barely fatal

Dependency injection? Object relational mapping? Delegates? Lambda expressions? Four reasons why I’ve become a tester rather than a developer. I get it, yes, but it’s so … dull. Maybe it’s more exciting if you actually use that stuff instead of having to read about it … on the other hand: equivalence classes, state transitions, pair-wise, code coverage, defect trends, yeah baby!

What else, let’s see … history lesson: terrorism of the 70ies in Germany. Heavy Metal. Batman. My 15 yo. electric shaver broke (they knew how to build stuff back in the nineties…). Delicious scones. Quiet week.

I, err, spent some money on Amazon. Let’s call it premature Christmas presents – for myself.

So yeah I got me Windows 7 (I’m an early adopter by nature) and I used the oppurtunity to clean up my PC. Changed my hard drive setup, switched to a RAID 1 to allow my two old, slow disks some extra read speed. Of course write speed is still as slow, but you can’t have it all, can you. RAID 0? Naaah those things are too old. If one of them dies, I’ll just use the chance to reinstall freshly again.

Of course when I tried to install my new drive for storage and backups, I found out I couldn’t use it because the graphics card effectively blocked the free SATA ports. After 2 hours running to the store, getting one of those flat, 90-degree cables (10€, goes for 40 cents on Amazon! Fucking rip-off) I found out my RAID controller did not allow using RAID on one of the other SATA ports I was using. So I had to choose between my DVD drive and the new hard disk. Or buy another cable. Long story short, BIOS update solved the problem, after five hours of searching. My new-found love for consoles always gets a boost when something like that happens.

My sister spent a night here – made me get up real early, on a Saturday, grrr… but we had a lot of fun with the Brutal Legend, Dirt 2 and Little Big Planet demos. I really need a second controller. But hey, need some new ideas for Christmas presents now, there’s one.

Update: Wrote this with Windows Live Writer. Hm gotta say, not bad. If you could set up basic rules in Live Mail, I might actually switch from Thunderbird, too. Windows is finally becoming useful, and not only for games. In fact: the Games Explorer still sucks.

Putting what to test? Apple customer service. My iPod died on me today. Now let’s see how long it takes them to fix it / send a new one / charge me. No I didn’t drop it, it just stopped working, won’t turn on anymore. Technology sucks.

So says Keanu Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still, a solid yet totally uninspired and ultimately irrelevant movie with a flat start, a flat middle part and a flat ending.

Twin brother of Jumper? Hayden “I am your father” Christensen plays a teenage-looking teleporter hunted by the properly undefined “Paladins” headed by Samuel L. “Still hate him for killing me in that other movie” Jackson. I almost feel guilty saying it, but I actually enjoyed watching this for its pop-corn value. In the end the story’s so flat you could wrap it around Darth Vader’s helmet thrice, but at least it tries to be original. To bad that you have to do, or do not, since there is no ‘try’.

John “61 and still grinding people into mincemeat with my machine gun” Rambo is a hand-made classic action flick of which Stallone (director, actor, writer) himself says it was “possibly the last movie made that way” with real stunts, not so much green screen and no modern 3D crap the kids are into so much today. Simply Good vs. Evil, barely touched by a plot, naive, adult entertainment. Blood and gore yippie ki-yay. Too bad that in some scenes some advanced post-pro would have been good. Some things just looked weird so I ran a frame-by-frame and yessir, on Blu-ray you see everything. Puppets get ‘sploded, you can see poor effects painted over, decals copied-in, fake blood, people vanishing from one frame to the next. Old school stuff. Somehow tho, it fits the movie.

Played the demo of Brütal Legend. Guys, can you pleeeease stop it now? There is no way I can pay for or find the time to play all these brilliant games. I’ll let you know when you can go on releasing the next. Thanks.