Spring 2: Electric Boogaloo
It's been a while, so let me briefly bring things up-to-date.
Our AC difficulties are solved for now. Arizona Refrigeration Services called us the morning of our appointment to verify, showed up 2 hours later, cleaned the coils in 45 minutes and charged us $115. Our electric bill for the month of August was $220. Shazam!
In a week and a half, we'll take our annual trip down to Tucson for the Tucson Beer Festival. It's been great the past 2 years, and I have high hopes for getting drunk cheaply again this year. The weather here the past week in Phoenix has been absolutely delightful - highs in the low 90s and lows in the low 70s. It's essentially like Spring part 2. I sense a Violently Competitive Croquet party in the near future.
In mid-October, we'll be taking a trip to San Francisco and Napa valley with Paul and Maureen. That should be a lot of fun, but it seems that once again any chance of visiting the Winchester Mystery House are out the door. One of these days...
As for work, now that Tiger Woods has shipped, I've been working on 2 unannounced projects. I don't follow the licensing/legal stuff too closely, but I think they'll be announced before too terribly long. Glenda says that the main holdup to announcing them has to do with clearing the contracts through the various layers of lawyers for all parties involved. I have a suspicion that one of the 2 projects will catch some people off-guard - it certainly floored me when I found out. (And no, it's not a shooter, first-person or otherwise.) I'll have more to say about them once they're public.
The Mac mini I got a month ago to replace my G4 has worked out great. It's whisper quiet (as opposed to the jet enigne of the G4 tower) and it takes up so little room. I still need to set up Apache2 and a subversion server on it for MacMAME. My first attempt ended in dismal failure. I tried to build it off darwinports using the settings that have been reported to work with 10.4, but I must've screwed something up since it still had the 64k timeout problems.
Switching gears again, I downloaded Eclipse 3.1 earlier today and installed the CDT toolkit, as I've heard that this is becoming a pretty powerful development environment for C/C++. While it may be, I can't seem to get it to work right - clicking on the "X" to close the sub-windows does nothing, and I get weird errors when quitting. I haven't had time to google for answers yet though, and I know next-to-nothing about Eclipse. I was kinda hoping that it'd "just work" :) I'll probably dig around over the weekend and see if I can figure out how to get it to work, and see if the OSX version is "fully baked" or just a work in progress.
Comments
I keep running into people who actually want to go to the Winchester Mystery House, and I'm not sure why. That was one of the biggest wastes of $15+ and a few hours I've ever experienced. I just didn't think there was much there -- it's a slightly weird house that's been over-embellished and the tour guide was awful.
Posted by: Eric Albert | September 18, 2005 08:33 PM
"I keep running into people who actually want to go to the Winchester Mystery House, and I'm not sure why."
Because it's a mystery, and I'm a sucker. :-)
Posted by: Brad Oliver | September 19, 2005 01:45 AM
Oooooh, mystery projects. I just hope Mac X-Men Legends II is a on the horizon. ;)
Posted by: a2daj | September 19, 2005 10:25 AM
> I have a suspicion that one of the 2
> projects will catch some people off-guard -
> it certainly floored me when I found out.
Clearly Brad WANTS us to guess when he writes stuff like that. :-)
One thing that would floor me would be a game that uses an engine or middleware that we'd long thought was unavailable to us - Half-Life 1/2 engine, Gamespy, or especially Havok.
I suppose it could just also be a title that we didn't expect to be announced, like Splinter Cell 2 or 3, or Deus Ex 2. (Or the original Jedi Knight, right, Brad?) :-) Or a title that you'd expect from a rival publisher, like Halo 2 or Civ 4. But I don't think Brad would have mentioned being floored in that case.
I'm not going to guess a specific title at this time though, even though that's a favorite game of mine. Inspiration just isn't striking today...
Posted by: Matt Diamond | September 19, 2005 11:54 AM
All I hope for right now is KOTOR II - The Sith Lords; and if it isn't; well, then I'll have to wait hopefully only a little longer to get the sequel to my favourite all time game up and running.
By the way Brad, can you tell me if there are any technical reasons why KOTOR II couldn't be ported to the Mac??
Would be nice to know if it's at all possible, just to keep the hopes up :-) .
By the way, my deepest thanks for all the work you've done so far over the years; it gave me long looooong hours of goooood entertainment.
Posted by: Arnaut Naegele | September 20, 2005 07:10 AM
Well, the Winchester Mystery House is not that bad. It's true you can be a bit disappointed by the inside but it's still worth visiting it IMHO. I would recommend visiting it during a sunny day as this is somehow a dark place.
And the tour guide was good.
Only a x86 Sith deals in absolutes...
Posted by: Darth Sidious | October 5, 2005 02:24 AM
The Civ I-III + PTW announcement certainly caught me off-guard :) Nice.
Posted by: a2daj | October 27, 2005 09:37 AM
AJ did the math correctly: the 2 mystery projects are Civ3 Complete and Civ4, announced today. And now a clarification:
"The Civ I-III + PTW announcement certainly caught me off-guard"
Civ3 Complete does not contain Civ1 or Civ2. It does contain Civ3 and its 2 expansions, Play the World and Conquests.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | October 27, 2005 09:46 AM
I think he just typed CivI instead of CivIV. Roman numerals - those things'll get you every time.
Speaking of which, I've just realized that the reason "733T speak" never caught on during the Roman Empire was because of their long-winded way of writing numerals. Also, they didn't have a numeral zero. So whereas today we can write the elegant taunt "d00d u w4s 0wnz0r3d", Romans would have had to write "dvde v wIVs ownzorIIId". That would have just looked stupid.
Posted by: Matt Diamond | October 27, 2005 12:18 PM
Matt got it right. I meant to type Civ IV-III.
Posted by: a2daj | October 27, 2005 02:17 PM