I Am A: Lawful Neutral Elf Wizard

Dang I'm sure that should be Chaotic Good, that's what I usually play after all!

I Am A: Lawful Neutral Elf Wizard (3rd Level)


Ability Scores:

Strength-11

Dexterity-13

Constitution-13

Intelligence-16

Wisdom-14

Charisma-12


Alignment:
Lawful Neutral A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs him. Order and organization are paramount to him. He may believe in personal order and live by a code or standard, or he may believe in order for all and favor a strong, organized government. Lawful neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you are reliable and honorable without being a zealot. However, lawful neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it seeks to eliminate all freedom, choice, and diversity in society.


Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.


Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

An interesting little tool/form of Art

Found this tool today when I was looking something up Webpages as Graphs. Throw it your website address and it generates a rather pretty (if highly cpu intensive) graph of your site based on the html tags used to make it up!

Any way here is an example of what my site looks like!

What do your blogs/websites look like in it?

Dragon Age!

BioWare : Dragon Age : Home

Dragon Age is looking awesome from the early screenshots and videos released, the website has some info as well these days so if you like RPG's have a look at it!

The extra bar is so worth it!

And my arm likes it a lot more!

Quote: You do not exist!

A Quote from the God Delusion

Steve Grand points out that you and
I are more like waves than permanent 'things'. He invites his reader
to think . . .

. . . of an experience from your childhood. Something you
remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even
smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were
there at the time, weren't you? How else would you
remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there.
Not a single atom that is in your body today was there
when that event took place . . . Matter flows from place
to place and momentarily comes together to be you.
Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of
which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand
up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does,
because it is important.

I've read some SF where stuff like this has been mentioned a little in passing but never as clearly put! A really fun idea to consider that to a certain degree is correct. While some parts of the body are still there many are no longer and have been swapped out to the environment. This means that to a certain degree your simply a traveling informational lifeform that has conveniently managed to piggy back it's self on to a clump of matter that it then rearranges according to a set of rules. :-) Like software in a certain manner you do not physically exist!

For Fun

Got to Love it...

When older windows games run better on Linux via WINE than they do in Vista (and XP to a certain degree).
BG, BGII, IWD, IWD2, PST I choose you!

Any way time for some IWD2 Heart of Fury Mode, where level 1 Goblins have 40 health, do 200% more damage, and can wipe out your entire party of level 1 characters with out even lossing half there HP, if your not careful.





Amazing I even remebered to save my party from the last time I played ~1 year ago, heck I might even finish the game this time if I'm not careful. Go you level 26 Party!

Windwos Vista + Macbook Air

Macbook Air running Vista

Games

Hmm just had a look at all the computer games I've bought over the last 11 years, a rather decent pile. Any way set them all out on the floor in roughly the order I bought them and decided might be cool (Geeky) to take a photo so here you are most of the games I've bought, It's not all the games I own though some are only electronic downloads and others game free on gaming magazine cd's.

Excuse the quick paint job on the background couldn't be bothered doing it any better.

Some of these games are rather amazing others are just average.

The Best Games by Genre:

FPS/RPG: (In order of preference)
Deus Ex (Best Game EVER)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R

FPS:
Knights of the Old Republic 2 (in the Starwars game pack)
Unreal Tournament original and 2004 (sure no story but fun none the less)
Deus Ex II (sucked compared to the first still reasonable though)
BIOSHOCK (NOT! what are people on it's just a linear shooter with a somewhat better than average story?)

RPGs:
Baldur's Gate II + xpack (at up to 250hrs it's the longest game I own, 2nd best game)
Oblivion
NWN2 + xpack
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2
Fallout 1 and 2 (though admittedly never managed to finish 2 yet)
NWN, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale 1 and 2

Strategy:
Age of Kings and Age of Empires + xpacks (by amount of time spent playing it)
Total Annihilation (it's still fun to play after 10 years)
Star Craft (Best RTS campaign)
Sins of a Solar Empire

SIMS:
Starlancer (But it's so insanely hard with out in mission saves)
Independence war II Edge of Chaos

Any way how many of these have you played? What do you think?

EEE PC The future

Well it looks like the EEE PC has some interesting changes coming up in the near future.
Bigger screen (1024x600), more storage (8GB, 12GB, 20GB), a change in CPU (Intel Atom), quick battery recharging, longer battery life (up to 8hours) etc

This could make things rather interesting, If they manage to get one out with 4+ hours battery, and an Atom CPU I think I'll be picking one up rather quickly!

For more info Eee PC to Get Intel’s Diamondville, Hard Drives, and Fashion Forward Style.

Current Desktop Theme

Finally got around to clearing out all my old gnome, and thunderbird settings (canning all the old pop mail in thunderbird and moving to IMAP saved 1GB of HD space) today, and changed the default theme for my desktop. Have moved to a Dark grey theme which works rather well except that it looks a little odd in thunderbird and on some Internet sites in firefox. As seeing firefox uses the system theme colours and widgets you end up having dark grey data boxes on a white page and a few other minor things like that.

Desktop

Odd appearance of Google.co.nz, with a dark theme.

Mac getting Spore

Coming to the Mac in 2008: 'Spore' | CNET News.com. Well it looks like you Mac Fanboys will be getting the odd interesting game for OSX this year, though I see they're using Transgaming's wine derivative rather than a native port of the engine.

Linux is Productive

Well I've finally managed to finish installing the latest version 64bit of Mandriva Linux on my laptop, the result being much to my supprise I actually got some acutal work done due to the lack of games etc to distract me from my task. Along with the advantages inherent in Gnome desktop compared to Vista. Virtual desktops, Scale/Exposé andvarious other difference between the systems make the Gnome Desktop much better at handling work that envolves 10+ windows and 3-4 different apps, even on a 1440x900 res screen.

Also being 64bit it's nice to know the 4GB of RAM can actually be used rather than 3.5GB when running in 32bit Vista.

Eee PC

Any one looking for a cheap (NZ$600) ultraportable laptop? The Asus Eee Pc seems to have hit off rather well, with a heck lot of info on the web about it.


The review sites love it.

Asus Eee PC 701 4G Review
Eee PC Review

The specs are decent
* Processor: Intel Celeron M ULV 900MHz
* Graphics: Integrated Intel GMA 900 GPU
* Storage: 4GB of Flash-based storage (SSD)
* Memory: 512MB of DDR2 RAM (667MHz)
* OS: Xandros Linux (Asus customized)
* Screen: 7-inch screen with 800 x 480 resolution
* Ports: 3 USB 2.0, 1 VGA monitor out, headphone jack, microphone input, SD card reader (SDHC compatible), Kensington lock slot, Ethernet 10/100
* Webcam (0.3 MP)
* Battery: 4-cell 5200 mAh 7.4V Li-Ion (rated at 3.5 hours)
* Wireless: 802.11b/g Atheros
* Input: Keyboard and Touchpad
* Weight: approximately 2 lbs with battery, 2.5 lbs travel weight with AC adapter.
* Two-year warranty

And it's so small that some people have been shiped boxes of five when they order 1.
Asus' Eee PC laptop so small, buyers sent boxes of five


Certainly rather tempting for the price though the low resolution for the screen seems abit of a pity. Be tempted if I had a six hundred dollars sitting around.

RPG Cliches That Need To Die

IGN: RPG Cliches That Need To Die

Self explanatory I think.

Screams of horror pour forth from the PC gaming faithful.

EA acquires Bioware, Pandemic

What I'm up too currently

I've spent the last 4 weeks or so doing paid work for my supervisor while waiting for my thesis to come back. Kind of fun, research is alot more enjoyable when your being paid to do it rather than paying to do it. Also knowing that at 5pm that's it for the day, and not having to worry about is it enough to get the thesis done makes a major difference. At this point looks like a mix of my work and some by a couple of his previous students will result in a paper which I'll be helping to right in the next few weeks, which would be rather good! Also the pay is nice and having something to do 4 days each week is good. Have also just restarted demonstrating with first year labs as they restart for the final term of the year. A fun set of lab's spent 2 afternoons this week at Travis wetlands and the Bromley oxidation ponds, helping students ID birds and making sure they don't loose any of the departments gear or do anything stupid. Also a nice chance to take the odd photo (See bottom of post), though of course the weather did the biology field trip thing and was rather bad both days (on Friday it clouded up just as we arrived there).

Apart from that have been doing a bit of reading and a decent bit of computer gaming so far have played:

• Knights of the Old Republic - A rather impressive bioware starwars RPG would rate it an "A+".

• Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords - Another good RPG by Obsidian, and a somewhat different focus the the previous one, not yet finished but think I'd rate it an "A" or "A-".

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Interesting semi RPG/FPS, good fun and rather spooky in parts "A-"

• Bioshock - Not yet finished but a rather good FPS with some RPG elements, I don't think it's quite as good as every thinks though "A-"

• StarLancer - Fun space opera/sim game, enjoyable but the inability to save during missions makes it rather Hard "B+" (not yet finished)

• Fallout 1 - Older (1997) GURPS derived (You are "SPECIAL") post nuclear war RPG, with a 1950's style, lots of adult humor and rather violent but a bloody good game (both figuratively and literally) "A+" If you haven't played it you should runs on both Mac and PC.

• Fallout 2 - Larger more complex, and less tightly woven than the orginal still lots of fun though I haven't finished it yet (A-)
  

• Half Life 2 ep 1 - Also played abit of the first episode for HL2, all right but not amazing (B+)

Also been reading a bit, if your looking for some very good epic fantasy, I'd highly recomend "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss. Also any thing by Alastair Reynolds, Neil Asher, or Richard Morgan if you prefer SF.

Any way that is about it for now, I'll leave you with a few pictures, more can be found at my flickr account.


Introducing - The New Zealand Scaup
Originally uploaded by Falcdragon

Scratching - New Zealand Scaup
Originally uploaded by Falcdragon

The New Zealand Scaup
Originally uploaded by Falcdragon

The Oxidation Pond
Originally uploaded by Falcdragon

Vista: The Good and the BAD!

Thought I might as well stick up a few thoughts about Vista as I've been using it a bit on my laptop while slowly configuring my linux setup and waiting updated version to come out:

The Good -

Vista's Built in search - By default it's selected when you press the win key or click on the start menu, so type in the first few letters of the app or something from the document you want to open, and it brings it up in a second then it's just a matter of hitting enter to start it, or the down key then enter if theres a couple of apps with similar names. For starting apps I'd say it's pretty close to gnomes deskbar tool though it lacks the useful plugins deskbar has for web, calculator etc.
Also as a search engine it seems pretty decent, though maybe not quite up with Googledesktop in some areas such as text preview.

System speed - It's pretty good, vista finally utilizes all available ram to cache apps and other stuff of interest in a manner similar to linux, as a result the system is rather snappy. At least on laptop with 3GB RAM.

Sidebar - A widget system that seems to work fine a little slow starting, and some what RAM hungry (70MB for 6 applets one of which has my address book loaded) but CPU lite. Also could do with a few more applets and a hot key to bring them to the front ie F9.

Security - Requesting permission to make system changes is good, still not with out it's share of problems check out the BAD.

File System Layout - The new file system layout with /users makes more sense than the old /Documents n Settings. Also placing the various media, catagory and search folders at /users/username/ makes more sense than the old /Docs/username/My Documents/.

Windows network center - Nice clear layout of how and what your connected to.

The OK

3D desktop - Somewhat RAM hungry (100MB 9 apps open + sidebar) but again fairly CPU lite when used with a dedicated 3D card (10% single core when moving a video window round while it's playing). The 3d switch app mode is alright but nothing great, much prefer the linux cube, wall, or OSX expose.

Appearance - Not bad not brilliant either, far, far better than XP's though if your computer can handle Aero. The new icons are nice and the file previews and folders showing previews of there video or image content is nice.

Windows Defender - Spyware/malware protection, useful but hard to know how effective it is.

Windows Mobility center - Quick access to laptop specific settings.

The Bad

Security - Permissions can get out of hand to create a folder and rename it in a section of the drive you don't have full permissions too requires 4 confirmations!
1) Warning you will need permission to create the folder
2) Permission
3) Warning you will need permission to change the foldername
4) Permission
That's 4x you need to click continue in an admin account! UAC really needs a cooldown period or something similar like linux, ie once you give your self permission you have admin permissions for that Window and it's contents until you close the Window.
It also needs some method of saying hey I trust this app this can be run as admin as long as it doesn't change with out me being asked to confirm it each time!

Compatibility - Some games are quite mucky to get set up and some of the vista security options can result in odd things happening to them. Compatibility mode + Admin permissions has worked so far for me though.

Performance - For gaming at least seems somewhat slower than expected, this may be due to still fairly early drivers for vista and current generation hardware.

Settings - The settings have been rearrange somewhat, not sure why but compared to windows XP sometimes things aren't where you expect to find them.

Size - An operating system with out any applications appart from basic email, internet and IM shouldn't take 8+ GB HDD space!


Overall I think vista is a nice upgrade from XP if your computer is fast enough to handle it properly and if you don't have too many legacy programs.



Windows Vista, with a few changes.




My previous linux desktop.

From bebo

1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question even if it doesn't make sense. NO CHEATING!

Some what bizarre the mix you can get.

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
How can I keep from singing - Enya

WHAT'S YOUR OUTLOOK ON LIFE?
New Medicines - Dead Poetic

WHAT DOES YOUR FAMILY THINK OF YOU?
The Tower - Vienna Teng

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
UNATCO - Ionstorm Studios

WHAT DO STRANGERS THINK OF YOU?
0 - Nakagawa Koutarou

WHAT DO YOUR EXES THINK OF YOU?
Vhailor Theme - Black Isle Studios

HOW IS YOUR LOVE LIFE?
Town - Bethesda Studios

HOW WILL YOUR LOVE LIFE BE IN THE FUTURE?
Secret Seeker - Ichiko Hashimoto

WILL YOU GET MARRIED?
The Umar Hills - Bioware Studios

WILL YOU HAVE KIDS?
Lost Village - Castlevania Developer

ARE YOU GOOD AT SCHOOL?
Tuba Mirum - Orquestra Sinfônica de Budapeste

WILL YOU BE SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE?
Inner Take - Ichiko Hashimoto

WHAT SONG SHOULD THEY PLAY ON YOUR BIRTHDAY?
Duke of Death - Jeff van Dyck

WHAT SONG SHOULD THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Viconia's Romance Theme - Bioware Studios

THE SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE:
Herr, lehre doch mich - Brahms, Johannes

YOU AND YOUR BEST FRIEND ARE:
Selig sind, die da Leid tragen - Brahms, Johannes

HAPPY TIMES:
Nemesis- machinae supremacy

SAD TIMES:
Brynnlaw - Bioware Studios

EVERY DAY:
Tokusou - Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi

FOR TOMORROW:
Shin Troop - Nakagawa Koutarou

FOR YOU:
Zone Triggers - Mooze

WHAT DOES NEXT YEAR HAVE IN STORE FOR ME?
Rem - Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi

WHAT DO I SAY WHEN LIFE GETS TOO HARD?
Cursed Clock Tower - Castlevania Developer

WHAT DO I THINK WHEN I GET UP IN THE MORNING?
Tavern 2 - Bioware Studios

WHAT SONG WILL I DANCE TO AT MY WEDDING?
A Shadow on Me - Project 86

WHAT DO YOU WANT AS A CAREER?
Deus Ex - Ionstorm Studios

YOUR FAVOURITE SAYING?
A Knife in the Dark - Howard Shore

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS?
Romdo Overshadows- Yasuyuki Ueda

WHERE WOULD YOU GO ON YOUR FIRST DATE?
Desert - Black Isle Studio

DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
Black Out- Muse

WHAT DO I LIKE DOING MOST?
Area 51- Ionstorm Studios

SONG THAT DESCRIBES MY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL.
mx explore - Bethesda Studios

WHAT IS MY STATE OF MIND AT THE MOMENT?
The Void - Ben Houge

HOW WILL I DIE?
redd - Black Isle Studio

THE SONG THAT YOU'LL PUT AS YOUR SUBJECT:
Misa no Theme A- Taniuchi Hideki

A Question - Skype or SIP?

Do any of you who read my blog utilise any VOIP programs like Skype or Gizmo? If so which program do you use? As I am thinking about setting up such a program and would prefer to use what ever one is used by more of the people I know if any of you use such a program, that is.

Also I don't entirely like the idea of using Skype have heard the odd iffy thing about it.