Rare is the fun wedding. This wedding was uncommonly rare. Great people, fantastic weather and setting, and oustanding food.

Would do again! A+

Back in 2003, my friend Erik had me stop by the then Atari/Infromatics/Microprose HQ in Hunt Valley to check out a beta of an amazing game called Planetside.  FPS games were really hitting their stride, but this game was unlike any other FPS out there at the time.

Full air, land, and vehicle combat, at the same time with over 300 people in one spot   (but the maps were massive continents, not some 70×70 square) – it made for some epic battle and game play. Moreover, it had great squad and platoon command abilities, allowing you to direct up to 30 ‘real’ players to coordinate assaults. Sadly, Sony never really seemed to give it the support it needed (often pulling manpower over to EQII which was in development) and as such it was carried on the back of one heck of a vibrant and dedicated community.

I’ve never played a game since that really captured my imagination (or time). The levels of strategy and then tactics that could be employed were highly entertaining. The variety of weapons and vehicles at one’s disposal, all wrapped up in a futuristic setting (as opposed to the rampant fantasy settings that most games were moving to at the time) helped keep things fresh.

I played that damn game for a good three years straight until I could see the maps and strategies, literally, in my dreams.

Fast forward three years after I last played and to my surprise it looks like Sony is poking around at doing a Planetside 2 and are currently soliciting ideas. Given the advances in hardware, bandwidth, and programming I can only speculate at the amazing things a development team could do with this IP.

I, for one, am really excited about this news. The original Planetside got me back into building PCs after a long hiatus (and in a round about way got me into a whole new career of programming) as well as connecting with a lot of individuals with whom I have a good friendships today. So let’s hear what you’ve got up your sleeve, Sony.

This video is popping up all over the place, so I’ll continue the wave. It’s worth the watch. In fact, it’s really worth the mp3 download.

I wish I had been into Cosmos as a kid. All those crazy biology, science, and nature shows I watched and yet I have no recollection as a kid of the show. Shame.

In one fell swoop we could pay off the national debt, and most likely fund some sort of expanded health care initiative – not to mention something as useful as universal hi-speed broadband for every citizen (we’re talking swank stuff like 50Mb fiber connections). Call on your local representatives to remove church’s tax exempt status – a payoff churches received to stay out of politics in the first place, as well as  in exchange for pure humanitarian efforts like feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless – a priority  many churches have since  failed at miserably (but hey, look at the fancy church schools, pretty church  stages, new pews and great cars and salaries the church leaders drive).

So call it a day, own up to the fact that hundreds of thousands of dollars are being funneled right now into coffers to sway the politics in Maine over the gay marriage law by religious organizations (*waves* at  Catholic Church), and that millions were funneled by Mormon organizations to oppose the gay marriage law in California. Own up to the fact that millions upon millions of dollars are being passed around and filtered, tax-free, through mega-churches and religious mainstays like Pat Robertson for pure political agendas.

Why continue the charade since only one side benefits here?

OK, I admit, I’m painting with an awfully large brush here. Yes, there are small religious institutions with underpaid staff that do carry the torch to help the less fortunate – but you’ve been sold out and overshadowed by your less virtuous brethren. Sorry, reality is a bitch.

Given the current political and scientific climate in America at the moment, I about spit coffee out the nose upon seeing this image.

Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy page wins my favorite-sentence-I’ve-read-today award.

“I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.”

I wish I could claim it as my own.

If you’ve never taken an astronomy course, I heartily recommend it. Even a 100 level course does wonders for opening the mind. It’s an amazing convergence of math, physics, and beautiful sights. As well, it serves up a heaping helping of understanding that can help you blast through a surprisingly large amount of pseudoscience that banks on people’s ignorance of how the universe works.

Beautiful

So a script kiddie visited me the other day (virtually). I watched them create an account and go about their script kiddie ways. I was eager to see what would happen (hurray for server logs). Things were still up when I went to bed, so I figured they either had given up or I’d find a present in the morning.

Sure enough I received an email in the early hours that the site had been hacked. It wasn’t anything ground-shaking and here we are all restored.

The bit I found interesting, that I didn’t find in any searches out there, was that they changed the data in the Word press theme I was using to reflect their own site.

So if this should happen to you, take a peek into your wp_content/themes/(current theme your using)/index.php folder and see if some code hasn’t appeared that shouldn’t be there.

P.S. of course this means you’ll have to recreate any accounts you had. The databases needed some flushing.