Blessed by the Potato

I’m very sad to say that less than 3 months after buying a Petro-Canada Mobility phone for Wayfare, they are jacking the calling rates: local calls are going up 25%, while long-distance goes up 50%. This is a ludicrous price increase, and really cheeses us off. While the rates are still competitive with most other offerings, we might switch to PC [President’s Choice — slightly confusing since Petro-Canada has the same initials] out of spite (and to get a phone with volume controls). At the very least we might start using PC calling cards for our long distance; since we’re all over the place when we do use our phones almost half the calls were long distance, and the decent rate (30 cents/min before) was part of the attraction for Petro-Canada.

Other than that the service so far has been just fine, with the exception of the fact that the phone comes with a camera and FM radio tuner but no bloody volume control (since when is volume an optional feature??).

Thanks to Ben for pointing this out; we still haven’t received any kind of notification from Petro-Canada.

I really enjoyed Fallout 3. So much so that I think I’m going to reroll a new character and play through it all over again. So even though I may be my own critical self and focus on the parts of the game that freaked me out, I did really enjoy it.

First off, you might as well start by watching the Yahtzee review at the Escapist since he is a professional.

Right, so first off that part about the characters being in the uncanny valley… well, it gets worse. Not only do they stare at you weirdly rigidly when talking, and not only is everyone covered in a layer of itchy-looking, radioactive grime, but they glow. If you talk to a NPC in a dark area you’ll see that their eyes and mouth are self-illuminating. I wasn’t sure if that was a way of trying to make them look more life-like in the regular lighting, or a product of the radioactive fallout, but it was pretty creepy. Plus as photo-realistic as the broken terrain is, the characters don’t seem to ever quite touch the ground.

Ok, to start a little closer to the beginning: Fallout 3 is a hybrid between a role-playing game and a first (or third, depending on your camera preferences) person shooter. You level up, assign skill points, rummage through things, and go on quests like an RPG, but also can fight it out and go for headshots like a first-person shooter. The game takes place in the area around Washington, DC sometime around 2277 — about 200 years after a nuclear war broke out. Things are, to put it succinctly, post-apocalyptic.

My faithful readers will recognize that I have a soft-spot for post-apocalyptic fiction, and Fallout 3 snuggles up in there quite nicely indeed.

The world is broken and everyone is focused on survival, except for the vault-dwellers, who live beneath the ground in massive fallout shelters, largely ignorant to the plight of the world outside after generations of electricity and safe water. Of course, things are starting to run down beneath the ground too, and throw in a bit of a political crisis when your dad (voiced by Liam Neeson) does the unthinkable and leaves the vault. Forced outside to find him (and escape the insanity of the vault’s overseer) you have to survive in the ruins of DC. The game takes itself fairly lightly, with lots of humour around and cutesy 50’s-style cartoons and billboards (and cars with fins), and home-brew steam-powered teddy bear launchers. Highly advanced nuclear powered levitating robotic butlers are controlled by monochrome text-entry computer terminals. There are numerous entertaining small touches to be found throughout the game world.

I found the game to be quite hard at first: resources were so scarce that I would quite often run out of ammo when exploring (and not all that far from town, either), which was doubly damning because early on my small arms skill was not very good so a lot of shots missed their target (for the min-maxers, I have to say that small arms is probably the most important skill to level up). Every half-full clip of ammo was a treasure. On top of that, the world is just run down: the vendors have very poor stock, and are themselves nearly broke, so even if you do manage to load up on vendor trash in your explorations, they may not have enough caps (bottle caps — the currency of the Fallout world) to buy it all from you. And even if you have the caps to pay for ammo instead of finding it, you may find the vendor only has a half-dozen bullets themselves.

Of course, by the end it was one-shot one-kill, and I had a mountain of ammo (though the traumatic experience of the early levels kept me paranoid so I never went anywhere without at least 3 guns that took different bullets and a melee weapon). I continued to play long after I hit the level cap of 20, partly to finish off the main storyline, and partly just because it was fun to explore the world, meet the quirky characters, discover the unique weapons, and set giant mutant ants on fire. It helps that the game world is very pretty (better than most of the characters), though this is also the first game I’ve played on my new PC (all settings were on max).

You can effect fairly sweeping changes in the game world with your choices, one of the biggest of which you face very shortly after escaping the vault (spoiler warning!): you come across a town built around an unexploded atomic bomb. You can choose to detonate it, destroying the whole city and leaving nothing but a radioactive crater behind, which was very pretty to watch. You can be nice and help those in trouble, or you can just bash their heads in and take their stuff. I haven’t tried murdering the characters central to the storyline, but no one else is sacred: you can go on a rampage and wipe out virtually any settlement you want to.

There are a lot of subway tunnels to explore, most of which are mandatory for the downtown DC area (which you will need to thoroughly explore for most quests, including the main storyline). Fortunately, once you’ve navigated the tunnels once, the areas appear on your map for fast-travel (which is a godsend). These parts of the game in particular were a little freaky, I found. Things can jump out at you, and if you find Dogmeat, then his growling in your ear does not help. The game can get pretty gruesome, with bags of skulls, bodies hung from the ceiling like meat, and cannibalism, along with the splatter and decapitation/dismemberment physics of combat.

The game is a little slow at the beginning when you’re in the vault, and then it whipsaws up to what I thought was the most difficult right after you get out: you go from being in this small, contained space with clear objectives to being in this huge, open, visually stunning world to explore, and no direction at all. You have essentially no resources, no “home base”, no allies, very little ammo, and only a few levels under your belt.

My biggest wish for the game is that it had a multiplayer co-op component, I think the world they’ve created would be a really fun place to rampage through with a buddy. Beyond that, I found some of the clipping and character animations immersion-breaking (at least the sentry robots were supposed to be robotic), and the difficulty curve wasn’t very consistent through the game, with few challenges left after hitting level 20 and having a full arsenal. I also found the big guns and energy weapons a little lacking: even in the end game I found very few uses for them (although ash piles were much tidier than gore splatters). The AI isn’t great, and seems to rely a lot on super-speed running if you catch it off-guard, though some (scripted?) encounters feature some enemies trying to flank you, etc. The teammate AI is even worse, they love to go charging in to any situation. I played through the first time without patching, and actually found it pretty stable, with the main exception being the VATS turn-based combat kludge (which I try not to use too often, except to score righteous decapitations or to instantly wipe out one enemy when faced with several). I got the patch and the Operation Anchorage expansion, and it’s been crash city since.

Anchorage is a fun little add-on, focusing more on the first person shooter aspect (you can’t even try to loot the bodies), and it was a neat storyline to play through. However, aside from the power armor and gauss cannon you get at the end, the content’s only good for about an extra hour or two of commie-busting fun. Since my main complaint is that I didn’t want it to end, I think I’ll be getting the Pitts expansion as well when it comes out.

The level editor/mod kit has also been released, so there might be some decent user-generated content coming soon. One thing I would like to see is a “rock climbing” ability — ruined overpasses and waist-high cliffs blocked my path far too often.

There are a great many cheeses to choose from in the world; each Eurpoean town seems to have its very own (or one for each day of the year). However no cheese can hold a candle to Cheddar, the God-Emperor of cheeses. There are a plethora of positive attributes that make Cheddar the best: its ready availability, its gentle, non-footy flavour, its pleasing colour and texture. However, the reason that elevates Cheddar to god status is its omnipresence and malleability. No other cheese can transmute itself into so many forms, from organic dairy farm goodness to powdered horror and still be recognized as Cheddar. It can be mild or aged strong; uniform in appearance or marbled (my personal favourite). It’s good cold or melted, in solid cheese form, semi-solid slices, or powered and/or liquified. As a “flavour” it can appear on crackers, gators, fish, and a variety of other fried or baked snack foods that turn your hands orange.

In fact* Cheddar is so synonymous with cheese that in some languages/dialects Cheddar is the word for cheese, and the locals may know of no other types. The French word for cheese, fromage, comes from the word for mold or form, which is used in the making of Cheddar-like cheeses. Here at UWO we are going to have a brain imaging study starting very soon (as soon as we get funding and ethics approval and MRI time) that will objectively prove that when people think about “cheese”, they’re really thinking about Cheddar (and a non-significant activation in the “smiling for pictures” region of the brain). A serving of Cheddar contains 20% of your daily calcium & B12 requirement as well as all kinds of other good stuff, yet as little as 5% of the lactose of milk, making it suitable for lactards such as myself. It’s also stable in the fridge for over a month after opened, and up to 6 months before that, very important for shut-ins who don’t like to grocery shop very often. You can find it in the deli counter, the fancy cheese section, and the general dairy case in your local supermaket simultaneously, and that’s just for its most common chilled cheese form. Cheddar is also the only product that can be put between two pieces of bread on its own and still be considered a “sandwich” (indeed, two sandwiches depending on whether heat is available: a cheese sandwich or a grilled cheese — peanut butter requires the help of one other item, usually jam or bananas; bacon, itself a prince amongst meats, requires both lettuce and tomato to become a BLT). Cheddar is often the glue holding together other foods, originating all around the world, such as KD, quesadillas, casseroles, grilled cheese, nachos, and cheeseburgers (note that it requires two pieces of cheese to hold a cheeseburger together; this is not the common distribution of double cheese cheeseburgers, but should be).

Cheddar also does not rely on the action of mould, nasty fluffy stuff that invades your basement, to make the magical transformation from milk to manna in its wax chrysalis. Many other cheeses mistakenly went bad in antiquity, picking up mould veins or fuzzy coatings, and people ate them. Continue to, in their ignorance, despite the fact that starvation is no longer the only alternative, and that mould and fungi are not from one of the three kingdoms of life that humans have evolved to eat (plantae, animalia, and petrochemical). This makes Cheddar one of the few cheeses actually suited to human consumption and digestion, even without the purifying effects of fire cooking. If we need an antibiotic we’ll call you, Roquefort, but for something to put in my mouth I’m going to stick with Cheddar.

Yes, if it weren’t for the need to have mozza (the queen-consort of cheeses) for pizza we could in fact get by with Cheddar as the only cheese in our society. And we would be happy to devote ourselves to the God-Emperor of cheeses.

* – not an actual fact.

[Photo credits: wikipedia, flickr user srboisvert, Kraft Canada. The idea for this post came from Mr. Cheap]

I have not been thrilled with the consumption of Domain Direct by Hover. I figured that I was handling the hard stuff of having a website with the server, database, stylesheets, content, and that the process of pointing people to that (domain forwarding, nameserver) should just work. For the most part it did under Domain Direct — there were some twists, such as the fact that the IP of my server isn’t truly static, so every now and then I’d have to update all the pointers, and that the one time a year that would happen would invariably be when I was on vacation. Also due to the way the forwarding was made “transparent”, the URL of a specific page wasn’t shown in your address bar, so anyone wanting to put in a permalink to a specific page would have to build it themselves by hovering over the title of a post and adding the /?p=XXX part themselves. This didn’t seem to be a big issue since I seemed to be the only one who referred to anything here.

Anyhow, things worked, even if there were some work-arounds needed, and then Hover came along and broke things. They were lambasted for it, and fixed things, so that now things look to work just as before, except for the favicon.

Oh, and something I just found out about: the RSS feed.

The thing is, I have no idea why the RSS feed isn’t working properly. The real strange thing is that if I try re-subscribing to the feed in the Google Reader, I get some posts, but nothing past mid-January (right when Hover took over). That was weird, since my own RSS subscription is working fine. Now how on earth the feed could deliver some posts, instead of working or not working was beyond me. I could get all the up-to-date posts with the un-forwarded RSS feed (the IP address directly). Finally I tried another reader and there’s nothing — the RSS URL is invalid. It’s not forwarding correctly. Google just has a cache somewhere.

So, that explains my weird web server issues. It gives me one more reason to move to a professional host instead of doing it myself, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to manage a move right now nor the financial inclination to do so.

One way to get the RSS feed is to subscribe to it via the IP address. This is of course not the preferred solution since my IP can change at any time without notice, breaking the feed. You’d then need to come back here to get the new address and re-subscribe. What a pain. The other way is to try to figure out what Hover is doing to break the RSS feed (answer: frames). Since I elected to turn on the frames to hide my IP address (so only holypotato.com appears in the address bar, which looks a little more professional IMHO), I suppose all I can do is elect to turn them off to make the RSS feed work. You may have noticed that I’ve already implemented this (unless I’ve changed my mind since posting).

To subscribe to the RSS feed, simply add
http://www.holypotato.com/?feed=rss2
into your feed reader of choice (Google Reader, Thunderbird, your iGoogle homepage, etc). It should work now — please let me know if it doesn’t! (oh, and http://www.holypotato.com/?feed=comments-rss2 for the comments feed)

I just got back from seeing Jorge (interestingly, it doesn’t rhyme with “George”) Cham of PHD comics give a talk on the Power of Procrastination here at UWO. It was quite a good talk — funny, entertaining, and maybe a little bit inspirational too. If he’s coming by your school, I recommend you stop by (this means you, UBC readers!). There was a bit of time for questions-and-answers at the end, which was to my surprise a little slow (not many questions), so I stuck up my hand and asked if there was an update to the economy and grad school enrollment graph to reflect the recent economic troubles. I got dissed for daring to ask a question of the PHD comics guy while wearing an XKCD T-shirt. It was fun.

Note that this is not the question I had burning in my mind going in, but rather “Who writes Cecilia’s blog if she’s a fictional character?”

Anyhow, take-home points:

-Powerpoint is cool.

-Bulleted lists are cool.

-Those are probably the 2 most useful real-world skills you will learn in grad school.

-Grad student mental health is not good: 95% report being overwhelmed (what about the other 5%?), 67% feel depressed, 10% contemplate suicide, 0.5% attempt it.

-In the US, the average grad student makes $15 more per year than a minimum-wage worker at a California McDonald’s. Based on the new $9.50 minimum wage (next week!), at 48 weeks/year an Ontario McDonald’s worker could take home $17100 pre-tax; a PhD student in our department without an external scholarship gets $15050 to live off of.

-Guilt is a big problem for grad students. Even though we have the freedom to mosey on in to the lab at the crack of noon and run experiments all through the weekend (depending on equipment availability and our own inclinations — or to even blog while running experiments on the weekend — I have someone in the MRI right now, BWAHAHAHAHAHA), the flip side to that is that there’s never a point where you shouldn’t do work, so you always feel guilty when doing something else. At least people with real jobs often get to leave it behind at the office.

-Procrastination is needed since people are less creative when stressed or forced to do something, etc. Procrastination is what you do when you’re doing what you want to be doing (or what your OCD demands you do), so you need those breaks.

-Procrastination is not laziness. Laziness is when you don’t want to so something. Procrastination just means you don’t want to do it now. And of course the whole concept of grad school is one of procrastination: the process of putting off joining the real world. Laziness is something you need to watch out for.

-Eventually something will come along that will spur you to finish: a job offer, a family issue (wife moving, kid on the way, parents’ disappointment), or just getting sick of being a grad student. At that point your motivation will come back and you’ll rush to finish.

-Everyone is eventually in a rush to finish. No one is 100% happy with their thesis. Git ‘er done.

Jorge has a great understated comedy delivery method. He makes good use of his powerpoint slides, but doesn’t rely on them like a crutch; they’re more like a good team. He has good comedic timing and likes to let the audience fill in the blanks sometimes (sometimes we’d yell it out, sometimes just think it and cry). It was a lot of fun. It may seem like I may have stolen some of the better points that stuck out in my mind here, and so now have spoiled it so you don’t need to go… but it was an hour long lecture, so there’s lots more in there and well worth the price of admission. Be sure to wear an XKCD shirt.

The Western Research Forum that preceeded it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It’s sort of a mini conference on campus where grad student showcase their research. I figured there would be undergrads and junior grad students in attendance as well as members of the public to see what kind of research was going on (and for undergrads, who to apply to for summer research positions/volunteer positions)… but there was nobody there who wasn’t speaking as far as I could tell. In fact, they didn’t even seem to pretend that other people would come, since the rooms we were in were barely big enough to hold the speakers of each session. Since it was a non-specific conference all the presentations were kept quite general so that a non-specialist could follow, and everyone in my session at least gave a quite good, enjoyable talk.