At times like this I love the GameFly service, because X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition showed up in my mailbox today. And even though I've only spent an hour or two with it tonight, I absolutely love it! Yes, the boss battles are too repetitious, and it has no multiplayer, but as a single-player game it is incredibly engaging. Hit the link if you want details.

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To the philosophically inclined, I'm a believer in a-series, rather than b-series, time. That is, I don't think that the past exists anymore than I think the future exists; time travel is impossible because there's literally "nowhen" to go other than the present moment. As my favorite professor put it far better: space is an arrangement such that many things can happen at the same time, whereas time is an arrangement such that many things can happen in the same space. If all that's confusing, or uninteresting, let me cut right to the chase and ask the question that bugs me: why is it so hard to live in the moment?

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I've long known the environmental protection agency (EPA) is full of crap, given a variety of stupid decisions and edicts over the years. But it's nice to see their willful avoidance of facts that don't suit their political aims brought to light.

When economic times are good the state screws the working taxpayer. When economic times are bad the state screws the working taxpayer... harder. Case in point, the state is cutting the child exemption while raising taxes. Just once I'd like those jackasses to cut wasteful programs and make do with less, actually force the state to live within its means. You know, kinda like working taxpayers.

I loved it when my son first stood and walked. His first words were a big deal too. Watching him write out the numbers from 1 to 1000 was amazing (largely because he was doing it around two-and-a-half years of age). But tonight he gave me the father's day gift I never thought I would get. He looked me in the eye at dinner and said "Daddy, I want beer." I've never been more proud.

Perhaps you're a Beatles fan; I'm not. That doesn't much matter. But contrary to Mark Edwards' piece in the TimesOnline there's a simple reason it's never said that George Harrison is the greatest rock guitarist of all time: he just wasn't that good.

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Let me be clear: I don't merely dislike Windows, I don't merely hate Windows, I positively despise Windows. I hate it for its unrelenting unreliability, its beyond-stupid design decisions, and for the fact that I pretty much can't live without it, thanks to my gaming addiction. I'd switch to any other OS in a heartbeat, were it not for that. But over the years one irritation has stood out clearly head and shoulders above the rest, and I think I've finally figured out which irritation it is. Hit the link if you'd like to help me vent.

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Apparently Iran's top religious zealot has promised a crackdown if the protests continue. Here's my advice to the Iranian people. When your elections are rigged by said top religious zealot, and his religious zealot buddies, and when they come to crackdown on your protesting, shoot them in the face. I probably sound like a broken record, but Iran isn't the only place in the world where overreaching government leaders need to be reminded that they serve the people, not the other way around. I would be only too happy to hear of the Iranian people rising up and putting an end to the mullah-ocracy.

Yeah, it's a completely dorky title for a blog entry, but I can't help it. I saw the original Ghostbusters movie multiple times when it was released twenty-five years ago, and I loved it. I was a big fan of Bill Murray's humor before then, but he practically defined funny with his role in the film. Today I saw that Steam was having a launch day sale on the new video game; the $50 title was available for $30, and I snapped it up. I've only spent a couple of hours with it, but it brings back all the great memories of the film and is a lot of fun to boot. It's probably not perfect, but right now I'm having too good a time to care.

How could this happen?! How could ABC turn over its operations to the white house?! The breathless announcement of an "ethical firestorm" shouldn't be news. The mainstream press have been excluding opposing (read: conservative) viewpoints for years. ABC is just making it official. Frankly, I'd doff my cap to them, were I wearing one, for having the balls to admit so openly that they're nothing more than an Obama lapdog. Now may they go straight into fiscal bankruptcy to match their moral bankruptcy.

It seems a fourteen year old German boy was hit by a meteor as it fell to Earth from space. I used to think I had bad luck, but this kid has to take the cake. I mean, how do you go on living your life knowing that the universe itself is throwing rocks at you?! Sheesh.

Apparently, the senate has now voted to expand the power of regulators where smoking is concerned. Note that some of the key reasons cited are to "...not only cut deaths but reduce the $100 billion in annual health care costs linked to tobacco." I've despised the U.S. government's unremitting nanny-ism for a long time, but this is ridiculous.

If you don't see why this is the death of liberty, just ask yourself a simple question: what's next? Less drinking would surely cut deaths and reduce health care costs, as would eating less fatty foods, exercising more, avoiding high risk sports/activities, and so forth. If we let our government tell us we can't smoke, then they might as well tell us what to eat, how to exercise, what we can do in our free time, and pretty much anything else. I'm not a smoker; in fact, I'm sensitive enough to secondhand smoke that I might be allergic to it. But I'll take a room full of smokers any day over a government telling them they can't smoke.

Goodbye, liberty. It's a shame to see you go.

The thing I love about GameFly is that I get to try games for the Xbox 360 as much or as little as I like without committing to buy them, today's case in point being Viking: Battle for Asgard (VBA). My first impressions are somewhat positive, but unless I discover something very surprising it's not a game for which I would pay full price or spend a lot of time with. I love the combat, but it just isn't grabbing me like Too Human, Superman Returns, Dead Space, The Force Unleashed, or the various other Xbox 360 games I've really enjoyed. Hit the link if you're interested in more about VBA.

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So the new GM chairman of the board admits that he knows nothing about the auto industry. I think that makes perfect sense, given that our president has basically zero qualifications himself. But now that I think about it that's not really fair; Mr. Whitacre has run a company before, after all, unlike the Obama-fool who hasn't ever run anything.

I have a new article up on GameObserver entitled A Tale of Two (Zombie-Infected) Cities. In it, I compare Killing Floor to Left 4 Dead and wonder why the two games have been received so differently. If you like zombie shooters, it might be worth your while to read.

Tonight was my best night yet with Killing Floor (KF). I had a couple of hours to play after finally completing my work for the day, and I put them to good use. I got into a server with a good bunch, and we actually beat the patriarch end-boss on all three maps for which I was there from start to finish. That's three out of five of the maps that ship with the game, so I'm pretty pumped. Hit the link for details.

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I got a popup today from one of my installations of Windows Vista. It notified me that Windows had found a solution to one of my problems. Given my past experience with Microsoft solutions I didn't hold out much hope, but I clicked anyway figuring it couldn't hurt.

The problem was that I had recently connected my HP ScanJet 5400C to that machine but couldn't get it working. I couldn't get the drivers to install, Windows Vista couldn't find drivers for it, and I couldn't find any drivers online. The solution was pretty straightforward: the ScanJet 5400C isn't supported under Vista. As to that being a "solution", well, Microsoft keeps using that word, but I don't think it means what they think it means.

I should just thank my lucky stars Vista didn't trash the hard drive when I clicked the solution popup. That's something, I guess.

For the last year or so, my dentist has been nagging me to get a crown on a tooth. That's not something I've wanted to do, for a variety of reasons, but I finally relented when the tooth started to bother me on rare occasion. Every once in a while, when I drank something really cold or really hot, it would give me a small jolt of pain. She had been warning me that if I didn't take care of it a root canal would be required, so I finally gave in and had it done.

The process was highly unpleasant. The initial appointment wasn't bad at all, but the temporary crown was painful. Far worse, though, was the adjustment process for the final crown: she made no less than eight adjustments to it, which involved putting it on my tooth, taking it off, etc., each step of which caused excruciating pains. It wasn't pleasant at all. But I was told the final result would surely be worth it.

Well here I sit, nearly two weeks after the permanent crown was cemented, "enjoying" frequent shooting pains. Whereas the tooth bothered me only on rare occasion before, and then with only minor jolts, it now gives me shooting pains whenever I drink or eat anything that isn't at a temperature identical to the inside of my mouth. Today it's even hurting as I breathe the nice, cool air.

Gosh, I'm so glad I went to the dentist.

I wrote before about how the economic numbers for April were worse than the Obama-fool's crack team of geniuses said they would be even without his "recovery" plan. But now the economic numbers for May have arrived, and they're even worse than before. That site has a lovely graph exposing the economic idiocy of the Obama-fool rather well. Definitely worth the click-through time.

I'm sure it's all Bush's fault somehow.

Like I said earlier, there are plenty of people who become complete pricks when you give them a gun and a badge. When I wrote that, I didn't think I'd be commenting again so quickly on an idiot cop who tasered a high school student for refusing to obey. Apparently, the kid refused to stop talking on his cell phone and go to class, so the officer (stupidly) thought it appropriate to use a taser on him. To be clear, I'm all for order in schools; I think the officer should have forcibly taken the phone from the student and marched him off to the principal's office. But drawing a weapon and using it on a child?! That's a preposterous overreach.

According to USA Today, government spending provides 16.2% of all personal income in the U.S. This is precisely why the Obama-fool has been labeled a socialist: bailouts, handouts, and soon enough Obama-care for everyone. I'm already tired of footing the bill for all you damnable llamas suckling at the federal teat. Maybe it's a good time to start looking for a new country to join or found; this one is all but finished.

Ah, the fine performance of police. I've worked closely with our public servants in blue at a couple of points in my life, and I came away with a thoroughly mixed picture. On the one hand, many of them are just regular guys doing a tough job. Yet on the other hand, there are plenty of people who become complete pricks when you give them a gun and a badge. Then there are the New York police, who are apparently very good at writing parking tickets but slow to recognize a dead body in the car. For weeks. Keep trying, guys, you'll make detective yet...

I noticed the main, 750 GB drive on my gaming machine was at 80% in use, so I decided to delete a few games I don't play much anymore. After uninstalling them, I found it was at 92% in use. I figured it must just be a recycle bin thing, so I let disk cleanup do its thing and deleted all but the most recent system restore point, but even after all that fussing my drive was now at 90% in use.

So I used a utility from Stardock called DriveScan (part of the Object Desktop suite) to figure out where the space was going and was shocked to discover that the "System Volume Information" folder was using an incredible 158 GB (21% of the drive). I thought that was used only for system restore points but apparently not.

After a bit of web searching, I found a very helpful article on the subject. I used the instructions there and found my system was storing eight shadow copies, the times for several of which corresponded to the uninstall times for the games I had removed. I don't know why uninstalling a game would require the operating system to make copies of itself and its files, but apparently that happens with Vista. I used the instructions to set the maximum space usage for the drive to 10%, and suddenly I have a lot more breathing room on that drive.

Only with the "brilliance" of Microsoft Vista could you expect to uninstall software and have less space on your disk. Sheesh.

I tried Left 4 Dead yet again tonight, and I really don't like the game. It's just not fun. I'm uninstalling it and calling it done. I didn't get my money's worth from it. It was a bad choice. Thankfully, Killing Floor is a lot more enjoyable.

I'm not sure what I find more pathetic: that (1) our president is so ignorant of proper grammar as to say "one of the largest", or that (2) he used it when saying that the U.S. could be considered "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." As one can easily discover elsewhere, the U.S. isn't even in the top ten.

Ah, I think I know what I find more pathetic: that the same press corps that picked over every name Bush ever mispronounced can't be bothered to notice that the Obama fool thinks we have fifty-seven states, or that he's so ignorant of our population demographics. But then I guess that's what you get when you elect a guy barely qualified to oversee a bake sale to the highest office in the land.

I didn't get to play much tonight, but insofar as I did I stuck with Killing Floor (KF). If you haven't heard of it, most reviewers seem to think it's merely an okay game compared to the staggering brilliance that is Left 4 Dead (L4D). Me, I had more fun tonight with KF than I've managed to eke out of L4D in the months since its launch. I'm so surprised by the way the two get covered, I think I'm going to write an article. Consider the demo highly recommended.

I've been referring to our new president as the Obama-fool for some time, in part because he's more than earned the title of fool and in part because it's the most charitable thing I can think to call him. Today he has stated that Iran has a right to nuclear energy. The buffoon running that place denies the Holocaust and says Jews have no right to exist, which makes the president's comment as stupid as suggesting that Hitler's Germany had a right to nuclear energy. If Obama-fool really believes that, he's not merely a fool; he's developmentally retarded.