James Chamberlin

The other night I had the opportunity to watch a movie called Matchstick Men. I remember hearing a little bit about it when it originally came out in theaters, but I don’t recall seeing a whole lot of press. But it’s now airing on cable and is obviously out on DVD now.

The film’s biggest star is Nicholas Cage, who I am a big fan of. He plays a con artist (aka matchstick man) with a business partner (played by Sam Rockwell). The two seem to only do one or two particular cons, nothing too crazy, but they’re obviously successful at it. Cage’s character, Roy Waller, reminds me of Adrian Monk. He’s got a lot of those same ticks Monk does, so I feel oddly comfortable watching Roy.

I’m trying not to spoil very much of the movie in the chance that you’ve not seen the film. But a lot of the plot revolves around the fact that Roy fathered a child but never knew of its fate because he and his then-wife split up and went their separate ways.

Once he meets his daughter (now 14), it really throws a wrench into the mix. Roy not only has to worry about his business, but keep her safe and away from it. Again, I’m not going to spoil anything, but the huge plot twist is incredible. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

Wow, what a great movie. If you haven’t seen this, I recommend at least renting it. I was really impressed by it. It was directed by Ridley Scott, who was responsible for a personal favorite, Gladiator.

For a little while, I played around with a new theme. I doubt anybody saw it, but I like the overall look of it. It took quite a lot of customizing. One of the problems is the site has a lot of pages (my OLD episode reviews), and those all showed up as links. That was quite a mess.

Unlike most of the themes I’ve tried, it used a logo. I’m not usually a fan of these due to my lack of graphics design skills. So if anybody wants to customize the logo and email it to me, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, I think I’ll stick with the current theme.

One of the other problems I ran into deals with CSS. Unfortunately, the align right commands for images, for instance, are different from one theme to the other. So if I were to switch, I’d have to edit all of the posts which use those old commands. What an incredibly big pain in the ass that would be.

Aside from looking for a new theme, which admittedly isn’t high on my priority list, I’m looking to eventually replace the default emoticons pack WordPress ships with. I frankly have a hard time to believe they couldn’t get somebody to design something new for the distribution with WordPress. I would think somebody would be willing to do it for free, just to have the joy of seeing his/her emoticons on everybody’s blog. After all, WordPress is used everywhere.

Last night Ogre and I decided to try and play Age of Empires again. He tried to get Railwolf, but he wasn’t reachable at that time, probably because he’s sick. Without Rail to serve as host, Ogre offered to host, which is fine by me. Unfortunately, Ogre couldn’t figure out the port forwarding for the game and we had to give up on that venture.

Instead of gaming, I worked more on the fan site, and Ogre showed me some more of his great RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 parks. A while back, he released his latest version of the Station Park, which was a tribute to the now defunct fan site RCT Station I used to manage.

Well, Ogre’s latest maps include Carolina Woods and River Vista. I haven’t downloaded them to check ’em out firsthand yet, but they both look nice judging from his screenshots and descriptions.

Over the past two months a number of stories have come out about HD DVD and BluRay. All signs are pointing to a win for BluRay over HD DVD. When Warner announced they were switching to BluRay, that was a huge blow to the HD DVD format.

Most recently, Netflix announced they’re not going to be buying anymore HD DVD for their inventory. Also Best Buy said they’re going to begin steering customers towards BluRay. And now there’s a rumor that says Toshiba will cease production of HD DVD players.

Every now and then Ogre and I discuss it, but it’s not something I have a personal investment in yet. I’m usually slow in getting new technology and with competing formats, I know never to become an early adopter because it’s a real gamble.

Early adopters almost always end up getting screwed. And even if you did happen to choose BluRay, now there’s news about different versions (profiles) of BluRay. Early versions won’t be able to do some things that new versions/profiles can. I’ve already read an article about how a man is filing a lawsuit over this and he intends for it to be a class-action lawsuit soon.

Still, I don’t really have any intention to buy a BluRay player yet, not until the profile stuff is sorted out and is less confusing. Hell, I still haven’t got an HDTV yet, so I’ll save my money for that stuff for another year and retire my old TV and maybe upgrade to BluRay. There aren’t many DVDs out in that format anyway.

It wasn’t but a few minutes after I made the previous entry that Ogre came on AIM and said he and Rail were ready for a game. Well, I agreed since I was just researching, nothing too important at that time of night.

In the first game, I attacked Railwolf a few times early on, but he rebuffed those attacks without batting an eye. It was pretty much downhill for me after that. I was never really able to get an upperhand over Ogre or Rail. After getting run down by Railwolf’s Persian elephants, it was time to admit defeat.

Instead of exiting the game, I chose to watch the conclusion of it. It came down to Railwolf’s elephants and Ogre’s helepoli. Railwolf seemed to be in control through much of the game (from what I saw), but it was the helepoli that won out. I didn’t expect that quite frankly, but once I saw Ogre mow down the elephants near Rail’s small defensive wall, I knew Ogre had a good chance at a comeback.

Having a lot of fun in the second game we played another. It was on an islands map, not my favorite (not that I really have a favorite, mind you). I’m usually slow to move from island to island, but I had to get moving this time. Ogre and Railwolf got the two big islands, while I got one of the smallest islands on the map. Just my luck. I did well getting over to a nearby island which had a source of gold, but it wasn’t long until Ogre settled in, but I took his lone archer out and took control of the island.

Without much for resources on my tiny island, I decided to move. The island to my right was nearly bare except for a handful of trees. It wasn’t enough to bother with. So I continued down and let my villagers off the boat on the tip of the southern island. And what do you know, it’s Ogre’s home city. I set up camp right down town and start slashing away. When it seemed like I had him dead, he decided he wanted to partner up with me. Fine by me because it wasn’t but a few minutes after this that Rail found my home city and took it over.

Without a home, I hunkered down on Ogre’s island. Just stood around until I had to fend off a pretty big phalanx group of Rail’s. I lost 3/4 of my guys in it, but I did win it. I rebuilt my meager army thanks to donations from Ogre (I was out of villagers at this point, so I couldn’t gather resources) and helped him clear most of Railwolf’s original island.

That’s when Ogre decided to go back on his word and blow my guys to smitherines with his helepoli. See folks, that’s why you never trust an ogre. Sure Shrek may have great PR people, but all ogre’s are mean and ruthless. You’ll see in due time. (Stay out of the swamps!)

I didn’t stick around to watch that game’s conclusion. I saw that Rail had taken firm control of my original home base. I saw a nice group of helepoli which covered the tiny island. Still, it was a good game. I had fun once we quit the (true) first game because of the lag brought on due to the computer AI.

The other day I mentioned I ordered some games from Amazon. I was eagerly awaiting them, much like any other package. For some reason it’s always nice to receive a package, even if you bought it for yourself.

Anyway, the only game I opened was the big Age of Empires collection. Much to my disappointment, the CD case was broken. You know those little plastic things that hold the CD in the center? Well they all broke off on mine. I hate it when they do that. The multi-CD holders seem to always break. I don’t know if they’re manufactured more cheaply or what the deal is, but mine are frequently broken.

Anyway, installation went just fine. I played two games and boy was I rusty. Who knew it had been this long since I’ve played this thing. I’m not really a multiplayer fan. I’ve always played slow, methodical single player games, so I’m not accustomed to rushing. I managed to rush the computer opponent in my second game, but it took two waves. The first wave took out the villagers, as the rush technique is supposed to, and the second wave took out any remaining villagers and infantry that had since been created.

Unfortunately, I haven’t got the time to play these games, so I’ll have to put this on the back-burner for a while. I wish I had a little more free time to play these games. Between the Age of Empires games and the RollerCoaster Tycoon games, Railwolf, Ogre and I have logged a lot of hours on the PC in the past.

Just under a year ago I installed the original RollerCoaster Tycoon on my PC. I hadn’t had it installed since I closed down RCT Station a few years ago. When you go a long time without playing a favorite game, it’s only natural to go back to it at some point. Well, since I can’t find my discs anymore, I went ahead and bought the RollerCoaster Tycoon Deluxe Pack along with the Rollercoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack.

I also went ahead and ordered Age of Empires: Collectors Edition since I couldn’t find my CDs anymore. One of the selling points for me is it contains all of the games leading up to Age of Mythology. Not bad for $9.99.

Ogre, Railwolf, and I have all been thinking of getting back into playing AoE. They’ve both begun playing multiplayer, but I’m still waiting on Amazon to ship my order. It’s kind of odd that all three of us began reminiscing about old games. It could be because of a number of reasons, but I know I’ve grown tired of what the game developers are making. It’s nothing but First Person Shooters anymore. And if you’re a PC gamer, like I used to be, you need a small fortune to keep up with CPU and GPU technology. The two computers I have aren’t capable of playing any of the modern games.

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Exactly one year ago I began working on another fan site. I hadn’t worked on one since RCT Station. I don’t know why, but I miss that sort of work. I seem to get some sort of sick, twisted sense of pleasure hand-coding pages, especially once the design is done and it just comes down to the content. Content was something that RCT Station had loads of, as Ogre and Railwolf both remember. All of Ogresnet was like that.

But when you make a mistake or decide to change anything major, it can be a pain in the ass to fix. I can use the simple “replace” tool in my text editor to replace a short string of text, but anything major requires a fully manual approach.

Since I’ve been away from this project for so long, I’m still familiarizing myself with everything. I had it so that everything used templates. That’s all well and good until you forget which CSS goes to what and what it all means. It’s just going to take me a little while to get back into the swing of things.

I wish I had some idea of when I’ll be able to officially launch this “new” site. I haven’t made any progress in at least six months, but I’m finally getting back to work on it. I’m not a fan of launching a site before it’s truly ready (all of the bugs are worked out). It will be a few more months at least, but I also need to work on buying, installing, and customizing vBulletin. That’s something I’m not looking forward to. I’m not much of a designer, so I will probably purchase a design and hire someone to do a custom logo/header graphic. But that’s months away, so I don’t have to worry about all of that yet.

Did anybody see that? Zednik had his throat sliced accidentally when another skater’s skate hit him in the neck. That was the last thing I thought I would see when flipping through the channels last night and came upon ESPN. That was a terrible thing to see, but thankfully he’s in stable condition.

WordPress upgrades are always a pain in the ass. They don’t include a decent changelog in their pack as far as I can find, but there is one available on the web. I only just came across it. It’s going to be a big help in the future. Something I always liked about some forum software (when I used it in 1999-2003 or so) is the changelog showed you what files were changed so you didn’t have to re-upload all of the files in the pack.

Changelog for v2.3.3:

wp-includes/version.php
wp-includes/pluggable.php
wp-includes/gettext.php
wp-admin/install-helper.php
xmlrpc.php