Biggs' Zone

A Geek's Cogitations, Conjectures and other Cortical Experiences

Soapbox: Rioting is Irresponsible and Foolish

By

On April 3, 2012

In General Cogitation, Soapbox

First, congrats to UK for beating Kansas. I was happy to see Kansas lose since they were responsible for taking Purdue out of the tournament. However, I was sad to see the fan response in Lexington. Rioting is not celebrating! I don’t understand the rationale behind burning of public or private property to symbolize joy and euphoria (unfortunately the rioting in Lexington took a step for the worse when someone was shot – though not critically).

What the hell, people?!?

I was at Purdue in 1999 when the students rioted because the men’s basketball team advanced to the Elite Eight. The students ignited a bonfire that burned so hot it literally melted the blacktop; a scar remained until the university ripped up the road and repaved it. Our tuition went up 12% the year following that riot, and yet somehow everyone was alright with that because it happened twice the two years after that. I like to see my school do well just as much as the next guy, but I didn’t want a tuition increase to pay for the damage caused by the reckless and deviate behaviors of the other students.

Here’s an intelligent thought: how about we find a less destructive way of showing our pride in our school and athletes? I cannot fathom how looting fraternities to burn couches, or tipping over dumpsters to burn garbage demonstrates even a shred of school pride (or dignity). It’s disgraceful and unsportsmanlike.

/end soapbox

Best. Quote. Ever.

By

On April 1, 2012

In Uncategorized

“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy
and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection.
It means never having to play it cool about how much
you like something.
It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat
childish level rather that behave like a supposed adult.
Being a geek is extremely liberating.”
– Simon Pegg

App Spotlight: TurboScan (& NotesPlus)

By

On March 30, 2012

In App Spotlight

Perhaps this will be a new category on my blog because I have been playing around with various apps, some are free, some you have to pay for (I’m also starting to write a few of my own). Honestly I rarely pay for an app unless I am certain that I will get the appropriate use out of it for even the $0.99 that I pay for it. However, when an app comes around that really gets the geek tingling, I feel like I should share it with others. After all, I think the best way news of an app is spread is through word of mouth. I hope, one day, someone will do this with an app I write.

A co-worker encouraged me to download an app called TurboScan. It is an iPhone app for now, though I can see there being an iPad version for the new iPad. Basically this app “scans” a document using the phone’s camera (so you will probably have the best results with the iPhone 4 or 4S). If you use the Sure Scan 3x feature, you have better results with the scan. Sure Scan 3x takes three pictures of the document and essentially creates the best possible scan of the document using a merge of the three photos.

I think this app is great. The quality of the scan is almost undeniable and you can sync it with iTunes File Sharing, Dropbox, Evernote, or email it as a PDF. This app becomes an excellent business tool when coupled with NotesPlus (v3), which I use all the time at work. I can scan in a requirements document, e-mail it to my iPad and load the PDF into NotesPlus where I can add additional annotations just like I would to the printed document.

TurboScan should be available to download from the iTunes App Store and costs $1.99. As I mentioned above, it is only available for the iPhone (as of the date of this post).

Check it out!

The MMO Times: The Panda’s Are Coming!!

By

On March 29, 2012

In Gaming, MMORPG

Issue 29

Hello Again, Gamers! Despite the title, there won’t be a lot of Mists of Pandaria information in this issue, mainly because there is so much out there that I didn’t want to flood this post with articles just about the next WoW expansion. If you really want to check out all the upcoming features for MoP I would head over to MMO-Champion, they have quite a comprehensive collection of information.

Instead I tried to keep things more about other games because, despite Blizzard’s best efforts, there are other games out there to play then just WoW and after nearly eight years, the other games are just more interesting. I did include a couple of WoW-related posts but I think people might enjoy some new information about upcoming (new) MMOs like Pathfinder Online and World of Darkness.

Read More

Soapbox: Discussing Politics Is Getting Insufferable

By

On March 28, 2012

In General Cogitation, Soapbox

When I was in high school I rarely cared about politics. I was neither republican or democrat. It wasn’t until college that I started to pay more attention and began forming my own opinions and which party those opinions better aligned with. In fact, there were even times when I enjoyed discussing politics with friends and family. I also thought it was great to see younger people becoming more politically involved.

Lately, however, I find myself trying to avoid talking politics to anyone. Passion is often a good thing, but I think passion can be blinding and I think that is what is happening in politics. I think, in some ways, we are in the midst of a civil war; a civil war fought with words and opinions instead of guns and bullets. There have been a few times lately when I have read something a friend posted on Facebook or Google+ that just almost got me extremely riled up. Almost to the point where I wanted to mute their posts or remove them from my Friends list, in fact there have been a couple times when I have already done that.

I’m reaching the point where I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to fight with my friends (or family) just because they hold a different opinion (this isn’t something that happens to all my friends of opposing opinions, its about those that often express their opinion colorfully). I think my new stance is that I won’t allow any of the idiots in Washington (regardless of party) to form a rift between me and my friends.

I will be “Unliking” any politically oriented group on Facebook and hiding any post that I feel is too extreme.

I’m not picking a side.

I’m not fighting this civil war.

/end soapbox

WoW: Why I’m Not Going to Beta MoP

By

On March 21, 2012

In Gaming, MMORPG, World of Warcraft

I suppose it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say that I won’t opt-in for the Mists of Pandaria beta, I probably will. In fact I may even log in to check it out, but I probably won’t do any long term testing of the expansion. In fact I probably won’t participate in any beta for a game (or expansion) that I intend to play when it goes live. I have decided this after playing the beta for SWTOR.

I discovered, after participating in the SWTOR for nearly 8 months, that once the game goes live, it starts to feel stale pretty quick. Granted there are some subtle changes and sometimes that is good and sometimes, not so good. For example, in SWTOR there was a preference in the Social options that I used all the time while I was in the beta, but when the game went live, they took it out. I never found out why but I was pretty disappointed to find it missing.

Eventually SWTOR became exciting again after I leveled past all the quests that I had already done repeatedly (because of data resets) in the beta. Be that as it may, I would still like to avoid that kind of repetition especially in an expansion where the level cap is only increased by five (which means there will already be some repetition, relatively quickly, when I start leveling the alts). I hope that I don’t discourage anyone else from participating in a beta. The beta test is an extremely important part of software development and the more people that participate the better the user experience will be (in theory) when the product goes live. It is also kind of fun to say that you had participated in the beta of a popular game.

Cheers!

Page 159 of 181

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén