James Chamberlin

There have been a series of tower defense games that I’ve played online for free over the past year or so. They’re all simple strategy games that can really make time fly by. Well, a new one has popped up and it’s a little different from some of the others I’ve played.

In previous games, there have been different types of creeps, some which walk/run and some which fly. You have to choose a combination of towers. Relying on just one type will cost you because you cannot defend against the other type of creep. In the new game, this is completely ignored. Here, they all walk or run.

It does simplify the game with that. But there are still plenty of different types of towers to choose from.

I managed to get to level 49 and scored 17,034 points on The Plains: Swirlishus, probably the easiest of the maps.

It’s a pretty good [free] game in my opinion. From a strategy standpoint, you not only need to place the towers in good places, but you need to upgrade them as the game progresses.

When I initially activated the WordPress plugin Akismet, I was a little apprehensive. I didn’t know if it would slow down the site or even catch the spam my little blog seems to attract. But after a few months of running, Akismet has caught over seven hundred spam comments and trackbacks… 711 to be exact. In the past, I received an email for each comment. Now, Akismet handles it all for me. I don’t regret installing it one bit.

I’ve seen a lot of headlines about Windows Vista and XP on sites like digg lately. Vista isn’t being purchased by businesses because of drivers, slowness of machines, memory consumption, etc, and some people seem to think that Vista is doomed.

I just don’t see MS giving up on the OS anytime soon. As bloated as Vista may be, I can’t really compare it to Microsoft’s previous OS failure, Millennium Edition (ME). MS has too much money in Vista to abandon it for XP.

I’ve got two PCs at home. Both are Dells; one is running XP and the other is running Vista. There’s no doubt that the Vista machine is faster at some things, but that’s not because of Vista, but because of the good hardware that I’ve got running it. If I had the same hardware specs in the XP machine, the XP machine would be incredible.

All of this brings me to my next PC purchase. I’ve been looking really hard at buying another Dell. This would replace my oldest machine, which has frankly seen better days. For ~$900 after taxes, I can get a very nice little gaming machine. I would have to buy it before the end of June if I wanted it to come with Windows XP unless Microsoft extends its availability, and I don’t see them doing that.

I’ve had nothing but trouble with the image uploader ever since 2.5 was released. For some reason, the developers felt it was necessary to use Flash to upload the images. I kept getting HTTP errors for some reason and judging by many of the other WordPress users, I’m not alone. I found a lot of blog entries about this, some of which proposed solutions, but I decided to use the plugin made available on the official site which disables the flash functionality.

I activated the plugin about five minutes ago and I uploaded a test image just to see if it works, and I haven’t had any problems. I’m guessing WordPress 2.5.1 will be released pretty soon, either to remove the flash functions or to actually fix it. Personally, I see no reason why Flash was needed. I suppose somebody felt it had to be used just to keep things new and fancy… but that didn’t work out so well, now did it?

There’s an old saying… if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. WordPress developers should have listened. Now they have to fix what they broke. Nice job, guys.

I have been slacking off on my workouts. I haven’t attended the gym in a while now and I can feel it. This morning, I hit the gym and it didn’t take long before I was exhausted. My legs are still about as strong as they were before I took a break, but my upper body strength has dipped a bit. The bench press is a good test of this. I’ll be headed back tomorrow. I need to get back to my daily workouts and lose some more weight.

When it comes to college sports, I can’t say as though I’m the biggest fan. I don’t have a particular favorite and generally just don’t follow any of the major sports. But for some bizarre reason, I caught a few games in the early rounds of this year’s March Madness tournament. And wow, there’s quite a difference between NCAA and the NBA.

Two things in particular stood out: defense and speed. It seems these young whippersnappers can actually play defense. Somewhere down the line the NBA players lose the desire to play good defense. Perhaps it’s the money. They may think they are now getting paid to score not stop the other guy. Guys like Gary Payton always stood out as good defenders in the NBA.

The speed of the game is very fast-paced. A lot of this has to deal with the simple fact that they’re young. They’re in much better shape (cardiovascular-wise anyway) than the pros and it really shows. Sometimes it’s almost like a tennis match; back and forth, up and down the court. I was blown away at the speed of the game.

I think I’ll be paying more attention to college basketball next year. The NBA doesn’t really excite me anymore. The guys I watched when I was younger are either retired or are at the point where they should give it up. Now the NCAA is very close to announcing an age restriction, with the hopes of keeping the kids in college for two years before they jump ship to the NBA to collect their paycheck.

I can’t fault any of these young guys for being eager to go to the NBA. I know that some of them have parents who frankly need their boys to turn pro, but as a fan, I’d like to see familiar faces on a team for a decent period of time. This is one of my complaints about professional sports (all of them). The rosters change so often sometimes that it’s hard to remain a fan.

When I read about Ogre’s pizza problems yesterday, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Not only did he get a bad pizza, but his stone broke in the oven. That’s just bad luck.

Not to gloat or anything, but I never have these problems because of two reasons.

1) I never buy boxed frozen pizzas. I know Ogre said they were on sale when he bought the Red Barons, but you really don’t know what you’re getting when you get them boxed like that. Always go for the clear plastic-wrapped ones.

2) I own my own pizza oven. A $100 investment, my little commercial grade pizza oven has paid for itself many times over. Buying pizza from Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, etc has not been worth it in my opinion. The cheap $2 frozen pizzas at Aldi’s is great. They’re big, the crust is actually thicker than the cardboard it is shipped on, and there are plenty of toppings. But it’s really the oven which seals the deal. 10-14 minutes and the pizza is thoroughly cooked.

I think Ogre will be buying himself one of these ovens before too long.

Well it didn’t take long, just a few minutes, but I’ve managed to get my blog upgraded to WordPress v2.5. I knew the new version would be out any moment now, since WordPress displays news about development every time I log into WordPress.

The GUI for the administrator panel is quite a bit different. This is going to take some getting used to.

In a silly mistake, I forgot to pay the cable bill on time and late Thursday night, Charter disabled my Internet. Initially, I didn’t know about the mistake about the bill. I had thought my modem died or something, so I even went out and bought a new one. Fat load a good that would have done, huh?

What an embarrassing moment that was. Well, I got them to turn it back on this morning and they should have the check processed in a few days so I won’t (fingers crossed) have to worry about this again.

Every now and again something actually interesting gets dug to the top of Digg.com. A link to a CBS News segment from a recent broadcast caught my attention.

I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in this sort of thing. Regenerative medicine is likely going to get a lot more research money in the near future because of the need to repair those soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. If people can regrow skin quickly, that alone would be a great advancement, let alone the more daunting task of regrowing entire limbs.