spent the better half of 5 hours here. Sigh.

5-Minute Review GT5: Prologue (PS3)

I will mince no words in saying I am a fan of the Gran Tourismo franchise. Played GT2, GT3 and 4 heavily and now comes the precursor to the full version, GT5: Prologue.

Let's look at things that are fun, easy to navigate menus, fairly quick load times (mostly owing to the game data being installed on the HDD versus run purely off BRD). Environments feel much more immersive and subtle touches like lighting/shadow and vehicle detail are are times nearly photorealistic. Car response in terms of steering and control feel a little bit easier to manage, particularly when trying to draft the AI cars. Some of this however is due to the longer throws of the analog sticks on the Sixaxis/DualShock 3.

The downside. Let's face it, as games go Prologue is a preview. Granted one that I'm paying for, but hey I'm a nut. I think it provides a good initial feel for the type of handling and graphics you'll find in the full release in 2009 (Painful I know) but many areas need to be optimized. Lag during online gameplay (though truth be told I had similar lag issues on Forza 2), occasional stutter with reflection rendering, lack of tuning and damage physics give you that slightly less than true GT feel and gives an edge to the likes of Forza.

Overall if you just want some slightly different tracks or, like myself am a GT fan, I think the $40 price tag isn't great, but not horrible. Visually stunning, fairly good handling and enjoyable track variation and environs bode well for this teaser release and hopefully results in a better final product in GT5.

Final Score 7.9/10

Epic Fail: Vraxx + Sick = Fail

OK so I confess that at times I am a workaholic. Not because I love work, but I hate trying to scramble to fix things later. That and I don't find myself particularly efficient. So Friday was miserable, body aches, previous day had been 15 hours long, I was supposed to be on sick leave but I remembered that I promised a coworker we'd do some triage testing in the lab. So off I went figuring "Ha I'm tough enough"... Bad, bad, bad idea. The weekend was mostly OK, I did chores, I read, but I realized I was still feeling woozy and food was not my friend.

So here it is Monday, I no longer have a fever but I'm coughing up my spleen... and what do I do? I STILL try to do work. Logged into a system with documentation opened up to try to configure something. After a bit of of frustration I realize why it's not working. I just spent 2 minutes trying to click the buttons on a screenshot... with that ladies and gents, I am not going to be doing anymore work today...

Vraxxism of the Day: It feels so good to be bad...

Addison: somehow i feel wrong and dirty loading an open source DB on a windows box
like the box is looking at me going "what? no MS SQL... for shame..."
then again the wrong and dirty part is probably why it feels so good :P

For reference, I was installing PostgreSQL on a Windows box for some testing since I didn't feel running with the MSDE. And I admit, it does feel good ^_^

And people wonder why US folks don't want these jobs

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/25/india.outsourcing.ap/index.html

Now far be it for me to begrudge India for their outsourcing but I've got news for you. US laborers faced similar issues with health, work/life balance and everything else mentioned in TFA. I just find it amusing that they're only NOW realizing it's impact on their own workforce.

Let's face it support centers are one of the weirdest jobs out there, you're expected to know everything, solve a problem remotely and above all do so with a chipper attitude and in a completely professional manner. In the US the quality of these centers often went to pot simply because nobody wanted such a raw deal job. Now that the economy is worse we bitch about not having the option. Hopefully Indian call centers will be used as "part" of the support infrastructure and now the entire infrastructure.

I'll close by commenting, yes I have worked a support hotline as one of my first jobs in the IT industry and while it was a grueling start I think it also helped me develop into the analyst I am today.