Hunting duck and turkey just got a whole lot simpler

I'm not a hunter, but many of my friends are, and I recently noticed that it's a huge pain in the ass to find hunting regulations. Each state reports them differently, and at different times. It seems difficult enough to figure out when and how you can hunt in your own state, much less planning a hunting trip across the country.

To that end, HolCope Computing is proud to present When is Duck Season? and When is Turkey Season?

Using a simple interface, hunters can easily navigate to any state where they want to hunt and find:

• Season dates (by species, if applicable),
• Bag limits,
• Shooting hours, and
• Arms & ammo requirements

I'm really proud of how these sites turned out, and I'm happy that people are using them. I'd love to hear any suggestions you have for improvements in the comments, or via the contact link on the site!

My newest website

For a couple years now, a friend and I have been trying to come up with ideas that will make us fabulously wealthy so we can buy our own private island or live in an underwater dome palace or control Congress. To that end, we just launched Which is BIGGER?

Here's the gist: You can pick the category of things you want to compare, currently landmarks, people or planets. In each category we have a small (but growing) list of available objects, and after clicking the two you want to see, we tell you which one is bigger, and more importantly how much bigger it is. You want to see how The Sphinx would look next to the Louvre Pyramid? No problem. Worried that Venus might be slightly bigger than Earth? Fear not, friend! The best part is that each comparison has a permalink and easily accessed sharing buttons for Twitter and Facebook. Prove to your friends that you know better than they do how big stuff is!

New computer

While this is not exactly a post about entertainment, I think it's appropriate. A few months ago, I did a major overhaul on my desktop, gutting it and replacing the aging components with shiny new ones.

Old System:
Motherboard: Can't remember. Too lazy to dig it out.
Processor: AMD Athlon 3500+ (2.2 GHz)
RAM: 2 x 2GB A-DATA DDR2 800 SDRAM
Storage: 250GB Seagate Barracuda
Graphics: ASUS RadeonHD 3450 256MB 64-bit GDDR2
Optical 1: LG IDE DVD Super-Multi
Optical 2: A-Open IDE DVD-ROM

New System:
Motherboard: ECS X58B-A LGA-1366 ATX
Processor: Intel Core i7 920 (4 x 2.66 GHz)
RAM: 3 x 2GB G.SKILL DDR3 1333 SDRAM
Storage: 250GB Seagate Barracuda
Graphics: EVGA GeForce 9500GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2
Optical: HP 22x SATA DVD Super-Multi

I love my new system. It runs so much smoother than my old system, and working from a clean hard drive is really nice. I'll need to expand my storage soon, since I only have about a quarter of my space left, but I've still got some time. I really hated having to buy another optical drive, but the motherboard I bought didn't have any PATA connections, so I didn't have much of a choice.

I really love having 8 cores to work with. In the past, I lent my computer to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), but I had to stop because it used so much of my processing power that I could only run it for a few hours a day. Now, however, I have assigned it four of my cores, and my computer hasn't slowed down at all. It's fantastic.

It has arrived! (a few months ago...)

Well, my diligence paid off, and my free Xbox 360 finally arrived! As I suspected, it's an older model, and does not feature an HDMI port, but I'm not going to complain. After all, it was free. I have also received the free extra controller I ordered. I'm starting to amass gaming paraphernalia that I have no place for. To solve this problem, I've decided to custom build a shelf that will compactly store all of my PS3 & Xbox 360 games and controllers and stuff. After the Xbox came in, I went and bought Guitar Hero: World Tour, so all told I have 2 PS3 controllers, 2 Xbox controllers, a guitar, a drum set, a microphone, an Xbox Live headset, and some games.

Once the shelf is built, it will have three towers to hold PS3 games, Xbox games/DVD cases, and Blu-ray cases. The only reason I've split up the PS3 games and the blu-ray discs, which are roughly the same size, is that I want my cubby holes along the bottom of the shelf to be three across and two down. That way I have a column for PS3, a column for Xbox, and the third column that holds Blu-rays and accessories. My current plans will have the shelf frame held together with wooden dowels and the internal shelves held by interlocking them. Here's a Google Sketchup mockup of what it will (hopefully) eventually look like.

At this point, all I have done is one sawhorse, but it's a start.

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OK, so it's months later and I still don't have the shelf built, but the Xbox is still going strong(ish). It did, however, mutilate my Halo 3 game disc beyond repair. It did this without me moving or even touching it at all. Thankfully I had only paid $20 for the game on eBay, and I was able to find another copy for about the same price. So while overall I have paid the current retail price for the game, I've received 2 game discs out of it. Whatever. Anyway, before I let the Microsoft Monster devour any games I paid full price for, I looked online to check out if anyone else had come across this little "feature."

Turns out it's quite common. So common, in fact, that Microsoft instituted a game disc replacement policy, for the nominal fee of $20. I call bullshit on that one, and I would never pay Microsoft to fix something that their product broke through no fault of my own. Well rather than taking my chances with other discs, I did some research and found out that it's caused by the way the DVD drive in the Xbox is manufactured. There's enough overhead room that the disc can actually tilt far enough for it to scrape against the laser apparatus. Total fail.

Good thing for me (and many others) that Llamma has dealt with this issue and come up with a relatively painless fix, if you don't mind voiding your warranty, that is. So I paid the $10 for the little pads they sell, completely dismantled the Xbox, took apart the DVD drive, stuck these little pads on, and voila! I can't scratch a disc even if I try, and I have. I can't even make it skip.

While I'm happy this worked, I must say I'm not terribly impressed with the workmanship of the (admittedly early-model) Xbox 360. So since I've voided the warranty with reckless abandon, I may think about modding it some. And speaking of voiding warranties, I might also void my hard drive and do a little self-upgrading from the stock 20GB drive to a big, fancy 120GB-er. Another project for another post.

Folklore for PS3

I played a demo for Folklore right after I got my PS3, and it was pretty fun. Walking around magical worlds, meeting wondrous creatures, sucking out their souls to use them as weapons...like I said, fun. Well, I saw it on sale at GameStop a few months ago, so I bought it.

There are a lot of good things to say about the game. There are two concurrent story lines in the game, one following Ellen and one following Keats. Ellen is a girl who received a mysterious letter from her dead mother asking her to go to a small village in Ireland called Doolin (also called, naturally, "The Village of the Dead"). Keats is a reporter for the obscure occult magazine "Unknown Realms," and he receives a call from a woman begging for him to save her from faeries. The game is broken up into chapters, and you are allowed to switch your character after each chapter. This allows for variety in gameplay since Ellen and Keats have different abilities and follow slightly different paths toward the goal. There are also opportunities for side quests, which break up the monotony of running through the same levels defeating the same enemies over and over again.

The artwork is beautiful and the music is nice and usually unobtrusive, but the story and the dialogue definitely leave something to be desired. I find myself berating the characters for their short-sightedness or sometimes utter stupidity. They exclaim in entirely abnormal ways at things that they should have expected, or at least accepted with more grace, considering that they have been jumping through magical portals into various netherworlds. The developers also chose to tell the story with a mix of "live-action" scenes and comic-book-esque montages with dramatic voice-overs and even more dramatic speech bubbles. But you can't fault the gameplay. It elegantly brings in the Sixaxis accelerometer, which you use when harvesting the souls of the creatures. The worlds are varied enough and the bosses challenging enough to make game exciting but not discouraging.

The movement controls are a little frustrating, since you can only explore those areas of the world that are pertinent to your quest. Invisible walls are everywhere. While I suppose that could be chalked up to the fact that you're in a magical place, it's not like they give a reason for it in the game. The characters move pretty slowly as well. I often find myself wishing for a bicycle.

By contrast, the battle controls are quite good. You assign one of the "ids" you have picked up along your way to each of the four PS controller buttons. Hitting the button releases the id as a weapon. Along with your health bar, there is an endurance (mana, focus, energy, call it what you will) bar. Each use of an id expends a portion of this bar, which regenerates over time. There are several creature types, and each type has strengths and weaknesses toward the other types. These two elements force you to strategize as to the best way to win a particular battle.

I'm about halfway through the game now, so I can't speak to how the rest of it plays out, but so far it's a very enjoyable game with some unique aspects that make it worth the playing time. At the very least it's worth giving the demo a go.

Live Search Club

*** This is a story of perseverance and the triumph of procrastination ***

Well folks, I have achieved the improbable. Using only my ability to play flash games, in concert with a zen-like patience and herculean will-power, I have earned an Xbox360. Yes, that's right. I have spent no money, only continued exercising my college-learned habit of spending free time playing flash games. All I had to sacrifice was variety in my gameplay, since I essentially played the same four games for six months straight. At a maximum point limit of 1000 per day, I could technically have accomplished this feat in two months, since the Xbox360 costs 55,000 points. I do try to maintain some semblance of a social life though, so it took me six.

Microsoft's Live Search Club is what allowed me to do this. My roommate in my final semester of undergrad pointed it out to me one day, so I started playing (Thanks, man!). I assumed at first that it was a short-term promotion and would end in a month or two. I also never thought that I would get close to 55,000 points, since the most lucrative game on the site only gives you 25 points (the least awards a paltry 2 points). In fact, about a month after I started playing, they removed the Xbox360 from the awards list. I could have given up, but I kept going, hoping that the public outcry would make them put it back up. I was right. There were a couple other prizes that I also wanted, but they were all eventually removed from the prize list, finally leaving the Xbox as the only hig-point-value prize that I wanted. I had a goal. I had the determination (because who doesn't want free stuff?). All I needed was enough time to finish.

Long story short, here I am, roughly six months later, and now I have this e-mail as proof of my accomplishment:


Now all I have to do is sit back and wait 8-12 weeks!

Hood - Book 1 of the King Raven Trilogy

In the past couple of years I have shown a pattern of liking reimaginations or reinventions of classic characters. Gregory Maguire's novels, while not literary perfection, are fun to read. My favorite so far is Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. I also liked Stephen R. Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, which comprises five novels about Merlin and his life and adventures. I find them especially interesting because they tie in Atlantean myth. They aren't perfect, and get a bit preachy at times, but overall I enjoyed them.

I received Hood as a gift recently, and as the title implies, it's about Robin Hood. However, rather than plopping him down as usual in Sherwood Forest against the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham, he is heir to the throne of Elfael, a Welsh kingdom in the Middle Ages. Lawhead alters his characters names to reflect the conventions of the time. The hero is "Rhi Bran the Hud," which roughly means "King Raven the Enchanter." His name is mangled by the Norman invaders to "Robin Hood." Bran's right hand man is "Iwan," which is anglicized as "John." The nickname "Little" is given him by Brother Aethelfrith, whose name Iwan cannot pronounce, so he chooses to call him "Tuck," in honor of his love of food.

Here again, Lawhead ties in real history. The main plotline of the book is about Baron William de Braose (also mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Elfael) taking over Elfael and the opposition he meets from Baron Bernard de Neufmarché. Bran, of course, has to stop them both to reclaim his throne.

The stories of Robin Hood have always been more exciting to me than those of King Arthur, so it's no surprise that I liked this retelling better than the Pendragon Cycle. Even so, I think it's a lot more accessible in some ways than Lawhead's Arthurian books. Arthurian myth necessarily has heavy themes of heavenly preordination, and while these are present in Hood, they are not nearly as pervasive. I'm looking forward to getting Scarlet and Tuck, the second and third installments.