Apparently when you google "Two Worlds 2 ending", one of my rants entitled "Two Worlds 2 Ending Is Disappointing" is on the first page. This search term first caught my eye that day I saw the Iraqi visitor(s) but I never got around to trying it till just now. Too bad for anyone trying to find out anything about the game from that rant because the title was the only part of it that mentioned that game.
The actual rant that described my opinion of the ending was really the following one.
Rebuild is quite an interesting game. It's a turn-based strategy game in which you reclaim your city after a zombie invasion.
I like it mainly because it requires some thinking but not a lot. More importantly, you can close it at any time and reload at the turn, ie day, you're on. The graphics may be bad even for a Flash game but I find that the gameplay more than offsets this issue.
The concept is simple. You begin with 4 tiles - a police station, 2 suburbs (low-density housing) and a farm. The police station raises your defence rating, the housing allows you to have more survivors and the farm produces food that your survivors eat each turn. Other buildings include laboratories (for research, eg fertilizer ie farm upgrade), apartments (high-density housing) and bars (raises happiness, don't ask where they get the booze)
There are many factors you need watch in this game, including food, happiness, survivors. Food prevents hunger and hunger makes people unhappy which may cause them to leave. Happiness needs to be kept high or people may refuse to work or, again, leave.
Survivors come in several types: soldiers, builders, scavengers, leaders, scientists and (useless) civilians. Soldiers raise your defence rating more when put on guard duty and makes missions they're in safer (like bodyguards). Builders can change your tiles into more useful buildings more quickly and reclaim tiles with better speed. Scavengers find more food when sent on scavenging missions in tiles containing food. Leaders guarantee success when put in recruitment missions in tiles where other survivors have been spotted, and raises the happiness more when they throw parties in bars and churches. Scientists are the only ones who can do research in the labs you reclaim. Finally, civilians can be retrained into more useful people in schools that you have reclaimed.
The game prevents you from just remaining in a comfortable position with multiple factors.
1) You need more tiles for farms to have a steady food supply. There is only so much food that your scavengers can find around you.
2) Zombies tend to be attracted by your reclaimed buildings. When you reclaim a tile, you increase the perimeter of your territory. Larger perimeter means more zombies can attack you from more tiles.
3) Random events happen, usually bad ones. Disease can strike, killing your survivors. Bad weather kills crops. One of your survivors may steal food. Raiders may attack you. On the other hand, the Zombie Killing Squad may randomly come to your aid to clear tiles of zombies.
4) Occasionally a huge zombie horde may arrive and attack you. You will be given several turns' notice before they reach your barricades.
In other words, you can't stop trying to find more food, more survivors to defend yourself with and more tiles to accommodate the extra survivors.
The game is not too hard on Normal and Hard difficulties since I've already tried those. Harder is very difficult because bad random events keep happening and zombies are attracted to you sooner, making it very hard to spare anyone to go outside to recruit or find food. The hordes also keep coming whenever one is defeated.
One thing I've figured out is that beyond Normal, it's necessary to take big risks, even leaving your Fort's danger rating to over 40% once in a while at the beginning.
Another is that expansion needs to be planned a long way ahead to reduce the perimeter of your barricade relative to the number of tiles you have. In other words, keep your reclaimed territory as squarish as possible, leave as few corners exposed as you can.
Hospitals, farms and homes are more needed than labs and bars. Police stations and malls are also important because they raise your defence rating.
Why the heck am I typing so much about a simple Flash game?
Probably because I'm currently out of games. Which is why I'm going retro again, playing this Chinese RPG I completed once before... over a decade ago, called 仙剑奇侠传. Apparently, there have been sequels and even an online game for this title.
For a DOS game it is surprisingly playable on my 64bit Vista. The only glitch is a rather minor one that prevents the words from displaying on unimportant messages like random objects I find (old RPGs, y'know, you can find random stuff on random cupboards and shelves) and the text that tells me what I got after each (turn-based) battle. Except the numbers are displayed properly so I can see how much money and exp I get.
Therefore it's perfectly playable.
Despite having finished it before, there were lots of things that I didn't understand, especially since I couldn't understand most of the words. I believe my uncle who gave it to me also gave me a guide which obviously I no longer have. I don't even have the game but as far as I can tell it's now abandonware which you can download from lots of Chinese game websites.
Even now there are phrases I don't get, mostly because it's using a little of the older forms of Chinese that all martial arts novels used to use. One can easily recognize it by noticing how they express themselves using much fewer words as ancient Chinese used to do.
In times long past, Mandarin-users used to prefer single characters to express things we now use 2 characters for. This is because ever since the Revolution, they've encouraged people to write using dual-character 词 (or phrase, although that's not exactly accurate). An example one lecturer gave me was this:
we now say: 这朵花喜欢潮湿。
they used to say: 此花喜阴。
Notice the absence of a measure word (量词) and the reduction of each 2-character phrase into single characters. Which in turns makes you notice that if each of the 2 modern phrases are split into their individual characters, they've basically the same the same meanings and you're really repeating yourself whenever you say those words.
I don't know about you but I'd never noticed it until that particular lecture.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
Rant 728 / Insipid
Finished Alternativa. It's not a difficult game.
I said it was bad the last time. I was wrong. It was worse than I expected. The ending was probably supposed to be a cliffhanger but instead turned out to be an epic anticlimax. Honestly, I've played better Flash games on Newgrounds than that. I'm so happy I didn't fork out US$25 for such a piece of junk.
To be fair, it had an excellent main menu and start, but the plot just never gets any deeper. Oh right, it did... at the final part. The moment it got a little exciting, THE END. WHAT?
It would have been better if they had scraped the cinematics and lengthened the game.
This is incredible! The Square Enix Complete Pack on sale on Steam costs US$75 (*1.3 = almost S$100) and contains everything SE has available on Steam, including:
Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY Edition
Front Mission Evolved with all DLCs
Hitman
Hitman 2
Just Cause
Just Cause 2 with all DLCs
Kane and Lynch
Kane and Lynch 2 with all DLCs
Supreme Commander 2 with DLC
Those are the better games on the list. Total savings: US$489.82
This is going to be available till 20th Feb. Too bad I'm not interested in most of the games on the list. I know they're good but they're just not my cup of tea.
Started on Majesty 2: Monster Kingdom. Skipped the original game, Majesty 2, and went straight to this expansion.
This game is a RTS game with a twist - you only handle the big picture. Think about what it's like to be a medieval king. You don't tell your soldiers which guy to attack first when you send them there. Instead, you tell them where to go and what to do (eg attack, plunder, kill everyone).
Same with this game. You are given 4 commands, or flags in this game, Fear, Attack, Defend and Explore. By placing these flags on the points you want these to be done, you're telling your men what you want them to do. On these flags, you place bounties so that the more you spend, the more guys will want to do it.
But the game is hard. Either that or I'm retarded. Nevertheless I'm still stuck on the second mission after 5 attempts. The first mission was deceivingly easy but this second one wasn't.
The best I could do was defend my base but I could never spare anything for the Lich's structure, so I keep letting it be destroyed after about 40 days.
I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I've tried building 2 towers to defend myself on my first attempt. I got overrun.
I then tried with 4 towers, 2 north and 2 south. The 2 northern ones eventually got overrun.
On my third attempt I built 4 towers in the same manner again, but with all my focus on the north. Eventually I wiped out all the portals (monster spawn points) there in about 35 days. My south was close to being overrun when the Lich thing got destroyed.
My fourth attempt began with a big focus on the Trader Post to the northeast. Again 4 towers for defence and with the extra money from a quicker Trader Post, I upgraded my Castle to level 3 for the extra tax collectors and guards. One tower on each side was upgraded. Base was fine this time but again, Lich's ritual thing was downed.
My fifth attempt had 5 towers on my base, 2 north and 3 south and I focused on getting an early Trader Post again. No upgrades. I just focused on resurrecting my dead guys instead of spending the money on upgrading buildings. By 35 days my south lost 2 towers and I had to rebuild them. North held just fine since one of the south towers was so close to the centre it helped both sides. I even spent some money to get my guys to defend the Lich. It still went down by 45 days.
I couldn't spare the cash for towers for the Lich! I could barely hold with 5 towers in my base!
...
Sixth attempt was much better now that I realized the impacts of the item shop's items and the pub. Still, I only lasted 51 days. Barely held my base, couldn't hold the Lich thing. The furthest I got was 2 towers around it and over 2k in bounty for defence.
This is getting annoying.
I said it was bad the last time. I was wrong. It was worse than I expected. The ending was probably supposed to be a cliffhanger but instead turned out to be an epic anticlimax. Honestly, I've played better Flash games on Newgrounds than that. I'm so happy I didn't fork out US$25 for such a piece of junk.
To be fair, it had an excellent main menu and start, but the plot just never gets any deeper. Oh right, it did... at the final part. The moment it got a little exciting, THE END. WHAT?
It would have been better if they had scraped the cinematics and lengthened the game.
This is incredible! The Square Enix Complete Pack on sale on Steam costs US$75 (*1.3 = almost S$100) and contains everything SE has available on Steam, including:
Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY Edition
Front Mission Evolved with all DLCs
Hitman
Hitman 2
Just Cause
Just Cause 2 with all DLCs
Kane and Lynch
Kane and Lynch 2 with all DLCs
Supreme Commander 2 with DLC
Those are the better games on the list. Total savings: US$489.82
This is going to be available till 20th Feb. Too bad I'm not interested in most of the games on the list. I know they're good but they're just not my cup of tea.
Started on Majesty 2: Monster Kingdom. Skipped the original game, Majesty 2, and went straight to this expansion.
This game is a RTS game with a twist - you only handle the big picture. Think about what it's like to be a medieval king. You don't tell your soldiers which guy to attack first when you send them there. Instead, you tell them where to go and what to do (eg attack, plunder, kill everyone).
Same with this game. You are given 4 commands, or flags in this game, Fear, Attack, Defend and Explore. By placing these flags on the points you want these to be done, you're telling your men what you want them to do. On these flags, you place bounties so that the more you spend, the more guys will want to do it.
But the game is hard. Either that or I'm retarded. Nevertheless I'm still stuck on the second mission after 5 attempts. The first mission was deceivingly easy but this second one wasn't.
The best I could do was defend my base but I could never spare anything for the Lich's structure, so I keep letting it be destroyed after about 40 days.
I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I've tried building 2 towers to defend myself on my first attempt. I got overrun.
I then tried with 4 towers, 2 north and 2 south. The 2 northern ones eventually got overrun.
On my third attempt I built 4 towers in the same manner again, but with all my focus on the north. Eventually I wiped out all the portals (monster spawn points) there in about 35 days. My south was close to being overrun when the Lich thing got destroyed.
My fourth attempt began with a big focus on the Trader Post to the northeast. Again 4 towers for defence and with the extra money from a quicker Trader Post, I upgraded my Castle to level 3 for the extra tax collectors and guards. One tower on each side was upgraded. Base was fine this time but again, Lich's ritual thing was downed.
My fifth attempt had 5 towers on my base, 2 north and 3 south and I focused on getting an early Trader Post again. No upgrades. I just focused on resurrecting my dead guys instead of spending the money on upgrading buildings. By 35 days my south lost 2 towers and I had to rebuild them. North held just fine since one of the south towers was so close to the centre it helped both sides. I even spent some money to get my guys to defend the Lich. It still went down by 45 days.
I couldn't spare the cash for towers for the Lich! I could barely hold with 5 towers in my base!
...
Sixth attempt was much better now that I realized the impacts of the item shop's items and the pub. Still, I only lasted 51 days. Barely held my base, couldn't hold the Lich thing. The furthest I got was 2 towers around it and over 2k in bounty for defence.
This is getting annoying.
Rant 727 / 顺其自然
Shit! Cutting their deficits by US$1.1 trillion over 10 years??! Those guys don't sound impressed, but I am! If that's true, they must be cutting off a limb or something. That's an average drop of a hundred billion USD annually.
In addition, they're also cutting military spendings by US$78 billion over 5 years. Overall, these cuts sound like they exceed all the other cuts that were proposed before.
If this goes through, there will be a lot of unhappy people. I bet many will be using "wrong budget cuts" or "spending in the wrong areas" as excuses for not supporting him.
And people are saying the political situation in Singapore can't get any worse and SDA is a possible replacement for the PAP. Seriously, how can our situation be bad when our leaders are good enough to avoid all debts and even accrue a huge buffer in the treasury? Are we supposed to take that for granted?
As for the SDA, the news about the split means 2 undeniable facts:
1) Their leaders can't control the alliance and make it work together.
2) The members can't keep their mouth shut about internal troubles.
Unfortunately, point 1 alone is enough for me not to vote for them. The logic is obvious. If they can't even control a political alliance, how can I expect them to control an entire government? Point 2 only makes things worse. Do you ever hear the PAP announcing their disputes? Did they discuss, for example, that anti-homosexual Young PAP blogger who typed that insanely homophobic blog years ago?
No, because when you're a leader, you need to appear confident. To do that, you need to keep your collective mouth sealed about certain things. It gives everyone the impression that things are under control.
If you still don't understand, then think about the officers in the military. Are they supposed to share their troubles with their men? No. To do that would reveal a weakness, and weakness does not garner respect. Without respect, an officer is impotent. Same with a government.
TBH I'm not exactly a PAP supporter. I've never voted for them because there's no reason to vote for anyone atm. Give me a better choice and I might get off my chair and vote for it. But right now, such a party is non-existent.
I feel that it's unhealthy that the general mentality of Singaporeans is that the PAP is bad. I've never heard anyone say anything good about them, yet everybody I know has complained about something regarding the party.
At the moment it's sad. But in the long-term, it's bad. Must they go through a period of chaos before they appreciate what they now have? I don't want that, not when the possibility of me finding a job in Canada after graduation is so slim. Of course that's not my main reason but let's just leave it at that. I wonder if anyone will quote this paragraph in the future and deliberately make misleading statements about me. Typing this is evidence that I currently have little desire to dabble in politics.
Nevertheless I think we will see bad times in the future when we vote in some inexperienced noobs from the opposition, which we definitely will if this mentality goes on. Some Singaporeans even use the reason that our Ministerial salaries being too high as a reason for voting for the Opposition.
That makes no sense whatsoever! The complete absence of sense pisses me off so much!
Do they expect the Opposition members to voluntarily cut their own salaries to more decent levels (roughly 66% if, say, one cuts his S$1,570,000 to Donald Tsang's S$516,000) if they ever become ministerial-grade MPs?
The matter of ministerial pay is no longer debatable. No sane non-desperate politician will ever promise to do that. It's done and that's that. Now we can only judge whether they're worth the money. Of course they're not, but how close are they?
Nobody in Singapore has better training than LHL, no matter how bad he is compared to his dad. After all, he has had a lifetime of personal training from LKY himself. Qualification-wise, he's got the best certificate there is regarding politics in Singapore - his frickin birth cert. Experience-wise, he's certainly got more of it in regards to controlling a Cabinet than anyone in the Opposition. Even if he doesn't have the calling, he's got the training.
I'm not saying PAP's great. Heck, I don't think any of them MPs are even close to being worth their pay, but I'm definitely saying they're currently the best we have, unfortunately.
And we should not take everything for granted. I know it's hard since we all grew up in such a nice environment, but people should pay more attention to international news and see how bad things can get. I wonder if any of those guys commenting about local issues in the various news websites or forums even paid attention to recent events in Thailand, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.
That's how bad things can get, how incapable governments can be, and they aren't even the worst-case scenarios. For those, you've got to study some history, like pre-1789 France. Let them eat cake, eh? (I know, there's no evidence that she ever said it.) People should be grateful for what they already have.
做人要知足，因为知足常乐。Translation: to be happier in life, we need to understand limits and be satisfied with having enough. Not the best translation, still think that can be improved upon.
Anyway, I guess Singapore is proof that money can't buy happiness. Next time you need to teach that to your kids, just tell him/her to look around himself/herself, assuming you're Singaporean.
PS if you're a Singaporean and you've never thought about what I've mentioned above, you ought to be ashamed that you need a non-native Singaporean to tell you these.
How does one make kuay tiao edible again after leaving it in the fridge overnight?
If you haven't tried it before, it becomes dry and brittle after a night in the cold. This cannot be reversed by putting it in the microwave.
Does this mean leftover kuay tiao cannot be saved??
The menu theme song of Civ 4 has just won a Grammy award. A piece of game music won a Grammy award. The world is changing, ladies and gentlemen, the world is changing.
Meanwhile, another form of mobile gaming begins! A PS phone, Xbox Live on smart phones, everything is going mobile these days, as expected. Whether non-mobile consoles will go extinct is still hard to predict. It all depends on how powerful (eg graphics) and mobile (eg battery life, weight) these handphone consoles will get in the future.
Maybe someday we will get public phone chargers, if they can ever shorten the recharge time dramatically. Maybe they can be placed like public washrooms - on every floor in malls and inside of every restaurant. And they'd charge money per Watt-second or something, kinda like public phones.
Malaysia sounds like a bad place to do business in. Then again, it always has been. It's not just the organized crime. All the low costs and rents are bullshit once you consider the amount of bribes necessary to keep your goods intact. Even in the malls, the security guards require bribes if you set up a store there. Worse, you can't just pay them off with one huge bribe each year. It's been tried, and convenient amnesia happened.
Transport sucks too. Even after she ended her business venture in Malaysia, my mum was never able to find a transport company that didn't occasionally steal something from her cargo. The problem is that there's no way to prove it unless you stay in Malaysia to check the goods when they arrive in the country and then again immediately when they drop them off at the destination, so the police can't do anything about it.
Actually the problem about transport happens in Singapore too, but we were fortunate enough to find a trustworthy transport guy. That's primarily because my father was the one who encouraged him to set up his own transport business and became one of his biggest clients. His fees aren't the cheapest but it's worth the safety. Cheaper services have been tried but few ever leave our goods alone once they're loaded into their vans. The other safer ones, usually owned by locals, are significantly more expensive than this guy's. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he charges his other clients more.
It might have to do with the ease with which our goods can be stolen, fenced and smuggled. I don't think any customs officer ever gets suspicious about jackets. The smugglers can easily put them on and say the air conditioners in their vehicles are too powerful.
Playing Alternativa. It's... pretty bad. It's got a good concept but the execution has much room for improvement.
Alternativa is a point-and-click adventure game similar to Broken Sword and Monkey Island. Set in a dystopic future that reminded me of Soylent Green and 1984, it started with a disgruntled worker who was unceremoniously informed he had been laid off only when he arrived for work. Hence began his search for the Resistance.
The graphics are poor but not ugly IMO. However, the voice-acting and scripts were horrendous. They could have spared that cash and just used subtitles instead.
Most of the puzzles were quite simple and logical other than one exception that required trial and error, although it only had 30 (6*5) to 120(6*5*4) combinations according to the hint.
The game's not popular at all in the English-speaking world, judging from the number of walkthroughs available on Google. There's one written version (but incomplete) and one series of videos on Youtube. As such, it was pretty hard to find an answer quickly whenever I was stuck.
The other day in the Chinese Reading and Comprehension class the lecturer mentioned 孔子 (Confucius) and 庄子 since we were on the topic of 散文, or essays. Speaking of 孔子, it's important to pronounce the 子 normally because to pronounce it lightly ( 轻声) would give it a whole different meaning - a hole. Saying you respect Confucius is quite different from saying you respect a hole.
Same with 老子. If 子 is pronounced lightly, these two characters together mean "me". If pronounced normally, it's the name of an ancient philosopher and author of the 道德经. How hard you pronounce the 子 in "道德经是老子写的。" can mean the difference between "The Tao Te Ching was written by Laozi," and "The Tao Te Ching was written by me."
Anyway he was telling us about how different these 2 men were. If you want to be successful in life, you should study Confucian teachings. If you fail, you should study 庄子。
The reason is in the philosophies of these 2 wise men. Confucius believed in rigid rules, in stereotypes and probably in racism. Anyone who didn't behave the way a normal Chinese should was a barbarian to him. All cultures not from China was not culture. When one of his disciples returned after staying several years somewhere far to the south, he found him to be barbaric in the aforementioned sense and treated him as one, ie he got rid of him.
However rigidity and, hence, good discipline usually do produce more successful people. This is why his works are still famous today.
But when you fail and you're feeling down, you read the teachings of 庄子because to put it simply, he believed in letting nature take its course, or 顺其自然. What will be will be, que sera sera, so just relax and go with the flow.
It's funny and it's true.
In addition, they're also cutting military spendings by US$78 billion over 5 years. Overall, these cuts sound like they exceed all the other cuts that were proposed before.
If this goes through, there will be a lot of unhappy people. I bet many will be using "wrong budget cuts" or "spending in the wrong areas" as excuses for not supporting him.
And people are saying the political situation in Singapore can't get any worse and SDA is a possible replacement for the PAP. Seriously, how can our situation be bad when our leaders are good enough to avoid all debts and even accrue a huge buffer in the treasury? Are we supposed to take that for granted?
As for the SDA, the news about the split means 2 undeniable facts:
1) Their leaders can't control the alliance and make it work together.
2) The members can't keep their mouth shut about internal troubles.
Unfortunately, point 1 alone is enough for me not to vote for them. The logic is obvious. If they can't even control a political alliance, how can I expect them to control an entire government? Point 2 only makes things worse. Do you ever hear the PAP announcing their disputes? Did they discuss, for example, that anti-homosexual Young PAP blogger who typed that insanely homophobic blog years ago?
No, because when you're a leader, you need to appear confident. To do that, you need to keep your collective mouth sealed about certain things. It gives everyone the impression that things are under control.
If you still don't understand, then think about the officers in the military. Are they supposed to share their troubles with their men? No. To do that would reveal a weakness, and weakness does not garner respect. Without respect, an officer is impotent. Same with a government.
TBH I'm not exactly a PAP supporter. I've never voted for them because there's no reason to vote for anyone atm. Give me a better choice and I might get off my chair and vote for it. But right now, such a party is non-existent.
I feel that it's unhealthy that the general mentality of Singaporeans is that the PAP is bad. I've never heard anyone say anything good about them, yet everybody I know has complained about something regarding the party.
At the moment it's sad. But in the long-term, it's bad. Must they go through a period of chaos before they appreciate what they now have? I don't want that, not when the possibility of me finding a job in Canada after graduation is so slim. Of course that's not my main reason but let's just leave it at that. I wonder if anyone will quote this paragraph in the future and deliberately make misleading statements about me. Typing this is evidence that I currently have little desire to dabble in politics.
Nevertheless I think we will see bad times in the future when we vote in some inexperienced noobs from the opposition, which we definitely will if this mentality goes on. Some Singaporeans even use the reason that our Ministerial salaries being too high as a reason for voting for the Opposition.
That makes no sense whatsoever! The complete absence of sense pisses me off so much!
Do they expect the Opposition members to voluntarily cut their own salaries to more decent levels (roughly 66% if, say, one cuts his S$1,570,000 to Donald Tsang's S$516,000) if they ever become ministerial-grade MPs?
The matter of ministerial pay is no longer debatable. No sane non-desperate politician will ever promise to do that. It's done and that's that. Now we can only judge whether they're worth the money. Of course they're not, but how close are they?
Nobody in Singapore has better training than LHL, no matter how bad he is compared to his dad. After all, he has had a lifetime of personal training from LKY himself. Qualification-wise, he's got the best certificate there is regarding politics in Singapore - his frickin birth cert. Experience-wise, he's certainly got more of it in regards to controlling a Cabinet than anyone in the Opposition. Even if he doesn't have the calling, he's got the training.
I'm not saying PAP's great. Heck, I don't think any of them MPs are even close to being worth their pay, but I'm definitely saying they're currently the best we have, unfortunately.
And we should not take everything for granted. I know it's hard since we all grew up in such a nice environment, but people should pay more attention to international news and see how bad things can get. I wonder if any of those guys commenting about local issues in the various news websites or forums even paid attention to recent events in Thailand, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.
That's how bad things can get, how incapable governments can be, and they aren't even the worst-case scenarios. For those, you've got to study some history, like pre-1789 France. Let them eat cake, eh? (I know, there's no evidence that she ever said it.) People should be grateful for what they already have.
做人要知足，因为知足常乐。Translation: to be happier in life, we need to understand limits and be satisfied with having enough. Not the best translation, still think that can be improved upon.
Anyway, I guess Singapore is proof that money can't buy happiness. Next time you need to teach that to your kids, just tell him/her to look around himself/herself, assuming you're Singaporean.
PS if you're a Singaporean and you've never thought about what I've mentioned above, you ought to be ashamed that you need a non-native Singaporean to tell you these.
How does one make kuay tiao edible again after leaving it in the fridge overnight?
If you haven't tried it before, it becomes dry and brittle after a night in the cold. This cannot be reversed by putting it in the microwave.
Does this mean leftover kuay tiao cannot be saved??
The menu theme song of Civ 4 has just won a Grammy award. A piece of game music won a Grammy award. The world is changing, ladies and gentlemen, the world is changing.
Meanwhile, another form of mobile gaming begins! A PS phone, Xbox Live on smart phones, everything is going mobile these days, as expected. Whether non-mobile consoles will go extinct is still hard to predict. It all depends on how powerful (eg graphics) and mobile (eg battery life, weight) these handphone consoles will get in the future.
Maybe someday we will get public phone chargers, if they can ever shorten the recharge time dramatically. Maybe they can be placed like public washrooms - on every floor in malls and inside of every restaurant. And they'd charge money per Watt-second or something, kinda like public phones.
Malaysia sounds like a bad place to do business in. Then again, it always has been. It's not just the organized crime. All the low costs and rents are bullshit once you consider the amount of bribes necessary to keep your goods intact. Even in the malls, the security guards require bribes if you set up a store there. Worse, you can't just pay them off with one huge bribe each year. It's been tried, and convenient amnesia happened.
Transport sucks too. Even after she ended her business venture in Malaysia, my mum was never able to find a transport company that didn't occasionally steal something from her cargo. The problem is that there's no way to prove it unless you stay in Malaysia to check the goods when they arrive in the country and then again immediately when they drop them off at the destination, so the police can't do anything about it.
Actually the problem about transport happens in Singapore too, but we were fortunate enough to find a trustworthy transport guy. That's primarily because my father was the one who encouraged him to set up his own transport business and became one of his biggest clients. His fees aren't the cheapest but it's worth the safety. Cheaper services have been tried but few ever leave our goods alone once they're loaded into their vans. The other safer ones, usually owned by locals, are significantly more expensive than this guy's. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he charges his other clients more.
It might have to do with the ease with which our goods can be stolen, fenced and smuggled. I don't think any customs officer ever gets suspicious about jackets. The smugglers can easily put them on and say the air conditioners in their vehicles are too powerful.
Playing Alternativa. It's... pretty bad. It's got a good concept but the execution has much room for improvement.
Alternativa is a point-and-click adventure game similar to Broken Sword and Monkey Island. Set in a dystopic future that reminded me of Soylent Green and 1984, it started with a disgruntled worker who was unceremoniously informed he had been laid off only when he arrived for work. Hence began his search for the Resistance.
The graphics are poor but not ugly IMO. However, the voice-acting and scripts were horrendous. They could have spared that cash and just used subtitles instead.
Most of the puzzles were quite simple and logical other than one exception that required trial and error, although it only had 30 (6*5) to 120(6*5*4) combinations according to the hint.
The game's not popular at all in the English-speaking world, judging from the number of walkthroughs available on Google. There's one written version (but incomplete) and one series of videos on Youtube. As such, it was pretty hard to find an answer quickly whenever I was stuck.
The other day in the Chinese Reading and Comprehension class the lecturer mentioned 孔子 (Confucius) and 庄子 since we were on the topic of 散文, or essays. Speaking of 孔子, it's important to pronounce the 子 normally because to pronounce it lightly ( 轻声) would give it a whole different meaning - a hole. Saying you respect Confucius is quite different from saying you respect a hole.
Same with 老子. If 子 is pronounced lightly, these two characters together mean "me". If pronounced normally, it's the name of an ancient philosopher and author of the 道德经. How hard you pronounce the 子 in "道德经是老子写的。" can mean the difference between "The Tao Te Ching was written by Laozi," and "The Tao Te Ching was written by me."
Anyway he was telling us about how different these 2 men were. If you want to be successful in life, you should study Confucian teachings. If you fail, you should study 庄子。
The reason is in the philosophies of these 2 wise men. Confucius believed in rigid rules, in stereotypes and probably in racism. Anyone who didn't behave the way a normal Chinese should was a barbarian to him. All cultures not from China was not culture. When one of his disciples returned after staying several years somewhere far to the south, he found him to be barbaric in the aforementioned sense and treated him as one, ie he got rid of him.
However rigidity and, hence, good discipline usually do produce more successful people. This is why his works are still famous today.
But when you fail and you're feeling down, you read the teachings of 庄子because to put it simply, he believed in letting nature take its course, or 顺其自然. What will be will be, que sera sera, so just relax and go with the flow.
It's funny and it's true.
Monday, 14 February 2011
Rant 726 / Forget The Song
This news makes no sense. Two points.
1) The Minister is implying that we should not react to the absence of free money just before the election.
2) The lift upgrading project was a "hongbao" in a way.
Not that I care about the extra thousand bucks. What's it going to do for me? My family consumes more than that per month (food, bills, etc) and there are twelve months in a year.
Now that I'm done with the disclaimer, let's move on to the actual point. He did admit that the economy did well last year. We all know we did get more foreign investments ever since the US tried to turn its currency into the new banana note (well, they kinda tried but not quite succeeded anyway).
So we're not getting free money this year even though the economy was good?
Despite all that, I do respect their choice not to buy our votes outright with (our own) money this time. I'd rather they spend the money on grants for the poor or raise their contributions to Edusave accounts.
The second point was just painful to read. It was such a feeble attempt to put them in a better light I felt it just backfired.
To put it succinctly, all the households paid $3000 each. Only the residents in 15 households per block benefited.
And it was figuratively described as a "hongbao", a red packet filled with money. The main thing is that nothing was free in this case, which is what most Singaporeans look for especially when it comes to hongbaos. It was nice, yes, because there are still lots of buildings out there without lift access on every floor. But to describe this as a "hongbao" would take a pretty broad interpretation of the term.
Nevertheless, if I ever vote I'll still be voting for the PAP. The most important Singapore has, IMO, is stability. Heck, we'd have nothing if not for that. To change the ruling party would destabilise our country. No, the situation is not dire enough to me that I would try to risk that.
Oh wow the last video was not transferred properly last night even though I gave it over 3 hours to finish the job. Before 10pm I had set the PC's shutdown timer to 1am and went to bed. It was at about 9% of the fourth video out of 7.
Amazingly slow.
After watching the videos that were successfully transferred over, it appears that it's only the end of the disc that's not so readable. The last second video was barely playable and keeps pausing after 6 seconds. The final video is taking forever to even begin to transfer.
Have to finish my assignment for Chinese Reading And Comprehension today by 2359hr. Chinese comprehension, university level. Ugh. Good thing this course has recorded lectures that I can watch if I forgot anything. And podcasts too. I love the organization of this course.
After such a long wait for A Dance of Dragon, I can't help but agree with this article. I've been waiting for the book for about 5 years, since the release of the 4th of the series. There has been so many deadlines I've given up on believing them until I see them available in online stores, and not just for pre-orders.
So if you're interested in reading A Song of Ice and Fire, don't. If you're currently reading the books for the first time, do yourself a favour and put it away. Do what I did for The Dark Tower series by Stephen King - discover it only after the final book is published.
The wait is bad. I want to read the book every time I see it mentioned somewhere, but I can't because it isn't out and even if it is, it's definitely going to be a long time before I see the following book after I finish it.
If he's going to take the same amount of time to finish the next 2 books, let's put it this way - he's already 62. I'm not going to talk about death because the national average in the US is 78. What I'm concerned about is the possibility that he could keep on writing till that age.
How often do you see a new bestseller on the shelves that's written by someone in his/her 70s?
As much as we avoid to mention it, minds age. He could write, but could he write well?
I understand that he doesn't focus very hard on it probably because you can't write well under heavy stress. Still, I'm fed up with the wait. I'm definitely not buying his books till his last one is out. I'm not going to refresh that urge to get the next book that won't be out for another 5-10 years.
It's not like it's entirely impossible. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King took 6 years per book for the 4th and 5th book, 5 years for the 2nd book and 4 years for the 3rd. The entire series was published over twenty-two years, from 1982 to 2004! He began the series as a budding writer，and ended it as a celebrity in the literary world.
People have died not ever knowing the ending of the story. Lots of people. According to King, dying grannies and death row inmates have written to him begging for hints of the ending. And he couldn't tell them simply because he didn't know how it was going to end either. Not knowing the ending of something is probably one major reason why people wish for immortality or, at least, longevity.
Almost done with this assignment, left 3 questions out of 12. One and a half hours remaining, but my brain is unwilling to work. Damned poetry. I can't even appreciate English poetry, let alone a Chinese one. And half the paper is on a poem.
As far as I can tell, <<雪花的快乐>> is about beauty and freedom. That's probably all I can confidently say.
Done! Not satisfied with the quality but I need a break if I'm to write any better than this, and there's only 20mins remaining. 15, since I prefer to hand it in 5mins before the deadline. I should probably have finished it yesterday to give myself another day to proofread and edit, but I never learn.
Finished New Vegas again. Didn't enter the NCR Correctional Facility to wipe out the Powder Gangers but I did accidentally wipe out their leadership when I cleaned up all the vaults in the game. Also forgot a few quests like the ones for Raul, Lily and Arcade. Not that I mind, since I'll have more stuff to do next run this way.
This is actually my first time getting Raul. He's not useful and in fact, I wasn't even planning on getting him. I only accidentally met him while exploring Utobitha, where the crazy Super Mutant with the blonde wig and sunglasses was broadcasting on one of the radio frequencies. I'm not actually sure he has a quest for himself but the ending seemed to imply there was one.
I was really planning on completing Arcade's quest but I really forgot. Really wanted to see the Enclave appear in this run.
As for Lily, I never knew she had a quest until I read about her on the Fallout Wiki after finishing the game.
Strangely, the Brotherhood was not mentioned in my ending. I did all their quests, let the Elder remain and then left them alone. When I left, he was telling me that he was going to end the lockdown, begin to explore the Mojave again and regain their strength.
According to Mr House's calculations, they would become the most dangerous enemy left in the Mojave after I defeat both the Legion and the NCR. One would have thought the ending would describe how the Brotherhood came back and demanded technologies from me or something. But no, their absence was conspicuous.
I think it has to do with a bug. As I recall, the conversation that was supposed to happen between Veronica and the Elder when she first returned to the bunker was never triggered for me. I think something bugged it and everything else after was not triggered, including Veronica's ending.
Finally, about the final battle, it was a big disappointment. I kept forgetting to set the difficulty higher and in the end, it was too easy even though all my bodyguard Securitrons died. I myself was never close to dying while the Legion soldiers died seconds after they appeared, causing long peaceful lulls during the battle, something I don't remember seeing in my first run.
Next run, I must make it a point to play on the highest difficulty (on Hardcore of course).
1) The Minister is implying that we should not react to the absence of free money just before the election.
2) The lift upgrading project was a "hongbao" in a way.
Not that I care about the extra thousand bucks. What's it going to do for me? My family consumes more than that per month (food, bills, etc) and there are twelve months in a year.
Now that I'm done with the disclaimer, let's move on to the actual point. He did admit that the economy did well last year. We all know we did get more foreign investments ever since the US tried to turn its currency into the new banana note (well, they kinda tried but not quite succeeded anyway).
So we're not getting free money this year even though the economy was good?
Despite all that, I do respect their choice not to buy our votes outright with (our own) money this time. I'd rather they spend the money on grants for the poor or raise their contributions to Edusave accounts.
The second point was just painful to read. It was such a feeble attempt to put them in a better light I felt it just backfired.
To put it succinctly, all the households paid $3000 each. Only the residents in 15 households per block benefited.
And it was figuratively described as a "hongbao", a red packet filled with money. The main thing is that nothing was free in this case, which is what most Singaporeans look for especially when it comes to hongbaos. It was nice, yes, because there are still lots of buildings out there without lift access on every floor. But to describe this as a "hongbao" would take a pretty broad interpretation of the term.
Nevertheless, if I ever vote I'll still be voting for the PAP. The most important Singapore has, IMO, is stability. Heck, we'd have nothing if not for that. To change the ruling party would destabilise our country. No, the situation is not dire enough to me that I would try to risk that.
Oh wow the last video was not transferred properly last night even though I gave it over 3 hours to finish the job. Before 10pm I had set the PC's shutdown timer to 1am and went to bed. It was at about 9% of the fourth video out of 7.
Amazingly slow.
After watching the videos that were successfully transferred over, it appears that it's only the end of the disc that's not so readable. The last second video was barely playable and keeps pausing after 6 seconds. The final video is taking forever to even begin to transfer.
Have to finish my assignment for Chinese Reading And Comprehension today by 2359hr. Chinese comprehension, university level. Ugh. Good thing this course has recorded lectures that I can watch if I forgot anything. And podcasts too. I love the organization of this course.
After such a long wait for A Dance of Dragon, I can't help but agree with this article. I've been waiting for the book for about 5 years, since the release of the 4th of the series. There has been so many deadlines I've given up on believing them until I see them available in online stores, and not just for pre-orders.
So if you're interested in reading A Song of Ice and Fire, don't. If you're currently reading the books for the first time, do yourself a favour and put it away. Do what I did for The Dark Tower series by Stephen King - discover it only after the final book is published.
The wait is bad. I want to read the book every time I see it mentioned somewhere, but I can't because it isn't out and even if it is, it's definitely going to be a long time before I see the following book after I finish it.
If he's going to take the same amount of time to finish the next 2 books, let's put it this way - he's already 62. I'm not going to talk about death because the national average in the US is 78. What I'm concerned about is the possibility that he could keep on writing till that age.
How often do you see a new bestseller on the shelves that's written by someone in his/her 70s?
As much as we avoid to mention it, minds age. He could write, but could he write well?
I understand that he doesn't focus very hard on it probably because you can't write well under heavy stress. Still, I'm fed up with the wait. I'm definitely not buying his books till his last one is out. I'm not going to refresh that urge to get the next book that won't be out for another 5-10 years.
It's not like it's entirely impossible. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King took 6 years per book for the 4th and 5th book, 5 years for the 2nd book and 4 years for the 3rd. The entire series was published over twenty-two years, from 1982 to 2004! He began the series as a budding writer，and ended it as a celebrity in the literary world.
People have died not ever knowing the ending of the story. Lots of people. According to King, dying grannies and death row inmates have written to him begging for hints of the ending. And he couldn't tell them simply because he didn't know how it was going to end either. Not knowing the ending of something is probably one major reason why people wish for immortality or, at least, longevity.
Almost done with this assignment, left 3 questions out of 12. One and a half hours remaining, but my brain is unwilling to work. Damned poetry. I can't even appreciate English poetry, let alone a Chinese one. And half the paper is on a poem.
As far as I can tell, <<雪花的快乐>> is about beauty and freedom. That's probably all I can confidently say.
Done! Not satisfied with the quality but I need a break if I'm to write any better than this, and there's only 20mins remaining. 15, since I prefer to hand it in 5mins before the deadline. I should probably have finished it yesterday to give myself another day to proofread and edit, but I never learn.
Finished New Vegas again. Didn't enter the NCR Correctional Facility to wipe out the Powder Gangers but I did accidentally wipe out their leadership when I cleaned up all the vaults in the game. Also forgot a few quests like the ones for Raul, Lily and Arcade. Not that I mind, since I'll have more stuff to do next run this way.
This is actually my first time getting Raul. He's not useful and in fact, I wasn't even planning on getting him. I only accidentally met him while exploring Utobitha, where the crazy Super Mutant with the blonde wig and sunglasses was broadcasting on one of the radio frequencies. I'm not actually sure he has a quest for himself but the ending seemed to imply there was one.
I was really planning on completing Arcade's quest but I really forgot. Really wanted to see the Enclave appear in this run.
As for Lily, I never knew she had a quest until I read about her on the Fallout Wiki after finishing the game.
Strangely, the Brotherhood was not mentioned in my ending. I did all their quests, let the Elder remain and then left them alone. When I left, he was telling me that he was going to end the lockdown, begin to explore the Mojave again and regain their strength.
According to Mr House's calculations, they would become the most dangerous enemy left in the Mojave after I defeat both the Legion and the NCR. One would have thought the ending would describe how the Brotherhood came back and demanded technologies from me or something. But no, their absence was conspicuous.
I think it has to do with a bug. As I recall, the conversation that was supposed to happen between Veronica and the Elder when she first returned to the bunker was never triggered for me. I think something bugged it and everything else after was not triggered, including Veronica's ending.
Finally, about the final battle, it was a big disappointment. I kept forgetting to set the difficulty higher and in the end, it was too easy even though all my bodyguard Securitrons died. I myself was never close to dying while the Legion soldiers died seconds after they appeared, causing long peaceful lulls during the battle, something I don't remember seeing in my first run.
Next run, I must make it a point to play on the highest difficulty (on Hardcore of course).
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Rant 725 / Those Formations
Having a test on Contract Law later. Slightly worried for 2 reasons. Firstly, it's 40% of my final grade (60% of my final grade in the next test in 2 weeks). Secondly, I find the line between "counter-offer" and "request for information" very blurry. I'll make a simple example:
A: I'm willing to sell this item to you for $50.
B: Would you accept $25 now and $25 next week?
Is that a counter-offer or just an inquiry? According to Stevenson, Jacques & Co v McLean (1880), that's a mere inquiry and not a counter-offer.
What if B had said," How about I pay you $25 now and $25 next week?"
I think this means I still don't understand where an inquiry becomes a counter-offer. According to the textbook, if he had said," I will pay you $25 now and $25 next week," it would have been a counter-offer. From this I deduce that the second question I suggested above was still an inquiry.
How about... "I will pay you $25 now and $25 next week, ok?" :)
It's interesting what makes a contract a contract, legally speaking. Contrary to what you might think, a verbal agreement is a legally binding contract in most scenarios, unless it has to do with employment, properties or marriage.
Before I forget, I'm talking about Singaporean law here, which in this case is very similar to English law since most of the statute laws regarding this have remained unchanged since independence, according to the lawyer lecturer.
Anyway to make a contract, there needs to be these elements: the intention to treat/create contract, meeting of minds, consideration, offer and acceptance.
The intention to treat is obvious. A contract is made only if someone wanted it made.
Meeting of minds means both sides must be talking on the same frequency. If A has 2 cars and offers to sell to B "a car", then B accepts thinking he's getting the Rolls Royce, but A actually had his Mercedes in mind, there is no meeting of minds. Hence there is no contract.
Consideration, in this situation, means an exchange of something for something, usually something bad for something good. The consideration needs to be sufficient but need not be adequate. To be "sufficient", the thing(s) being offered (ie consideration) must be of economic value. If you sell a house for $1, it is not "adequate" but it is "sufficient". Technically you could even sell your house in exchange for a candy wrapper and it could form a legally binding contract, provided you can prove that the wrapper has any economic value (at least to you).
I think I can rephrase the definitions to:
Sufficient - of any economic value
Adequate - of suitable economic value
Furthermore, past consideration is not taken into account. For example, a friend goes bankrupt and you gave him your $1000 laptop out of sympathy. 5 years later he worked his way back up and even made a killing in the stock market. He then promises you that he'll give you $10k because he traded his stocks through your laptop.
Legally, that laptop is past consideration because it was given long ago with no explicit agreement that anything will be given to you in return. Ergo, this is not a legal contract. Ergo, you cannot sue him if he doesn't pay up.
One more thing about consideration is that obligations from existing contracts or the law cannot be considerations. For example, if you're trapped in a burning building and the firemen arrive, promising them $5M for saving you is legally useless. They're legally obligated to try and save you, so if they did it and you refuse to pay up later, they can't do anything about it.
Offer and acceptance may seem obvious but it is actually not that clear. For example:
A: I offer you $50 to fix my PC.
B: I'll see what I can do.
No acceptance here. A can't sue B if the PC remains in that condition till the end of time. But if B comes over the next day and fixes the PC, then there is acceptance and A is legally required to pay B $50.
Speaking of this, there's another example of something strange that the lecturer raised.
A: Can you fix my PC?
B: I'll see what I can do.
B fixes the PC. A was so happy that he/she/it gives B $50.
In this case, the $50 was not part of any contract (no consideration from B, for one), hence A is allowed to ask for that $50 back later. A would have been an asshole but not a criminal.
Or if you told him you'd give him $50 for fixing the computer while he was already doing it, it would still not be a consideration.
Whether any of these can be proved in court is none of my concern because I'm only interested in Contract Law today.
However, all these can be nullified due to any of the reasons already listed on Wikipedia under Defenses against Formation.
Biggest storm I've seen in a long time today. Such storms belong in December but it's already February. Global warming. Not that I mind. Rain is always good when you're indoors.
WHY WAS THERE AN ANT ON MY MONITOR?!??
Bad sign. The only edible things on my desk is this re-sealed Lotte Fun-cap and the box with 3 packets of yeast I'm planning to use in the very near future. Actually I think I'll only need one. One packet of yeast per 3 cups of flour.
However all those recipes I'm using (I follow the general consensus of multiple recipes) are American, so I don't know if this French product is made with the same standards in regards to quantities.
Never mind. One packet is apparently 2 and a quarter teaspoon, so I could just measure them with my measuring spoon set.
As for the ant, I don't like it. I think I need to spray some insecticide the next time I go out for more than a few hours. If you don't understand why I'm fussing over a single ant, it's because this room is my final bastion of hygiene at home. The kitchen and living room are rarely cleaned and hence are pretty infested with ants. Tiny flies are tolerable because my room has a bathroom and the only way to prevent flies is to spray the drain with insecticide every week (for my home anyway). I don't like to spray insecticide too often for rather obvious reasons.
So nobody in Singapore and Malaysia is playing Bad Company 2: Vietnam. All the servers are in the original Bad Company 2. Tried that last night, horrible experience. Almost every player was trying to stack. Seriously, at one point when I checked the scoreboard, the opposite team was filled with general-ranked players while the best on my team were master sergeants (players gain ranks from points scored throughout their time in BC2).
People were complaining but none of the skilled players cared. A few were even gloating when they steamrolled over us saying, "Flawless," or "Too easy." I was thinking: Duuuuuuuude...
Near the beginning of the second game, one guy was even telling everyone to leave the server for 5mins to make the other team unstack. Nobody cared. I didn't. I just stayed long enough to be steamrolled till we were pushed back to our "Final Stand" base in 10mins, left and switched to Vietnam. What's the point of staying when I couldn't even get out of the base without being sniped by frickin tanks?
The stack over at the Europeans servers is pretty mild compared to that, so I'm sticking with Vietnam and sacrificing good pings for balance. The expansion is actually nicer to newbies because we get more stuff (like syringe for medics, used for reviving unconscious teammates) right from the beginning.
Now testing videocam again. After updating the PMB programme the last time I just left it alone. Now it's time to see if it's working.
Ok, a disc that used to work is still readable. Videos on it have been transferred to my PC before and are still watchable. Never bothered to format it yet.
Now for the disc that has videos on it that I've never been able to transfer over. Like I said before, the videos can be watched in the videocam but they're not when it's connected to the PC via USB cord.
Doesn't seem to be working. Been reading that disc for like 15mins. Looks like it may be the discs that aren't working somehow.
Oh wait now it responds...
...
Believe it or not, it's been about 2 hours and it's only at 9% of the third video out of 7 on this disc. True that they're of different lengths but it still is a very slow speed especially when its maximum capacity is only 2.8GB.
...
30mins later... 84%... of the third video still.
Oh well, at least it's reading at all. Those videos have sentimental value.
...
20mins later. 9% of the fourth video. Yes it's moving but I'm definitely blacklisting this disc and buying a few more new ones next time I pass a store that sells them.
...
Leaving it on. Setting the computer to shutdown at 1am. Not going to wait for it to complete the transfer for the entire night.
Endhiran or Robot was a 2010 film that I've never heard of. The trailer looks kinda interesting though. AFAIK it's supposed to have too much special effects.
Check out that cool expression at the end.
This video was actually played in reverse.
Bacardi Breezer has an even lower alcohol content than Jolly Shandy (4.8% vs 5%), yet Bacardi Breezer has a stronger alcohol smell. What's up with that?
I'm done exploring all the vaults in New Vegas, except for Vault 21 because it's been mostly filled with concrete and the remaining part was turned into a hotel. Not much chance of a surprise.
One of the more significant places I have not cleaned (ie wiped out every hostile thing and looted everything worth at least 8 caps per unit weight) is the quarry. I can't handle Deathclaws even at level 28. I've maxed out my Energy Weapons and I'm still using the Laser RCW, yet it takes too long to kill each Deathclaw with it.
Why?
My light armour isn't a problem. IIRC Deathclaw attacks bypass my armour, rendering armour completely useless in a fight with a Deathclaw.
I don't feel like sniping them like before, yet I can't just face them head on.
At this rate, I think I'll be skipping over the quarry this run and move on. I'll probably just clean up the NCRCF ( the Powder Gangers), finish Arcade's quest and end the game with me as king.
Since I'm so close to exploring everything in New Vegas as far as I can tell, it probably will be a long time before I play it again after this.
A: I'm willing to sell this item to you for $50.
B: Would you accept $25 now and $25 next week?
Is that a counter-offer or just an inquiry? According to Stevenson, Jacques & Co v McLean (1880), that's a mere inquiry and not a counter-offer.
What if B had said," How about I pay you $25 now and $25 next week?"
I think this means I still don't understand where an inquiry becomes a counter-offer. According to the textbook, if he had said," I will pay you $25 now and $25 next week," it would have been a counter-offer. From this I deduce that the second question I suggested above was still an inquiry.
How about... "I will pay you $25 now and $25 next week, ok?" :)
It's interesting what makes a contract a contract, legally speaking. Contrary to what you might think, a verbal agreement is a legally binding contract in most scenarios, unless it has to do with employment, properties or marriage.
Before I forget, I'm talking about Singaporean law here, which in this case is very similar to English law since most of the statute laws regarding this have remained unchanged since independence, according to the lawyer lecturer.
Anyway to make a contract, there needs to be these elements: the intention to treat/create contract, meeting of minds, consideration, offer and acceptance.
The intention to treat is obvious. A contract is made only if someone wanted it made.
Meeting of minds means both sides must be talking on the same frequency. If A has 2 cars and offers to sell to B "a car", then B accepts thinking he's getting the Rolls Royce, but A actually had his Mercedes in mind, there is no meeting of minds. Hence there is no contract.
Consideration, in this situation, means an exchange of something for something, usually something bad for something good. The consideration needs to be sufficient but need not be adequate. To be "sufficient", the thing(s) being offered (ie consideration) must be of economic value. If you sell a house for $1, it is not "adequate" but it is "sufficient". Technically you could even sell your house in exchange for a candy wrapper and it could form a legally binding contract, provided you can prove that the wrapper has any economic value (at least to you).
I think I can rephrase the definitions to:
Sufficient - of any economic value
Adequate - of suitable economic value
Furthermore, past consideration is not taken into account. For example, a friend goes bankrupt and you gave him your $1000 laptop out of sympathy. 5 years later he worked his way back up and even made a killing in the stock market. He then promises you that he'll give you $10k because he traded his stocks through your laptop.
Legally, that laptop is past consideration because it was given long ago with no explicit agreement that anything will be given to you in return. Ergo, this is not a legal contract. Ergo, you cannot sue him if he doesn't pay up.
One more thing about consideration is that obligations from existing contracts or the law cannot be considerations. For example, if you're trapped in a burning building and the firemen arrive, promising them $5M for saving you is legally useless. They're legally obligated to try and save you, so if they did it and you refuse to pay up later, they can't do anything about it.
Offer and acceptance may seem obvious but it is actually not that clear. For example:
A: I offer you $50 to fix my PC.
B: I'll see what I can do.
No acceptance here. A can't sue B if the PC remains in that condition till the end of time. But if B comes over the next day and fixes the PC, then there is acceptance and A is legally required to pay B $50.
Speaking of this, there's another example of something strange that the lecturer raised.
A: Can you fix my PC?
B: I'll see what I can do.
B fixes the PC. A was so happy that he/she/it gives B $50.
In this case, the $50 was not part of any contract (no consideration from B, for one), hence A is allowed to ask for that $50 back later. A would have been an asshole but not a criminal.
Or if you told him you'd give him $50 for fixing the computer while he was already doing it, it would still not be a consideration.
Whether any of these can be proved in court is none of my concern because I'm only interested in Contract Law today.
However, all these can be nullified due to any of the reasons already listed on Wikipedia under Defenses against Formation.
Biggest storm I've seen in a long time today. Such storms belong in December but it's already February. Global warming. Not that I mind. Rain is always good when you're indoors.
WHY WAS THERE AN ANT ON MY MONITOR?!??
Bad sign. The only edible things on my desk is this re-sealed Lotte Fun-cap and the box with 3 packets of yeast I'm planning to use in the very near future. Actually I think I'll only need one. One packet of yeast per 3 cups of flour.
However all those recipes I'm using (I follow the general consensus of multiple recipes) are American, so I don't know if this French product is made with the same standards in regards to quantities.
Never mind. One packet is apparently 2 and a quarter teaspoon, so I could just measure them with my measuring spoon set.
As for the ant, I don't like it. I think I need to spray some insecticide the next time I go out for more than a few hours. If you don't understand why I'm fussing over a single ant, it's because this room is my final bastion of hygiene at home. The kitchen and living room are rarely cleaned and hence are pretty infested with ants. Tiny flies are tolerable because my room has a bathroom and the only way to prevent flies is to spray the drain with insecticide every week (for my home anyway). I don't like to spray insecticide too often for rather obvious reasons.
So nobody in Singapore and Malaysia is playing Bad Company 2: Vietnam. All the servers are in the original Bad Company 2. Tried that last night, horrible experience. Almost every player was trying to stack. Seriously, at one point when I checked the scoreboard, the opposite team was filled with general-ranked players while the best on my team were master sergeants (players gain ranks from points scored throughout their time in BC2).
People were complaining but none of the skilled players cared. A few were even gloating when they steamrolled over us saying, "Flawless," or "Too easy." I was thinking: Duuuuuuuude...
Near the beginning of the second game, one guy was even telling everyone to leave the server for 5mins to make the other team unstack. Nobody cared. I didn't. I just stayed long enough to be steamrolled till we were pushed back to our "Final Stand" base in 10mins, left and switched to Vietnam. What's the point of staying when I couldn't even get out of the base without being sniped by frickin tanks?
The stack over at the Europeans servers is pretty mild compared to that, so I'm sticking with Vietnam and sacrificing good pings for balance. The expansion is actually nicer to newbies because we get more stuff (like syringe for medics, used for reviving unconscious teammates) right from the beginning.
Now testing videocam again. After updating the PMB programme the last time I just left it alone. Now it's time to see if it's working.
Ok, a disc that used to work is still readable. Videos on it have been transferred to my PC before and are still watchable. Never bothered to format it yet.
Now for the disc that has videos on it that I've never been able to transfer over. Like I said before, the videos can be watched in the videocam but they're not when it's connected to the PC via USB cord.
Doesn't seem to be working. Been reading that disc for like 15mins. Looks like it may be the discs that aren't working somehow.
Oh wait now it responds...
...
Believe it or not, it's been about 2 hours and it's only at 9% of the third video out of 7 on this disc. True that they're of different lengths but it still is a very slow speed especially when its maximum capacity is only 2.8GB.
...
30mins later... 84%... of the third video still.
Oh well, at least it's reading at all. Those videos have sentimental value.
...
20mins later. 9% of the fourth video. Yes it's moving but I'm definitely blacklisting this disc and buying a few more new ones next time I pass a store that sells them.
...
Leaving it on. Setting the computer to shutdown at 1am. Not going to wait for it to complete the transfer for the entire night.
Endhiran or Robot was a 2010 film that I've never heard of. The trailer looks kinda interesting though. AFAIK it's supposed to have too much special effects.
Check out that cool expression at the end.
This video was actually played in reverse.
Bacardi Breezer has an even lower alcohol content than Jolly Shandy (4.8% vs 5%), yet Bacardi Breezer has a stronger alcohol smell. What's up with that?
I'm done exploring all the vaults in New Vegas, except for Vault 21 because it's been mostly filled with concrete and the remaining part was turned into a hotel. Not much chance of a surprise.
One of the more significant places I have not cleaned (ie wiped out every hostile thing and looted everything worth at least 8 caps per unit weight) is the quarry. I can't handle Deathclaws even at level 28. I've maxed out my Energy Weapons and I'm still using the Laser RCW, yet it takes too long to kill each Deathclaw with it.
Why?
My light armour isn't a problem. IIRC Deathclaw attacks bypass my armour, rendering armour completely useless in a fight with a Deathclaw.
I don't feel like sniping them like before, yet I can't just face them head on.
At this rate, I think I'll be skipping over the quarry this run and move on. I'll probably just clean up the NCRCF ( the Powder Gangers), finish Arcade's quest and end the game with me as king.
Since I'm so close to exploring everything in New Vegas as far as I can tell, it probably will be a long time before I play it again after this.
Friday, 11 February 2011
Rant 724 / La Brioche
For some reason I can't transfer my videos from my camcorder to my PC. The problem lies in the camcorder because I've tried it on 2 different computers now.
The issue is that the discs are unreadable to the PC. I can watch the videos on the camcorder but they appear blank (and full) when the camcorder is connected to the computer or when I place the DVD directly in my computer's DVD drive.
The camcorder is correctly connected because this was done before I could download the Picture Motion Browser software which enables users to do exactly what I've been trying to do. When I downloaded it, it checked for the camcorder's model and stuff before it could begin, so it's confirmed that the connection is fine.
Which stumped me.
The discs are readable only to the camera.
Oh wait... the programme isn't updated. Strange that they don't just let me download the latest version straight away or show me a list of patches on the download page.
Onion News finally writes something that's actually funny, after such a long absence of good humour. I'm not saying it's hilarious though.
What is the right age for marriage?
Who knows?
In ancient times, even unborn children can be engaged. I wonder how it felt to be a baby boy married to an adult woman (of course, an "adult" in those days could be any girl who's past her first period). Must have been pretty good when he reached puberty, then pretty bad when he grew older. Don't forget that in those days, they didn't have beauty products or even bras in China. Worse still if they worked in the sun all day, eg farmers.
No wonder they allowed polygamy.
As for now, things are different. Personally I think the practical view should be taken. In this case, one needs to consider at what age children will begin to really spend money and make it coincide with the rise of the parents' careers.
Suppose you expect your kids to discover the joys of buying unnecessary stuff by the age of 20. Even if you don't, there's still university (girls slightly earlier, boys slightly later). Usually, careers should reach their peaks by the age of 45 to 50. Then the right age for childbirth would be about 25-30 and marriage would be roughly the same.
The problem I see here is that there are just too many parents who aren't ready for children but think they are. For example, there are parents who seem to treat the welfare of their children as something they do only because they have to. In this case, they hate for work overwhelms their love for their children.
It may be partly a case of immaturity, but it can also be due to laziness. Either way, it points to the fact that they are relatively spoilt. Then again, I don't think it can be helped in the modern societies.
I'm not saying you can't get married without ever having children. You certainly can, except in Asia in general, that's kinda uncommon.
I feel like making bread, have been since Thursday, but I can't. I'm planning to make some traditional French loaf again but that takes hours to make. Missing the smell of hot bread fresh from the oven. Good exercise for the arms too since after the first rise I'd need to squeeze out all the air by kneading it hard, then again after the second rise.
In between I have to wait at least 2 hours for the first rise and less for the second.
Oh well, I think I'll do it on Sunday, after the cleaner tidies up the kitchen. Last week she left a few carrots hidden somewhere and nobody remembered about them. By Monday the kitchen was filled with flies and we had to make a mess by searching everywhere for the source, which we had expected to be a dead lizard or something. After I sprayed parts of the kitchen with insecticide, nobody wants to clean up those parts.
Anyway I can't do it because I would not have been able to focus on doing it. Unfinished assignments and tests today and tomorrow. Multitasking is fine on the computer but not in the real world. Things don't get burnt in the computer.
WHAT?! A HOLOGRAPHIC KEYBOARD IS ALREADY OUT?!???
OMG! Since 2006! I'm so embarrassed that I wasn't aware of it sooner. Why didn't this ever got popular??
From what I've dug up on this product, there seems to be 3 reasons:
1) It's expensive. A normal keyboard costs a few dollars but that costs over $100.
2) Needs a change of battery every few hours.
3) Lag. Together with the fact that you can't feel the key being pushed down, it takes a long split second to tell if you have mistyped anything.
4) This is purely a guess from what I imagine it would be like. Since there are no keys to press, your fingers might tend to stay close to the surface. When travelling between keys, it might mistake the action as typing all the letters your fingers went over. If you keep your fingers high, you might hit the surface hard. That's not going to be comfortable if you're typing an entire report or essay.
The issue is that the discs are unreadable to the PC. I can watch the videos on the camcorder but they appear blank (and full) when the camcorder is connected to the computer or when I place the DVD directly in my computer's DVD drive.
The camcorder is correctly connected because this was done before I could download the Picture Motion Browser software which enables users to do exactly what I've been trying to do. When I downloaded it, it checked for the camcorder's model and stuff before it could begin, so it's confirmed that the connection is fine.
Which stumped me.
The discs are readable only to the camera.
Oh wait... the programme isn't updated. Strange that they don't just let me download the latest version straight away or show me a list of patches on the download page.
Onion News finally writes something that's actually funny, after such a long absence of good humour. I'm not saying it's hilarious though.
What is the right age for marriage?
Who knows?
In ancient times, even unborn children can be engaged. I wonder how it felt to be a baby boy married to an adult woman (of course, an "adult" in those days could be any girl who's past her first period). Must have been pretty good when he reached puberty, then pretty bad when he grew older. Don't forget that in those days, they didn't have beauty products or even bras in China. Worse still if they worked in the sun all day, eg farmers.
No wonder they allowed polygamy.
As for now, things are different. Personally I think the practical view should be taken. In this case, one needs to consider at what age children will begin to really spend money and make it coincide with the rise of the parents' careers.
Suppose you expect your kids to discover the joys of buying unnecessary stuff by the age of 20. Even if you don't, there's still university (girls slightly earlier, boys slightly later). Usually, careers should reach their peaks by the age of 45 to 50. Then the right age for childbirth would be about 25-30 and marriage would be roughly the same.
The problem I see here is that there are just too many parents who aren't ready for children but think they are. For example, there are parents who seem to treat the welfare of their children as something they do only because they have to. In this case, they hate for work overwhelms their love for their children.
It may be partly a case of immaturity, but it can also be due to laziness. Either way, it points to the fact that they are relatively spoilt. Then again, I don't think it can be helped in the modern societies.
I'm not saying you can't get married without ever having children. You certainly can, except in Asia in general, that's kinda uncommon.
I feel like making bread, have been since Thursday, but I can't. I'm planning to make some traditional French loaf again but that takes hours to make. Missing the smell of hot bread fresh from the oven. Good exercise for the arms too since after the first rise I'd need to squeeze out all the air by kneading it hard, then again after the second rise.
In between I have to wait at least 2 hours for the first rise and less for the second.
Oh well, I think I'll do it on Sunday, after the cleaner tidies up the kitchen. Last week she left a few carrots hidden somewhere and nobody remembered about them. By Monday the kitchen was filled with flies and we had to make a mess by searching everywhere for the source, which we had expected to be a dead lizard or something. After I sprayed parts of the kitchen with insecticide, nobody wants to clean up those parts.
Anyway I can't do it because I would not have been able to focus on doing it. Unfinished assignments and tests today and tomorrow. Multitasking is fine on the computer but not in the real world. Things don't get burnt in the computer.
WHAT?! A HOLOGRAPHIC KEYBOARD IS ALREADY OUT?!???
OMG! Since 2006! I'm so embarrassed that I wasn't aware of it sooner. Why didn't this ever got popular??
From what I've dug up on this product, there seems to be 3 reasons:
1) It's expensive. A normal keyboard costs a few dollars but that costs over $100.
2) Needs a change of battery every few hours.
3) Lag. Together with the fact that you can't feel the key being pushed down, it takes a long split second to tell if you have mistyped anything.
4) This is purely a guess from what I imagine it would be like. Since there are no keys to press, your fingers might tend to stay close to the surface. When travelling between keys, it might mistake the action as typing all the letters your fingers went over. If you keep your fingers high, you might hit the surface hard. That's not going to be comfortable if you're typing an entire report or essay.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Rant 723 / Silently Warm
A Mass Effect movie is now close to being a reality!! Best of all, they're having a good team of people to handle the movie, so I don't expect a terrible disappointment.
The production company, Legendary Pictures, is the one that produced The Dark Knight and Spider-Man, both of which were pretty good films. They will be working with Avi Arad, founder of Marvel Studios, and his son as the producers of the film.
The screenwriter is Mark Protosevich, who wrote I Am Legend and Thor.
Not expecting a big screen remake of the trilogy exactly but I wonder how different it's going to be. Maybe it won't even be a remake of anything. Maybe the film is going to be the ending of the series instead of ME3, which makes a lot more sense to me than my initial guess. Obviously they won't do what the Japanese do - make a 90-minute-long version of an episode and call it a movie.
Bad Company 2 is making me more nauseous than other FPS. I rarely feel nauseous significantly when I play Empires, maybe only get a slight reduce in appetite. Fallout 3 and New Vegas makes me feel full all the time which, in turn, makes me forget to eat.
But Bad Company 2 goes significantly further. Fortunately I never hit the degree of actually puking but it gets really uncomfortable. What I suspect, what I've noticed and hate is that my view seems to be constantly zoomed in too far, like everything is slightly magnified.
Apparently that's the same reason others have complained about. I've just changed the FOV (field of view) in the "settings" file in "My Documents" folder to 75 from 55. Soon I'll know if that works.
It did.
Found that I was wrong about one thing though. Those sniper rifles aren't all as easy to use as I thought. When I tried the sniper class in multiplayer, the one I was given moved when I looked through the scope. So it's just those in singleplayer that are noob-friendly.
As for the singleplayer campaign, the ending was not so much a cliffhanger as it was an abrupt interruption. I felt like I had just reached the climax of the story when the credits rolled. Almost no plot was ended except the villain's, and his role was pretty small in the big picture.
This is forgiveable since this game was probably designed as a multiplayer game and little attention was paid to the singleplayer aspect.
But one thing that irked me was how there were pretty significant bugs in the latest version even though Bad Company 3 is about to be released. For example, there was one bug that I encountered in the mission "No One Gets Left Behind" that caused me to get stuck on the cliff overlooking the enemy base. Apparently it was because I didn't land in a clearing initially (that was an objective) and flew into the trees instead. The only way I could solve this problem was to restart the entire mission.
That just proved again that EA lived to up to its reputation of paying very little attention to its games once they're released.
Another thing I noticed is that sometimes, my mind plays songs from the 50s that I usually listen to in the last 2 Fallout games when I play FPS games. I think I'm unconsciously associating those songs with FPS games, which I've done before multiple times in the past with different music and games.
Finally reached the part where I killed Mr House in New Vegas. It felt bad. He wasn't doing anything wrong and he didn't try to hurt me. Worse, he saved my life. But I've already got his ending once so for the sake of variety, I had to run past all his Securitrons and kill his helpless physical body. It was better than leaving him alive if we take into account his physical condition (he was over 260 and was kept alive by machines). Once I took control of his robot army, he'd literally have nothing.
With the aid of the hilarious Yes Man, I did that and upgraded them all to Mark II.
Yet nobody respects me. Caesar still wants me to be his errand boy. The NCR still wants me to do their dirty work. The Omertas tried to confront me for destroying their weapon stash and getting rid of their special employees. Worst of all, I couldn't just send my missile-firing, grenade-launching, single-wheeled soldiers of steel into their homes and wipe out their entire families.
And they said Fallout: New Vegas was an open-ended game with free choices.
Also, Vault 11 was sad.
Will we ever see Google Sun?
Or Google Mars for that matter?
Why is this blog getting more visitors from Europe and South America? I don't remember there being this many before. On the other hand, few Asians ever visit this blog. I can't use the "they don't speak English" excuse because even Russians have visited this blog this week, and Russia is known to be not a good choice for travellers who don't speak Russian. Eleven pageviews from Russia this week.
Even more surprisingly, the only Asians to have visited this blog yesterday were... Iraqis. 4 view counts. What. Which made me wonder... how fast is their broadband?
So I googled "iraq broadband".
Right away I get 3 ads for iraqi ISPs.
That's interesting.
But what about land lines? Cable?
None of the 3 ISPs, provide cable broadband services. The next logical step was to add "cable" to the search term, as in "iraq cable broadband".
Nothing. Wow. Iraq doesn't have cable broadband and yet has three wireless ISPs.
Just to confirm it, I changed the search term to "iraq wired broadband".
Nope. Really nothing. So the country skipped one step and dived straight into wireless technology. Cool, but it means we won't be seeing Iraqis in online games like SC2 any time soon. Too bad. Having a Middle Easterner in the GSL would cause the viewership to explode.
The Stats page is also showing me the number of internet browsers out there. Safari, Opera, I've heard of. But PBSTB? Flock? handycafeCFW?
Absolutely no idea what PBSTB stands for. Google isn't giving me anything.
handycafe seems to be a software for cybercafes that helps owners manage their PCs. Since it does content filtering and acts as a firewall, it probably got listed because someone visited this blog from a cybercafe that uses this programme.
Flock is a "social browser". From what I see on their website, it's probably just a browser with toolbars for FB and Twitter. Everyone's got to eat, right? Can't blame them for trying.
Just tried Nestle's Vanilla Cashew Delight. Didn't like the chocolate but the rest is pretty good. I could probably just crush some cashews next time and sprinkle them on some vanilla ice cream.
The production company, Legendary Pictures, is the one that produced The Dark Knight and Spider-Man, both of which were pretty good films. They will be working with Avi Arad, founder of Marvel Studios, and his son as the producers of the film.
The screenwriter is Mark Protosevich, who wrote I Am Legend and Thor.
Not expecting a big screen remake of the trilogy exactly but I wonder how different it's going to be. Maybe it won't even be a remake of anything. Maybe the film is going to be the ending of the series instead of ME3, which makes a lot more sense to me than my initial guess. Obviously they won't do what the Japanese do - make a 90-minute-long version of an episode and call it a movie.
Bad Company 2 is making me more nauseous than other FPS. I rarely feel nauseous significantly when I play Empires, maybe only get a slight reduce in appetite. Fallout 3 and New Vegas makes me feel full all the time which, in turn, makes me forget to eat.
But Bad Company 2 goes significantly further. Fortunately I never hit the degree of actually puking but it gets really uncomfortable. What I suspect, what I've noticed and hate is that my view seems to be constantly zoomed in too far, like everything is slightly magnified.
Apparently that's the same reason others have complained about. I've just changed the FOV (field of view) in the "settings" file in "My Documents" folder to 75 from 55. Soon I'll know if that works.
It did.
Found that I was wrong about one thing though. Those sniper rifles aren't all as easy to use as I thought. When I tried the sniper class in multiplayer, the one I was given moved when I looked through the scope. So it's just those in singleplayer that are noob-friendly.
As for the singleplayer campaign, the ending was not so much a cliffhanger as it was an abrupt interruption. I felt like I had just reached the climax of the story when the credits rolled. Almost no plot was ended except the villain's, and his role was pretty small in the big picture.
This is forgiveable since this game was probably designed as a multiplayer game and little attention was paid to the singleplayer aspect.
But one thing that irked me was how there were pretty significant bugs in the latest version even though Bad Company 3 is about to be released. For example, there was one bug that I encountered in the mission "No One Gets Left Behind" that caused me to get stuck on the cliff overlooking the enemy base. Apparently it was because I didn't land in a clearing initially (that was an objective) and flew into the trees instead. The only way I could solve this problem was to restart the entire mission.
That just proved again that EA lived to up to its reputation of paying very little attention to its games once they're released.
Another thing I noticed is that sometimes, my mind plays songs from the 50s that I usually listen to in the last 2 Fallout games when I play FPS games. I think I'm unconsciously associating those songs with FPS games, which I've done before multiple times in the past with different music and games.
Finally reached the part where I killed Mr House in New Vegas. It felt bad. He wasn't doing anything wrong and he didn't try to hurt me. Worse, he saved my life. But I've already got his ending once so for the sake of variety, I had to run past all his Securitrons and kill his helpless physical body. It was better than leaving him alive if we take into account his physical condition (he was over 260 and was kept alive by machines). Once I took control of his robot army, he'd literally have nothing.
With the aid of the hilarious Yes Man, I did that and upgraded them all to Mark II.
Yet nobody respects me. Caesar still wants me to be his errand boy. The NCR still wants me to do their dirty work. The Omertas tried to confront me for destroying their weapon stash and getting rid of their special employees. Worst of all, I couldn't just send my missile-firing, grenade-launching, single-wheeled soldiers of steel into their homes and wipe out their entire families.
And they said Fallout: New Vegas was an open-ended game with free choices.
Also, Vault 11 was sad.
Will we ever see Google Sun?
Or Google Mars for that matter?
Why is this blog getting more visitors from Europe and South America? I don't remember there being this many before. On the other hand, few Asians ever visit this blog. I can't use the "they don't speak English" excuse because even Russians have visited this blog this week, and Russia is known to be not a good choice for travellers who don't speak Russian. Eleven pageviews from Russia this week.
Even more surprisingly, the only Asians to have visited this blog yesterday were... Iraqis. 4 view counts. What. Which made me wonder... how fast is their broadband?
So I googled "iraq broadband".
Right away I get 3 ads for iraqi ISPs.
TigrisNet WiFi cards are sold in the following bandwidth levels — 64kb, 96kb, and 128kb, and are available in ten-hour and one month subscriptions. TigrisNet WiFi is an affordable yet reliable service for individuals and small offices, with minimal to no equipment cost. Roaming in all major cities in Iraq.
That's interesting.
But what about land lines? Cable?
None of the 3 ISPs, provide cable broadband services. The next logical step was to add "cable" to the search term, as in "iraq cable broadband".
Nothing. Wow. Iraq doesn't have cable broadband and yet has three wireless ISPs.
Just to confirm it, I changed the search term to "iraq wired broadband".
Nope. Really nothing. So the country skipped one step and dived straight into wireless technology. Cool, but it means we won't be seeing Iraqis in online games like SC2 any time soon. Too bad. Having a Middle Easterner in the GSL would cause the viewership to explode.
The Stats page is also showing me the number of internet browsers out there. Safari, Opera, I've heard of. But PBSTB? Flock? handycafeCFW?
Absolutely no idea what PBSTB stands for. Google isn't giving me anything.
handycafe seems to be a software for cybercafes that helps owners manage their PCs. Since it does content filtering and acts as a firewall, it probably got listed because someone visited this blog from a cybercafe that uses this programme.
Flock is a "social browser". From what I see on their website, it's probably just a browser with toolbars for FB and Twitter. Everyone's got to eat, right? Can't blame them for trying.
Just tried Nestle's Vanilla Cashew Delight. Didn't like the chocolate but the rest is pretty good. I could probably just crush some cashews next time and sprinkle them on some vanilla ice cream.
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