Snow, Ice and Gorgons

Snow and ice

We had our first real blast of snow the other night. I didn't really believe the forecast, because when I read it in the early part of the afternoon it was a warm, sunny day. Not long after I got home, though, I looked out of the window toward the west and saw some really nasty looking dark grey clouds between us and the mountains. Then up came the wind and down came the snow. This will be lesson on how quickly the weather can change from spring-like to arctic conditions in a matter of minutes - something to remember whenever we decide to take a trip to the mountains.

Yesterday morning the ground was covered with a white layer - as luck would have it the wind had kept the roads clear so getting to work wasn't a problem. In any case it had all pretty much evaporated by lunchtime. Then my boss told me that the "little bit" that we'd had was just part of a storm system stretching all the way to the Texas panhandle - some people had been killed.

It started up again yesterday afternoon, about the time I left the office. The driving conditions weren't great because the wind was blowing strongly from the north while I was driving east along a very exposed road. The snow was falling horizontally from left to right, and more than once a gust hit the car hard enough that I felt myself being pushed southward - i.e. in danger of going off the road and into some farmer's field. After what my boss had said, I admit to feeling a little worried.

It must have stayed pretty cold overnight because this morning there was crunchy ice on the driveway and some big, evil patches of ice on the road all along the four or five miles up to the freeway. Hopefully they'll have melted away before I leave today. The forecast says there's a chance of more snow later then it's supposed to be sunny and warm over the weekend... but I've already been warned to be ready for more snow.

I think I need to look into trading in the car for a Jeep...

Meanwhile in mythical ancient Greece...

Kate and I are both finding Titan Quest more than a little addictive. Kate was having trouble getting past three Gorgons in the Pythian Caves, until we found some information hinting that one of the Gorgons used magic to restore the health of the other two while you're fighting them. All we had to do was figure out which one; Kate was able to send that one down for the long dirtnap and with it gone the others weren't far behind.

One thing I can't wait to do is set us up a multiplayer game so that we can go through the quests together.

The first slow day since I started

Today I can breathe a bit

I've been in the new job about a month and for most of that time I've been way too busy to post anything here. The first week or so I was learning how the software was organized, then it was straight into fixing one of the simpler of the known bugs.

Having taken care of that one, I was thrown into the deep end when I was assigned a far more complicated bug fix - one that involved changes all the way from the JSPs at the front end to the JDBC at the back. The back end wasn't a problem - that's where I'm used to working - but it's been a while since I had to mess with HTML and Javascript. Still, the job was estimated at five days and it took me maybe seven altogether - not too bad considering I'm still feeling my way around the system.

In any case I'm now in limbo waiting for the next batch of bug reports to come through. The most challenging thing I've done today is think of a list of possible codenames for the new source branch that we'll be creating for those fixes.

And so, being at something of a loose end, I can write something to post. I don't feel like getting into anything heavy and since I've been working hard I think it's time to play hard for a bit...

Game news 1 - Half-Life² episode 2

The release date for HL2.2 has been pushed back yet again. It was originally supposed to be on the shelves late last year, then the word was it would appear around March '07 (i.e. about now). The latest word is that we won't see it until the third quarter of this year. Bah.

Game news 2 - Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

It looks like this one has been pushed back too - although it's difficult if not impossible to find anything specific on the official website, a note on Wikipedia says that the release date is now Q1 2008. Double bah.

There are a few interesting snippets available; for example it seems that you can choose to play your character on either the good or bad side, that there will be six character classes, the graphics will be exceptionally good, and the game is actually a prequel rather than a sequel, set about two thousand years before the storyline of the original Sacred.

Well, I suppose there is one good thing about the delayed release dates on both games: more time to buy faster computers and better graphics cards. Kate's machine and mine were high-spec when we got them, and the graphics cards were and still are pretty hot, but games are already out that expect faster CPUs than we have. I expect Sacred 2 in particular to be very demanding on the graphics.

Game news 3 - Titan Quest

A couple of months ago Gametrailers.com posted a video review of Titan Quest (click here to see the video review, if you have the bandwidth). They didn't give it particularly high marks for originality but all the same it looked interesting, and a few days ago Kate and I bought it to see how we liked it.

It's damn good. If you like swords-and-sorcery games like Diablo, Diablo II, Sacred etc., then I can recommend Titan Quest. It's the same kind of thing, this time set in the world of ancient Greek myths.

I'd recommend getting hold of the Immortal Throne expansion - it gives you ten extra player levels, another Mastery (which in combination with the existing masteries adds eight new character classes to the original 36), a complete new region/quest, extra storage for valuable items and a whole lot more.

There are some things I don't like and I wish they'd fix:

• The gameplay can get a little jerky at times; I'm going to try disabling my network connection and antivirus software to see if that helps.


• Only one camera angle - you can zoom in and out, but you can't pan around. Mostly it's not a problem but there have been times when the view is obscured by tree branches or overhanging rocks during a fight and it would be nice to be able to see who I'm fighting.


• When you save your game and restore it always restarts you at the last "Rebirth Fountain" - there isn't a genuine save/restore feature. This means that if you want to quit playing you have two choices - wait until you find the next fountain, or put up with having to go over a whole bunch of ground you already covered. Diablo II does pretty much the same thing, and I detested it. At least in Titan Quest the fountains don't seem to be as far apart as the save points in Diablo II, so it doesn't seem so bad - but what are the developers thinking with this? There's no need for it.


• Day/night cycles are something that no doubt the game designers think is a really cool idea - Diablo II has them, Sacred has them, no doubt a bunch of other games have them. Personally I wish there was an option to switch this off - I hate having to squint to see what I'm fighting at "night".


• The game could really use a whole stack more side-quests.

Despite all that the game is highly addictive, great to look at and lots of fun.

Until next time...

I suspect this little break isn't going to last long and it could well be another month before I get time to write again. We'll see...

Goodbye Texas, Hello Colorado

Yes, we moved

...and that's the main reason I haven't blogged for a while. It all started about six weeks ago, when I got a really interesting job offer. Then I was told that they wanted me to start the new job in two weeks, even though it meant moving a thousand miles. I managed to push the start back a week, but it still meant a lot to do in a short time.

What I should have done was to have professional movers come in, pack all our stuff, load it, move it, unload and unpack. If I'd done it that way we'd have probably been done in just a couple of days.

But I didn't do it that way. Instead I rented two trucks and a car transporter and we did most of the loading ourselves. I hired a couple of guys in Texas to load the heavy stuff we couldn't manage, and another bunch of guys in Colorado to unload.

The whole thing was a nightmare. There was far more stuff to pack and load than I thought. Kate wore herself out packing; I wore myself loading stuff onto the trucks (and unloading and reloading one truck when the guys I hired to load the furniture did it so badly they wasted more than half the available space).

Finally, at about 4am one morning about three weeks ago, we got to the point where we were ready to leave... and couldn't, because when I got the car onto the transporter I found the thing had a broken ratchet on the right side, and we had to wait four hours for a mechanic to come out and fix it.

We got just a couple of hours sleep on a hard floor, and finally got away at about lunchtime. Kate was so tired that we didn't even make it as far as the Texas/Oklahoma state line before she started falling asleep at the wheel and we had to stop and get a motel room.

Starting off from there the next morning, we didn't stop again except for bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, food breaks and fresh-air wake-ups, until we got to our new house. Normally, after a night's sleep it wouldn't have been so bad - but number 1 son had shared his bad cold with us before we left and that, probably combined with exhaustion to lower our resistance, was the final blow. By the time we got to the area around Denver Kate was so ill I was wondering if we'd have to park the trucks up in the parking lot of a hospital.

But we finally made it. We're still unpacking things but the house is becoming more homey every day. The area is beautiful - we can see the rockies off to the west, covered in snow; there are places to go and things to do, and unlike Texas you can go for a walk without having to worry about dying from exhaustion in 110° heat.

But if we ever have to move again, it will be done the proper way - like I said, I'll get the professionals in to do it for us, even if it means going into debt to cover the cost. Anything is worth not having to go through that again...