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TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
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bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ entry views: 1653 today's page views: 835 (49 mobile) all-time page views: 3246305 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1214 page created Thu Apr 17, 2025 23:13:15 |
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- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
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- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
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- Michel Platini, UEFA president (bert's blog stated that nobody admits to diving in the previous post. As can be seen, this is incorrect. bert's blog apologizes for the error) It's been a relatively packed twelve days. Last Friday: Japanese Dinner at Botan Restaurant, Far East Square, with the badminton people. Probably the first time I've been there. One of the guys is an intern at Microsoft, and got us to visit the HQ at One Marina Boulevard. For all the Microsoft-bashing, they do know how to create a cosy office ambience. Microsoft Surface was interesting, but I'm not sure if it'll enter the mainstream. I'll be waiting for more reviews on Windows 7 before deciding whether to upgrade the seven-year old XP installation. Saturday, 4O steamboat dinner at Bugis, with about 20 attendees not including two of our math/science teachers who dropped in. Law recommended Left 4 Dead at the Colosseum @ Iluma LAN shop, it being the newest hottest first-person shooter. Brings back memories of Counterstriking back in 2000-2002. The atmosphere was certainly there, with huge screens showcasing some of the offerings in their full 3D graphical glory. Eagerly await the Mechwarrior reboot, and the distinctive Street Fighter IV visuals almost make me want to try it despite never being any good at such games. But more on Left 4 Dead. Let's get the limitations out of the way first: There's not a great selection of weapons compared to CS, there's a strict upper limit of eight players per game unlike the dozens in CS, and I'm not even sure if gameplay is balanced with less than that. There's also only one mission objective - escape to a safe point - and the corresponding es_ maps in CS were never even that popular to begin with. What saves the game is the ability to play as the bad guys: the zombies. Alright, they aren't really zombies, but still-living humans afflicted with a rabies-like pathogen, a.k.a the Infected. Still, they look like zombies, talk like zombies (i.e. not much), and are for all intents and purposes zombies, except for their ability to make Usain Bolt look like a slowpoke when they rush at you. Fair enough, since I'm not convinced about the fear factor of traditional zombies: "Oh look, a zombie! I had better limp away slightly more quickly lest it catch up!" Unlike the survivor humans who have guns, all the Infected have are their bodies and guts. The Boomer is a prime example, his main purpose being to get in close and spill his guts onto the survivors. Then there's the Hunter, who can jump prodigious distances to his prey, but whom I never got the hang of, and the Smoker, who can snare victims from afar with his extensible tongue, my favourite of the three. Doing so from a high vantage point is both a smart tactical move and a good demonstration of in-game physics, as the unlucky survivor dangles from a ledge. The last playable Infected type is the Tank, who is very beefy, very strong, and unfortunately (for the Infected team) quite rare. It almost feels like cheating when one uses him to simply mow down the puny humans, and in fact the humans appear hard to win with, at least for inexperienced players, since for all their firepower advantage they can't just respawn like the Infected, and any stalemate is thus to their disadvantage. Moreover, the Infected have x-ray vision. For all the time that we played, the survivors only won once! The dinner itself was hearty, helped by the fact as I didn't feel as sleepy as usual during that period of time. Found out a bit more about some of my old classmates, almost all of whom are doing quite well. That's good. Sought out another LAN shop for more L4D-ing, then resumed conversation at the basement of a deserted shopping mall until past midnight, whereupon I shared a cab home with three other Jurongers. This post looks to be winding up as one of those where I mention all the random stuff that I have neglected, so I'll get it over with. Backed up the SMS-es from my ancient Nokia handphone using the CA-42 cable. It's been Plug-and-Pray too much for my liking, so Nokia gets some points docked for that. Speaking of durability, the electric fan's been replaced, about a month after I praised its predecessor. They just don't make them like they used to. Next up, my first rat sighting in NUS, in a drain by the tennis courts. My frequent exposure to the hamsters has made me far more partial to them (By the way, it appears that Mr. Fish was a normal Winter White instead of a Campbell's as we always thought, while Mr. Ham is a sapphire Winter White). Wonder if the cats of Computing might be interested in a visit, after they finish their promotion of common Linux commands. On animal design - it seems that some cockroaches, that embodiment of survival, can't flip over when upside down. Evolution may have some way to go with them. Gmail was down for a few hours one of these days, which led me to imagine if I could do with all my emails *gasp* lost. Well, probably yes, but it would be extremely inconvenient to say the least, though there's probably too much on the line for Google to risk something like that. They likely have multiple backups in nuclear-bomb proof caverns in Antarctica. Loss of access to Gmail is still annoying, and I wonder if they couldn't have some emergency stop-gap service to redirect to in such events. Now take a look at this:  Ah yes, three guys and a big photo, so? Nothing special, except it's not a photo. It's an airbrush painting. The artist spent over 70 hours on this specimen, but heck, the result after just ten hours is amazing. And there are more examples of this ultrarealism. One more thing to dabble in when I retire, if ever... More related to computing, I came across the TinEye reverse image search engine while trying to determine the provenance of an iconic image I thought I had seen before, but couldn't quite place (it turned out to be the Pulitzer-prize winning shot of the shot Jeffrey Miller at Kent State in 1970). TinEye works as follows: You supply it with an image, either from your hard disk or using an URL on the web, and TinEye tells you all the sites where the image occurs. Very useful. Oh, it doesn't return only exact copies; that would be almost too easy (since only a hash would be needed), and not very useful. It matches the image even if it has been altered slightly (see some cool search examples), likely by identifying key features. Hope the Computer Vision module covers that. Anything left? Ah yes, the pika, courtesy of zh: Import permit needed for one of these hambunnies! A complete whitewash for last week's $100 Challenge - yes, City and Everton both won, but by the lone goal, not nearly enough, and United cranked out a win. $174/$300 already, and nothing too attractive today. Eh, what the heck... $50 on United (-1.5) vs. Tottenham (at 4.20) - be bold. Next: Chrome Choices
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