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Playing the ‘elder’ Half-Life has some entertainment values: first of all I wasn’t that amused seeing the Steam engine installed. It crashes so once in a while too (a couple times already), plus it seems to update itself automatically to present me the latest stuff that won’t ever run on this hardware. Yeah!

Bugs too: the most annoying one is in the elevator in the ‘We’ve got hostiles’ level: this is a bug that happens so consequently that it has to be a game core bug. There are a couple of ways to get by it: the hard way or the ‘I feel lucky way’. I opted to go for the latter, which comes all back to timing: before the ‘loading’ text appears make sure you’re jumping. No joke. It works.

For the rest it’s all the same (except I can play it on high resolution now, earlier I was never able to do it this way), which means I can’t wait to play the other ones (‘Opposing forces’ [which I played before] and ‘Blue Shift’).

Today it was Computer Dude Day. We had planned to buy a new videocard for the half so she could play her Sims 2 game, something we did indeed earlier this morning (Additionally she bought a mini Zen Nano player, which needs to be set up too, but that’s a different matter for now).

Initially, we came home with a higher-end ATI Radeon 9550 (for a price of 129.99), but I was shocked to see that ATI recommended (at least) a 300 Watt power supply on the ‘installee’. The one-year old Pressario (an SR1320NX) only has a 250 Watt power supply, which is good enough for home-office machines. I probably could have got it running on the machine, I think, but I decided not to, ran back to the store and returned with a PCI version of the Radeon 9250 (which had no specific requirements whatsoever). It’s running now but still I have not found a way to turn off the existing SiS onboard graphics adapter. There’s no BIOS setting to effectively turn it off, except for that there’s that ’64 MB shared’ setting. For now it won’t hurt and who knows if the half may need an extra monitor one day.

I also decided to treat myself on a ‘Half-Life 1 Anthology’, which sells for not 50, not 30 but 20 dollars at your local Staples store (you’ll have to look for it though). I’m sure I had a copy already somewhere: after all I played it on my old PII 233 MHz MyNote before). I’ll be back in a minute after I’ve saved Black Mesa.

1. I just discovered that installing Half-Life 1 means installing the Steam engine plus the creation of an account.
2. We’re going an hour forward tonight!
3. Continued….

Recently, I’ve noticed that I’m statically charged all the time. It started a couple of months ago. It can be pretty painful too, particularly when I touch objects that, well -uh- conduct. Better stay clear from me. You too, cat. And particularly the dog.

Google’s April Fools Day joke seems to have leaked out to the public. For some kind of reason this reminded me of the first time I heard people talk enthusiastically about a search engine called Google, which I wasn’t familiar with. That was in 1999 and I think it was brought up in an Argentinian restaurant.

Which also brings me to OPML. I’ve mentioned it earlier, but I’m utterly convinced of an impending breakthrough in the Gopher protocol, a protocol that happens to be quite similar to OPML. The idea is the same: use hierarchical structures to display information:

A hierarchical arrangement of information is familiar to many users. Hierarchical directories containing items (such as documents, servers, and subdirectories) are widely used in electronic bulletin boards and other campus-wide information systems.

I always thought ‘Gopher’ was an unfortunate name for an Internet protocol: I propose to rename it to something like GOPML.

1. Interesting to see how data is exchanged in the Gopher protocol. It’s all ASCII BASED !!!!. No seriously. In about 10 years, someone will reinvent the ASCII numbering system and call it OPHELL.
2. I claim my couple of seconds of fame when I heard my name mentioned in a podcast an audio recording. I told you I’d be famous one day. Luckily nobody knows that I’m only pretending to be the proprietor of this site. Have a safe April Fools Day.
3. Now in your browser: Gopher support!. Yes you there in the corner, you can now bring out those gopher servers!

Via Blake Ross’, I read that we should thank Microsoft for its monopolistic behaviour. After all:

…and for all those who lament the pre-inclusion of Internet Explorer, it’s worth noting that if IE WASN’T pre-installed, most people wouldn’t be able to download all that IM, media playing, or even alternative browsers such as Firefox. In other words, if IE wasn’t pre-included with Windows, the market for software – including open source software targeted at desktop computers – might actually shrink. Talk about sucking the air out of a market.

When I first heard about ‘these internets’, I’m pretty sure the very first browser I got (Mosaic) was downloaded from an FTP site and then, put on a 1.44 MB 3 1/4″ disk for me. No Internet Explorer was required: after all a web browser was (and still should be) a stand-alone application. It’s exactly the integration of IE into Windows 98 that got (and keeps getting) Microsoft in antitrust troubles.

However, there’s no doubt in my mind that Microsoft played a crucial part (as in targeting the consumer and the desktop) in the evolution of ‘information technology’. But that is a different question.