Walking directions

So, if you want to go from southern France to Germany by foot, you have to go through Spain and England first according to Google, wtf???

I dare any of you to swim all the way from Spain to England without dying (ok, so maybe you don't have to swim, you take a ferry, but it'd be pretty funny if it said "swim to Portsmouth for a billion miles")

Natty Narwhal

This day only comes twice a year, the day a new Ubuntu version officially comes out. Yes!!! 11.04!!!

I exclusively use Ubuntu at work and school, and when I'm not obsessed with PC gaming, I also use it most of the time in my house. But I can't really get too excited, I've been testing 11.04 since like the first beta a couple of months ago, so the new stuff doesn't really do much right now...though it did when I started testing it :). I have mixed feelings about Unity, the new default interface in Ubuntu, but I'm leaning more towards the "I like it" side.

I stole this pic from the internet, cause I'm about to play in a bit so I logged in to Windows, haha

I will also test out Kubuntu 11.04 in the coming weeks, and I also want to try Gnome 3.0, but I have to take my time, cause if I mess something up, I can't work, haha. And I take my laptop to work :P (weird, Ubuntu is recognized by Chrome's spell-checker but Kubuntu isn't, haha)

Dust away

I don't really like to give maintenance to computers, I don't consider myself like a hardware kind of guy, even though I know some stuff, I just don't really like it. And today I had to go give some maintenance to some computers where my aunt Maribel works, and well, as long as they pay me, I guess it's cool, though I'd rather be working by developing software. And don't even get me started on networking and stuff, though I know how to do lots of stuff, I just don't like doing it :S

But there's one thing I like to do in these days, and that is: BLOW THE SHIT OUT ALL THE DUST IN THE FANS, haha

Weapon of choice

I could spend all day doing it...provided I have enough canned air and lots and lots of dusty fans, haha. I love the sound they make when you make them spin, plus it never ceases to amaze me how all the dust reaches all those seemingly unreachable places :P

Valve fever

Have you ever watched a movie and then thought about watching all the movies from one of the actors or from the director? Yup, it has happened to me a couple of times, Jim Carrey being the one I remember the most, right after watching Dumb & Dumber some years ago

It has also happened to me with video games, mainly with Zelda, I started playing all the Zelda games I could get my hands on one time... but never had it happened with all the games from a certain developer...until now.

I have the Valve fever (developers of the Portal games, Left 4 Dead games, Half-Life games and Team Fortress games, all first person games). Since I'm so much into playing in my PC lately, I want to play the kind of games that I think are best played with a mouse/keyboard, first-person games.

But knowing me, I probably won't finish them all, cause these past two days I've been thinking of buying a couple of Ruby & Rails books thanks to a post I read over at Nettuts+, and they might distract me from playing so much...I love me some Ruby :)

Light reading

After a week, I finally went back to work, I didn't miss having to wake up so damn early!!!! But anyway, today was one of those days that I didn't know how to solve a problem, so I turned to the CakePHP API documentation (CakePHP is a PHP framework that I use at work...uninteresting stuff). And I remembered how much fun reading languages' API documentations can be :)

Favorite stuff: JavaScript, Ruby, PHP and MySQL

Sometimes when I finish reading my RSS feed to pass a little time I just go to a language official documentation page and toss a random search query, like: "array" or "memory management" or "variable declaration" stuff like that and then end up reading up all the technical stuff... I do that all the time at work when I'm in my lunch break, haha.

So out of shape

So, today I moved back with my parents (I will write about all that in my other blog in the near future), and I'm almost dead just from carrying stuff from the car to my new room.

My legs are all shaky, my arms are hurting, and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to walk tomorrow... but after a whole day, it's all done... I got Ricky's old room... cause he now has my old room, haha.

Auto-save

So, as promised, today I started another game: Half-life, a 1998 sci-fi fps.

It's a pretty old game, it looks ugly and plays kind of weird, but I'm ok with all that, I knew what I was getting into, and since I want to play all the games in the Half-life series, I wanted to start from the beginning...but one thing I noticed right away... back then, games didn't use auto-save like games these days.

And I'm so used to that feature being there, that I never really bother to save anymore in games. So, the first time I died, I had to start all the way from the beginning... that was NOT cool, and it made me realize how important that feature is, but worse, how much I depend on it... I'm going to have to make it a habit in this game to save constantly

I love Amazon

And why wouldn't I? I just bought a keyboard-mouse combo for $5 (both wireless).

It may not be the best keyboard out there, in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not even a "good" one, but for my needs, it more than suffices. I just want it so that I can play games on my laptop from a distance when it's connected to my TV, so, I'd only use it while gaming in my room.

Ok, so the keyboard is $25, but when I bought Portal 2 they gave me a $20 discount for my next amazon-sold purchase, so maybe it WASN'T $5, haha

On a side note, today I finished both Batman and Portal, haha, so I'll probably do another new game entry tomorrow :P.

And on another non-blog related note, if you feel like giving back to some indie video game developers and to a couple of charities, you should consider buying this pack. It's 3 indie games, supposedly very good (haven't played them yet, I only just bought it) and it's pay what you want, even as low as one penny... just some advertising, haha.

Yet another videogame post :P

This time: Portal 2

It's a first person puzzle game. You have a gun with which you can create portals, and the point of the game is to solve "puzzles" to advance to the next one. You have to place portals in a very strategic way so that you can get to the exit, so that's what makes it a puzzle game.

Other stuff takes place in the game, like in the video, the blue gooey stuff makes you jump higher (for this puzzle, I had already made all the preparations, so I only showed the final part)

My new videogame is...

Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Since what I do in my day sometimes (or rather, very frequently) is based on a new game I'm playing, I'm going to do a post whenever I start a new game...after all, video games do speak of who I am, so it is another way to know me, but instead of a pic, I'm going to embed a YouTube video I recorded while playing myself, and will never be over 30 seconds so you don't get bored...ok, this one is 33 seconds, haha (btw, the gameplay is actually faster than in the video, but I was doing other stuff on my PC when recording so the framerate dropped to like half)

Now the game itself. It's a pretty cool game, surprisingly good for a Comic/Movie/Cartoon based game (those games almost always suck ass), it has good action like in the video, but since Batman is also a detective, a lot of the game also takes part as you trying to discover clues and stuff like that, and it has a touch of stealth, cause you don't want to go face-to-face to a guy with a machine gun, he's Batman, not Superman, haha. So you need to find ways of taking them out without the other dudes noticing and making them nervous cause they don't know where Batman is :P

Where did all my space go???

It doesn't seem to matter how big of a hard disk drive I have, I never have enough space for everything I want. And I know I have lots of stuff I'm not using and probably will never use, but even if I delete them and clear half of the disk, it doesn't take over one week to go back to the same state of "redness" in "My Computer"

Cleaning my downloads folder and uninstalling programs seems to do the trick, but I always end up installing more programs and downloading more junk... if only there was an indicator of when I'm installing a program I'm only going to use once, haha.

Milky :)

To date, this is the dog I've loved the most, probably cause it's also the prettiest one I've had, and it gets super happy every time I get back home, and every single day I go outside with her to play for a while... yeah, the name is not very original, haha, but I didn't choose it, my mom did.

White Boxer :)

She's a little dirty, haha

School & Work? Not for a week

If there's one good thing religion has brought to the mostly catholic countries (and I do believe there's this one thing only), is "Semana Santa". I don't give a crap why, how or what it is... I just know it means no school for two whole weeks :)... plus, I asked for my "days off" at work (in México, law mandates employers to give vacation to their workers every year, usually a week in the first year, and increasing the number of days for every year after that), so, for a whole week, I will not have to worry about waking up against my will or doing homework :)... of course, I'd rather have no religion and no vacation from school... but that's not happening anytime soon.

A building of my school (in lack of a pic taken by me, haha)

How did I end up reading this?

So, I go to Wikipedia to read about quantum computers... and I end up reading about double entendres... do you see the connection?... yup, me neither, haha

No speakers?

Nope, my laptop's headphone jack is sucky, and whenever I plug and unplug my headphones, there's a chance that the laptop gets stuck in headphone mode (it's in the hardware, not software), so whenever I want to listen to something with the headphones, I need to think if it's worth risking loosing the speakers for some days, haha (it fixes itself after some time, between 4 hours to 15 days). Of course, if it DOES happen, then I have to listen to EVERYTHING with headphones on...

As of this moment, speakers are not working... maybe tomorrow, haha

Keyboard shortcuts

Big fan of keyboard shortcuts, I say every piece of software & web app should have them :). My most used ones are:

Gmail: j & k to navigate through conversations (like Vim :D), x to select, e to archive. Say I wanted to label all buzz emails as 'Buzz'. Type '/' to place cursor in search box, type 'Buzz', hit enter, then type '*'+'a' to select all conversations, 'l' to apply label and type 'Buzz' to create the new label :).

Google Reader: j & k just as in Gmail. Or type 'g'+'u', then type 'chu' and enter to go to Chuy's 365 feed, or 'g'+'a' to go to all feeds, and shift+'n' to advance through my list of feeds :).

OS: If I want to check my mail, if in Windows, just win+3, takes me to Chrome, then ctrl+1, takes me to the first tab which is always Gmail. Win+4 to listen to music. Win and then 'gimp' to open gimp. Win+r then 'cmd' to open command prompt. How many gigs of ram does your windows machine have? Just press win+pause and you'll see. Dual monitors? win+p to select which one to use (some of these may only apply to win 7, not sure).

And who can forget good ol' ctrl+c, ctrl+v. :D.

Oh, how I love...

...that over here in Juárez, you don't need to look for parking spaces... just look for a sidewalk, haha

 

Of course, I'm only joking, I hate it when they do that. 

PC gaming

As of the last few months my gaming sessions have been almost exclusively on PC, I find it way more superior than console gaming, but then again, that's just me. Of course, if a new Zelda comes out, or another console first party title, I would have to play it in console, but if I have an option, PC will always win :)

Weekly routine

There are a lot of things I do on a weekly basis, and one of them is watching the new Rails screencast by Ryan Bates posted every Monday morning (Railscasts).

Nothing makes me learn faster than watching how it's done. Plus he explains stuff that I didn't even know was possible to do in Rails :)

h j k l

If you thought Mari's post was geeky, just look at this. I've been learning how to use Vim, a text editor based on commands, after several failed attempts in the past. Now I'm finally using it primarily for work...and it can be reaaaaally stressful at first, cause you don't know what the hell is going on (you move your cursor with h, j, k, l to the left, down, up and right respectively), but am finally in the stage where I know how to do most basic stuff way faster than on a normal text editor, like replacing text, copying, moving between many open files, folding blocks of code, searching for patterns.

Little things that bother me

Since my phone's camera is very sucky, I will mostly take pics of my computer screen.

There's a little message that has been bugging me since forever, that even though my copy of Windows is authentic, a little message that says "Test Mode" is always in my desktop... thanks to Diego, I don't even know what he did to put it there, but it takes me back to the days of Windows 7 RC, when it was ok to see that message... but oh well, it doesn't affect the OS so I guess there's no point crying about it...