“Today is officially a bad day…”

The X Prize Cup was held this past weekend, and among the contestants was Armadillo Aerospace, headed by none other than 3D game programming guru, John Carmack. John and his intrepid crew have been working for about seven years on their rocketry project. Currently, their goal is to enter, and win, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

The challenge is described as follows :

The Competition is divided into two levels. Level 1 requires a rocket to take off from a designated launch area, rocket up to 150 feet (50 meters) altitude, then hover for 90 seconds while landing precisely on a landing pad 100 meters away. The flight must then be repeated in reverse and both flights, along with all of the necessary preparation for each, must take place within a two and a half hour period.

The more difficult course, Level 2, requires the rocket to hover for twice as long before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface, packed with craters and boulders to mimic actual lunar terrain. The hover times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform the real lunar mission.

It sounds simple, but, as with most rocketry projects, it’s not. John and his team competed in 2006, but were not successful. They had another chance this past weekend to take another shot at the prize, a cool $350,000. Six flight attempts later, however, they walked away empty handed.

That’s not to say, however, that they didn’t accomplish anything at all. Even among the failures, Armadillo accomplished a lot. Two flights were quite successful, though they only accomplished the first part of the level 1 flight. A third flight was able to hover for a full 83 seconds, despite a crack in the combustion chamber. Overall, these were great accomplishments.

John Demar, a regular on the ARocket mailing list, was kind enough to post a bunch of photos from the event. John Carmack, just prior to leaving for the cup, posted a video of the AST qualifying flight at the Oklahoma space port. I’m sure John, or one of the crew, will post a complete run-down of the event on the Armadillo site when they get back home.

While they were unsuccessful this year, they were the only team to enter the competition. I can’t wait to see what they do next!

AIR, and a Prism

Web 2.0 is upon us, and with it comes new technologies determined to integrate it with our daily activities.  Thus far, interacting with the web has been through the use of a web browser such as Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer.  But, times are changing…

 

Let’s take a peek at two new technologies that are poised to change the web world and truly integrate web-based applications with traditional desktop applications.

 

First up is Adobe AIR, formerly known as Apollo.  According to Adobe :

Adobe® AIR lets developers use their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

In a nutshell, it brings web-based content directly into standalone applications.  In other words, developers can write a complete web-based application and distribute it as a downloadable application.  It’s a pretty neat concept as it allows you access to the standard UI elements of a desktop application, while allowing you to use standard web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript.

It’s cross-platform, like Java, so you can build a small distributable application without needing to distribute the framework as well.  It also supports offline use.  In other words, you can interact with web-based applications, while not connected to the Internet.  There are limitations, of course, but all of your interactions are queued up and synchronized with the online portion of the application the next time you connect.

It looks like a pretty cool technology.  Time will tell if it takes off or not.  One drawback, depending on who you are, is that this is not an open-source solution.  This is an Adobe product and with that comes all of the Adobe licensing.

 

The other new technology is Mozilla Lab’s Prism.  Prism is similar to AIR in that it strives to create desktop-based applications using web technologies, but so far, it’s doing it in a manner opposite to that of AIR.  Prism allows you to encapsulate on-line content into a simple desktop application, minus any of the fancy UI elements associated with the Firefox web browser.  The result is a fast web-based application running in a normal desktop window.

It doesn’t sound like much now, but it has potential.  Mozilla has plans to add new functionality to the web to allow for offline data storage, 3D graphics, and more.  So, instead of extending the capabilities of Prism, Mozilla wants to extend the capabilities of the web.

So why the different approach?  Well, with AIR, if you are away from your computer for some reason, you may not be able to access the same content you normally would.  AIR may not be installed on the new machine, and you may not have permission to install it.  You can likely access the web-based version of the application you were using, but you may end up with limited functionality.

Prism, on the other hand, allows you to use web applications as if they were desktop applications.  But, at the end of the day, it’s still a web application.  So, if you find yourself on someone else’s machine, without Prism, a simple web browser will do.

 

Both technologies clearly have advantages and only time will tell if either, or both, survive.  It’s a strange, new world, and I’m excited….

Stop Car Thief!

Technology is wonderful, and we are advancing by leaps and bounds every day.  Everything is becoming more connected, and in some cases, smarter.  For instance, are you aware that almost every modern vehicle is microprocessor controlled?  Computers inside the engine control everything from the fuel mixture to the airflow through the engine.

Other computer-based systems in your car can add features such as GPS navigation, or even connect you to a central monitoring station.  GM seems to have cornered the market on mobile assistance with it’s OnStar service.  OnStar is an in-vehicle system that allows the owner to report emergencies, get directions, make phone calls, and even remotely unlock your car doors.

Well, OnStar recently announced plans to add another feature to it’s service.  Dubbed “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown,” this new service allows police to remotely stop a stolen vehicle.  The service is supposed to start in 2009 with about 20 models.  Basically, when the police identify a stolen vehicle, they can have the OnStar technician automatically disable the vehicle, leaving the thief with control over the steering and brakes, only.  OnStar also mentions that they may issue a verbal warning to the would-be thief, prior to disabling the car.

 

But is this too much power?  What are the implications here?  OnStar is already a wireless system that allows remote unlocking of your car doors.  It reports back vehicle information to OnStar who can then warn you about impending vehicle problems.  Remote diagnostics can be run to determine the cause of a malfunction.  And now, remotely, the vehicle can be disabled?

As history has shown us, nothing is unhackable.  How long will it be until hackers identify a way around the OnStar security and find a way to disable vehicles at-will?  It will likely start as a joke, disabling vehicles on the highway, causing havoc with traffic, but in a relatively safe manner.  How about disabling the boss’s car?  But then someone will use this new power for evil.  Car jackers will start disabling cars to make it easier to steal them.  Criminals will disable vehicles so they can rob or harm the driver.

So how far is too far?  Is there any way to make services such as this safe?

Broken UMD? Here’s your cure…

When I first purchased my PSP, I picked up what I thought was a decent carrying case.  It was roughly the size of the PSP, but a tad thicker so it could hold 2-4 UMD games in addition to the PSP.  There was a cardboard divider to keep the UMDs away from the PSP screen, and straps to hold the PSP in.  All in all, it was a decent case.  Or, so I thought.

About a month or so after buying the case, I noticed that the clear plastic on one of my UMDs was cracked and pushing in towards the disc itself.  Over time, this got worse until the UMD wasn’t playable anymore.  I searched, in vain, for replacement cases.  The only suggestions I found were either to not break it in the first place, or to break open another UMD case you didn’t want, and super glue that case back together with the disc from the broken UMD in it.  Obviously, the first suggestion, complete with proclamations about the idiocy of such owners, was out of the question.  So, I tried the second suggestion.  I did get the case together, but the glue seeped out a little on the inside, creating a bump that the UMD would grate against.

Having failed to fix the UMD, I put it away, vowing to find a replacement case sometime in the future and to not break any other UMDs.  I went and purchased a new PSP Complete case from Slappa, as well as a few Score UMD storage cases.  There’s a nice comparison of the Score and Sony UMD cases on the official Playstation forum.  These two items kept both my PSP and my UMDs much safer, but over time, a few other UMDs started exhibiting signs of a cracked UMD shell.

Fast forward about two years and I come across this post on the PSP Fanboy site describing a new replacement UMD case.  This looked quite promising, so I went to the company’s site to check them out.  My first impression was that this was either a brand new company, or a scam site.  The website itself is pretty shoddy, mostly consisting of some poorly put together HTML and lots of Google ads.  However, they did have a video of the case itself and how it worked, so I trudged on.

Having seen the PayPal logo on the UMD ordering page, I decided to try them out.  I placed one UMD case into my on-line shopping cart and went to the checkout page.  The first thing I noticed on the checkout page was the lack of an option to use PayPal for payment.  I also noticed that the page was not encrypted with an SSL certificate.  I really had no desire to give this company my credit card information, especially with no SSL certificate in place, so I tried to proceed without entering it.  No dice.  I resorted to contacting the company via their online form explaining that while I did want a case, I couldn’t find the PayPal option.  Much to my surprise, they called me about 30 minutes later.

The gentlemen on the phone, whose name I forgot to write down, explained that the website was new and they knew there were some issues to work out.  He explained that the information entered on the checkout page was merely transmitted to PayPal for processing, but that I could use PayPal directly and just send them the money for the case, which they would then ship immediately.  I offered my concerns about the lack of an SSL certificate, which he promised to look into.  After we hung up, I headed over to PayPal to order.

The replacement cases are $3.99 each for US orders, and $4.99 for international orders.  This price includes shipping, so while it seems a little high, it’s actually not that bad.  I sent my $3.99 to the email address I obtained via my phone conversation and waited for the case to arrive.  Much to my surprise, I received my case in the mail a scant 4 days later.

The case was wrapped in a piece of light foam and placed inside of a standard white envelope.  Not the best packaging in the world, but MultiMedia Recovery (MMR) makes the claim that the cases are mostly indestructible.  True to their claim, the case was not cracked in any way and appeared to be in perfect shape.  I happily retrieved the UMD that was broken so many years ago and went to work placing it in the new case.

Honestly, the hardest part of the entire process is installing the frighteningly tiny screws into the new case.  I received three screws with my case, though only two are required.  I did have to go out and buy a jewelers screwdriver, though, but I should probably have one of those around the house anyway.  The screws secure the bottom portion of the UMD case, though I’m not sure they are really needed.  Even without them, the case fit together quite nicely and there was no danger of it coming apart later.  I suppose it’s possible that the case could be pulled apart when removing it from one of the UMD holders, but I don’t see that being a huge danger.  I installed the screws anyway and tried out the UMD.  It fit in the PSP with no problems, just like any of my other UMDs.  I fired up the PSP and the game loaded flawlessly.  Finally, I can finish playing Untold Legends.  Good thing I kept a backup of my save game…

 

All said and done, I think these replacement cases are a pretty good buy.  I would like to see discounts for bulk purchases, and perhaps better packaging, but overall, I am satisfied with my purchase and I will be purchasing more.  If you have UMDs that have broken in the past, I definitely recommend checking these out.  Hopefully MMR will address the problems with their website, but if not, the cases are available via david8950 on eBay.

Reaping what you sow…

Remember the stealth update story from a few days ago?  Well, it seems that not all is pleasant in paradise…  According to Windows Secrets, the transparent update can cause problems for users that use the “repair” feature in the operating system.  ZDNet has also confirmed this.

In theory, the repair function tries to restore the operating system to a usable state.  Basically, it removes some updates by overwriting files and adjusting the registry.  But apparently the repair feature will download and install the new Windows Update binaries.  When you attempt to install new updates, the updates fail to install.  Windows Update will download them, but is unable to install them.

Luckily, there is a workaround of sorts.  It does require some manual labor, though.  You’ll have to manually register the Windows Update files:

  • Open a command prompt windows (Start->Run->cmd.exe)
  • Next, run the following list of commands

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

  • Windows Update should now magically work!

 

My own personal recommendation is to not use the repair feature.  Look at it this way, if you’ve broken your system to the point where you need to use the repair function, then you’ve likely broken more than just the operating system.  Repairing it will remove updates, adjust the registry, etc., breaking some of the programs you’ve installed.  If you need to repair at all, then do so merely to back up your data.  Get a solid backup of the data and then wipe the drives and re-install the system.  Believe me, a little extra work to re-build the system now will save you tons of headaches later.

LOL

As I was zippin’ around the Information Superhighway today, I ran across this blog entry by Wil Wheaton. Wil is a great guy and has some interesting insights into a variety of matters both geeky and not-so-geeky. This particular post by him picked up on a pet peeve of mine that I’ve had for some time now, text-speak. Modern day devices have evolved to the point where we can communicate almost instantly via typed communications, most notably on cell phones. The reasons for using typed communication vary, but they exist and are actually pretty valid. However, it seems that as we move into more and more instant communication, our language skills are devolving. Wil’s blog entry is a perfect example of this.

I’ll admit, I’ve been known to use the odd LOL or ROFLMAO here or there, but it’s mostly in situations where those terms are almost expected. I refuse, however, to degrade myself by using shortcuts and misspelled words. It’s one thing to use the occasional acronym, but another to use cryptographic shortcuts to get your message out. Perhaps if my life was in danger, and I only had a few seconds to send a message, things would be different.

When I was in college, I spent a lot of time on IRC and playing a variety of MUDs. I have spent a good deal of time online in forums, talking on IRC and IM, playing online games, etc., and I have not devolved to the point of bad grammar in any of these situations. I think it’s a bad sign that people have decided to throw proper grammar out the window to chat with their friends.

What makes it worse is that television is popularizing the concept. AT&T runs a commercial now that pokes fun at the shorthand messaging by speaking it aloud and showing subtitles on the screen. It is quite the annoying commercial for any normal, educated person. In fact, I find it to be in quite poor taste.

Californication, a new series on Showtime, summed it up best with the following :

Radio Host: What’s your latest obsession?
Hank: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The Internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People…they don’t write anymore – they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.
Radio Host: Yet you’re part of the problem, I mean you’re out there blogging with the best of them.
Hank: Hence my self-loathing.

Whoa! Slow down! Or else…

There have been rumblings over the past few years about companies that are throttling customer bandwidth and, in some instances, canceling their service. I can confirm one of the rumors, having worked for the company, and I would tend to believe the other rumors. The problem with most of these situations is that none of these companies ever solidly defines what will result in throttling or loss of service. In fact, most of them merely put clauses in their Terms of Service that states that the bandwidth they are purchasing is not sustained, not guaranteed, etc.

Once particular company has been in the news as of late, having cut customers off time and time again. In fact, they have, what appears to be, a super-secret internal group of customer support representatives that deal with the “offenders.” Really, I’m not making this up. Check out this blog entry. This is pretty typical of companies that enact these types of policies. What I find interesting here is how Comcast determines who to disable. According to the blog entry by Rocketman, Comcast is essentially determining who the top 1% of users are for each month and giving them a high-usage warning. The interesting bit is that this is almost exactly how my previous employer was handling it.

Well, apparently Comcast has come out with a statement to clarify what excessive usage is. According to Comcast, excessive usage is defined as “a user who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures, or 13 million emails.” So let’s pull this apart a little. The terms they use are rather interesting. Songs? Pictures? How is this even close to descriptive enough to use? A song can vary wildly in size depending on the encoding method, bitrate, etc. So the same song can range from 1 MB to 100 MB pretty easily. How about pictures then? Well, what kind of pictures? After all, thumbnails are pictures too. So, again, we can vary the size of a picture from 10 KB to 10 MB, depending on the size and detail of the picture. And, of course, let’s not forget emails. An average email is about 10 KB or so, but these can also range up to several MB in size.

So let’s try out some simple math on this. Email seems to be the easiest to deal with, so we’ll use that. 13 Million emails in one month, assuming a 10 KB average size for each email, results in approximately 130 GB of data. That’s only an average of 50 KB per seconds over the course of 30 days. If we assume a user is only on the computer for 8 hours a day, that’s an average of 150KB per second for the entire 8 hours each day. Of course, we don’t normally download at such a consistent rate, it’s much more bursty in nature.

Now, I don’t believe the average user is going to download this much data, but there are business professionals who could easily exceed this rate. But I think the bigger issue here is how these companies are handling these issues. They advertise and sell access rates ranging anywhere from 3 Meg to 10 Meg and then get upset when the customers actually use that bandwidth. Assuming a 3M profile, that means you can download something in the range of 972 GB of data in one month. 10M is even more fun, allowing a max rate of about 3.2 TB. Think about that for a minute. That means you can only use about 13% of a 3M profile, and 4% of a 10M profile before they’ll terminate your service.

While I understand that providers need to ensure that everyone receives a consistent, reliable service, I don’t believe they can treat customers like this. We’ll see how this turns out over time, but I expect that as video becomes more popular, you’ll see customers that exceed this rate on a much more consistent basis. I wonder how providers will handle that…

Busted…

Imagine this. You turn on your computer and, unbeknownst to you, someone starts changing your files. Ok, so maybe it’s not so tough to imagine these days with all of the viruses, trojans, and hackers out there. But what if the files were being changed by someone you trusted? Well, maybe not someone you trust, but someone that should know better.

On August 24th, this exact scenario played out. All across the globe, files in Windows XP and Vista installations were modified with no notice, and no permission. But, this can easily be explained by the Windows Automatic Update mechanism, right? Wrong. The problem here, is that these updates were installed, regardless of the Automatic Update setting. Yep, you heard that right. These files were updated, even if you did not have automatic updates set to download or install updates.

This story was first broken by Windows Secrets on September 13th. The update seems to center around the Automatic Update feature itself. Nate Clinton, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Windows Update group wrote a blog entry about how and why Windows Update updates itself. Basically, the claim is that these updates are installed automatically because without them, Automatic Updates would cease to work, leaving the user with a false sense of security. He goes on to say that this type of stealth updating has been occurring since Automatic Updates was introduced. Finally, he mentions that these files are not updated if Automatic Updates are disabled.

This type of stealth updating is very disconcerting as it means that Microsoft is willing to update files without notifying the user. And while they state that Windows Update is the only thing being updated in this fashion, how can we believe them? What’s to prevent them from updating other files? Are we going to find in the future that our computers are automatically updated with new forms of DRM?

While I applaud Microsoft for wanting to keep our computers safe, and trying to ensure that the user doesn’t have a false sense of security, I disagree strongly with the way they are going about it. This is a very slippery slope, and can lead quickly into questionably legal territory. Should Microsoft have the right to change files on my computer without permission? Have they received permission already because I am using the update software? Unfortunately, there are no clear cut answers to these questions.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens from here as this has become somewhat of a public issue. Will Microsoft become more forthcoming with these updates, or will they proceed with stealth installations? Regardless, I don’t expect to see much of a reprisal because of this issue. It’s unfortunate, but for the most part, I don’t think most users actually care about issues such as this. In fact, most of them probably aren’t aware. Thankfully for those of us that do care, there are people out there keeping an eye out for issues like this.

Review – Puzzle Quest (PSP)

Anticipation : 8
Expectation : 8
Initial Reaction : 6
Overall : 4
Genre : Puzzle

Well, it’s been a while since I did a review. I held off on reviewing this particular title with hopes that the developer would release a patch to fix some of the problems with the game. Unfortunately, they have not. With that in mind, on to the review!

Puzzle Quest was designed by Infinite Interactive and ported to the PSP by Vicious Cycle. It was ultimately published by D3 Publisher, who, incidentally, purchased [pdf] Vicious Cycle on June 20, 2007. Puzzle Quest received the “Best Puzzle Game” award at IGN’s Best of E3 2007 awards for the XBox 360 Live Arcade version.

The game itself is quite fun to play. The player navigates a large world map, detailed with a number of destinations that open up as the story progresses. Each location has a variety of options such as retrieving quests, purchasing items, and listening to rumors in the tavern. Quests lead you on through the story, ultimately aiming to save the land of Etheria from the evil Lord Bane.

You can choose from four player classes, Druid, Warrior, Knight, and Wizard. As the game progresses, you gain levels and invest points into a variety of skills. There are four primary “mastery” skills, earth, air, fire, and water. In addition, you can choose to increase other skills such as cunning, morale, and battle.

The four primary skills determine how much of each mana type your player can collect, as well as various bonuses for collecting it. Battle skill increases the amount of damage you inflict when you match skulls. Cunning increases the effects wild cards have, amount of gold you gain for matching coins, and determines who goes first when battle starts. Finally, morale increases your life points as well as various bonuses for collecting the purple experience stars.

Your character also has a citadel that can be upgraded to gain access to additional spells, skills, and items. As you gain gold, you can build additional portions of your citadel. A dungeon allows you to capture enemies and even ride them as mounts. The mage tower grants you access to learn spells from captured enemies. The stable allows you to train your mount, allowing additional bonuses during battle and increasing the likelyhood of bypassing creatures on the map. Still other features unlock the ability to train your character, forge items, and capture other cities.

When a battle begins, you are shown an 8×8 grid of symbols. The red, blue, green, and yellow gems represent the fire, water, earth, and air mana. The skull icons are used to inflict damage. Matching coins increases the gold you character has, allowing you to purchase items and skills. Purple stars are matched to increase your experience, helping boost you to that next level.

The battle is played in a similar manner to the popular Bejeweled game. The player simply swaps the positions of two adjacent symbols. If the symbols cause a row of three or more symbols to match, the symbols are removed and the appropriate reward is obtained. Additional symbols fall in from above, often causing chain reactions which can result in additional bonuses. If the player matches five or more chains, they receive an experience and gold bonus. Matching four symbols in a row results in a free turn, while matching five results in a free turn and a wild card. Wild cards can be used to match any of the four mana types.

In order to win a battle, you must reduce your opponents hit points to zero. This can be accomplished by matching skulls, or casting spells. Skulls come in two flavors, a normal skull, and a +5 skull. The latter cause explosions, destroying any symbols around the skull and inflicting additional damage on the enemy. Spells are obtained through leveling your character, as well as capturing enemies. Spells come in a variety of forms. Some spells can heal damage inflicted on you, some inflict damage on the enemy. Other spells can change symbols on the board from one type to another, while other spells can steal or reduce your enemies mana.

As the game progresses, you can capture enemies and gain additional spells from them. Some captured enemies can also be used as mounts, allowing the player to move quicker through the map, gaining a chance to avoid some encounters. Capturing creatures occurs after you have battled a given creature at least three times. To capture a creature, the 8×8 game board is displayed and you are tasked with clearing the board of all symbols. In this version of the game, no symbols will fall from above. But don’t be fooled, some of these puzzles are quite difficult.

Once a creature has been captured, you can learn spells from it. Again, the battle board is shown and you match symbols to gain access to the spells. In this form of the game, you must match a specific number of symbols to progress. If you reach a point where no more matches are available, you fail to learn the spell and must start over.

Similarly, you can forge new items using runes found throughout the land of Etheria. This time, you must match the forge symbols on the board. As with learning spells, when no more matches are available, you fail to forge the item and must start over.

Overall the game is quite fun to play and can keep you occupied for hours on end. Additionally, you can choose to battle specific creatures through the battle menu, or play wirelessly against friends. Sorry, only ad-hoc multiplayer is available.

There are, however, a number of issues with the game. During the game, you have the opportunity to gain companions. Each companion adds bonuses and skills to your player that are used while battling. Unfortunately, a bug in the PSP version of the game prevents your player from actually gaining these bonuses. You still gain the companions, they just have no effect whatsoever on the gameplay.

Worse are the freeze bugs. I’m not entirely sure what causes these, but they have been reported by a number of users. There are a few different versions of this bug, all causing the game to freeze and the PSP to turn off. Some are avoidable while other can result in needing to completely restart the game. For me, I first encountered this while using the Druid character. After playing for some time, I noticed that browsing through my spellbook caused the game to freeze and lock up. I found no workaround for this and, as a result, was not able to use any spells above level 10. I have also seen the game freeze during various battles, though this seems to be a random event. I have seen additional reports of repeated battle lockups, causing the player to have to restart the game.

According to the Gamespy review, there is yet another bug that prevents settings from being saved. Personally, I haven’t noticed this particular problem, but I haven’t really played with the settings much.

I have emailed both Infinite Interactive and D3 regarding these bugs. Infinite Interactive directed me to D3 explaining that they did not write the PSP code and had no control over it. D3 responded with what seemed to be a canned response that they would “look into the issue.” That was six months ago. I have since emailed them twice. I have received no response from them, thus far.

This lack of customer service has me quite upset. What could have been an excellent game has been marred by bugs. The lack of response on the part of D3 has forced me to reconsider buying any additional D3 and Vicious Cycle titles. I highly recommend you check all reviews and forums regarding any D3 titles before you decide to purchase. While Puzzle Quest is still a great game and I do enjoy playing it, it is quite frustrating to reach a point where the game becomes unplayable due to a bug. I’m still holding out hope that D3 will address these bugs, but as time goes on, it seems less and less likely.

MegaDuck!

So, my wife was watching Boomerang with the kids last night.  Duck Dodgers was on, which is always great for a few laughs.  Well, she saw this particular episode and decided to rewind it for me to watch..  Well worth it.  I’ve seen the end before and was astonished..  The joining of two greats…  Megadeth is one of my all time favorite bands, and Daffy Duck is just hysterical..   So, without further ado, “MEGADUCK!”