Author: Tommy

I got Call of Duty for Christmas this year from my dad. It's a very fun game. It has more of a realism feel than arcade, but it's still very fun to play. It's not like Rainbow Six or any realism sim.

It covers various campaigns from World War II. You play as the Allied Forces: United States, Britain, and Russia. With each mission being a little different from the one before. I beat the game in a matter of days, but that was playing the game for hours on end.

The single-player gameplay is excellent. (i haven't played straight through a single-player storyline since Half-Life!) It has some very tough parts, certain points in the game you think it's impossible to beat. It's quite addicting in the middle of the game, and at the end it's a feverish pitch to keep pushing forward.
The multiplayer online play is just as feverish. The gameplay is constant, and if you're looking for more man-to-man gun battles than Battlefield 1942, Call of Duty might be your game. I was very impressed with the graphics, and the way I got so caught up in it. Definately worth a look.

Download the demo from the official Call of Duty website or any file-hosting site.

While playing Battlefield 1942 with the guys, we always use some form of voice chat. We started off with the one that started it all, Roger Wilco. Since it was bought up my GameSpy, it's gone to crap. There's almost no development going on with it, and it's become stagnant. The sound quality is 'good enough', but poor when compared to others.
Next, Havoc had us try out Sidewinder GameVoice a product from Microsoft. Like RW (RogerWilco), it's free. The sound quality of it is much better than RW, but the only problem was that, being a MS product, there is only a Windows server for it. Most other voice chat servers run on Linux, BSD, as well as Windows. So we left it running on Havoc's box (when it was up).
Over Christmas break, my older brother told me about a program that his Dark Age of Camelot guild uses called Ventrilo. He said they use it because it is small, like RW, but has great sound-quality like SW. And it will run on Linux. So I gave it a shot, and it is quite impressive. The sound quality is superb and it uses very little memory compared to the others.

What about TeamSpeak? TeamSpeak sux. I've tried several of their servers but it always either won't start or just crashes out. So I ditched it long ago. Besides, I had heard that SW sounded better, and Ventrilo sounds even better than that. So why bother...

So check out Ventrilo next time you want to use voice-chat. It's free and easy to setup. The server name is neodux.com and cheese.neodux.com.

I finally got my car. After a little over a month since the accident, I got my 'new' car. It's a black 1999 Nissan Sentra.

I like it. Very clean, it rides very smoothly. I love the way Nissan cars feel, the suspension and steering is very tight. It's a 5-spd manual, I've never had a stick-shift to drive before, so I'm learning. I enjoy it though, very fun to drive. Another perk about the car - some of you may scoff at this - it's a 1.6L engine. It's not much, but it gets 29mpg (city) and 39mpg(hwy)(US Dept of Energy). Very nice.

And here is Your's Truly posin with tha G-ride. (a true pimp. bling-bling)

Expect is a great utility for automating sys-admin tasks. It's been on my to-do list for learning for some time now. I've seen it used by one of the admins where I used to work and was amazed at what it can handle.
To quote the Expect website, "Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications such as telnet (ssh), ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. Expect really makes this stuff trivial. Expect is also useful for testing these same applications."

O'Reilly books has a great book on the subject, Exploring Expect, and has been a title I have been searching for, but this year it's high on my wishlist I got it for Christmas.

Expect is based on the Tcl ("tickle") scripting language, combined with the Tk extensions, Tcl itself is pretty nifty. Here's one example of what you can do with Tcl/Tk. (and that's one example i use quite a bit when i'm at a console!)

So last night I got in an accident at 12:25a. My car is totalled, and I'm beginning to realize that I can not drive a decent car for any length of time before the stupid, moronic drivers on the roads find me and put an end to my nice car(s).

This girl claims she 'never saw' me or this other truck right behind me. She was driving all emotional and crying and crap. Moron.
The wreck I had before this was a middle-aged accountant that still lived at home, and was turning left, unprotected, through a busy intersection. (I-10 @ Garth, Baytown) Moron.
Before that, the most stupid of the drivers that I've encounter in said way, pulled out of the Baytown Albertson's parking lot, across 2 lanes of oncoming traffic so he could "try to beat" the oncoming traffic. Even though the guy he was trying to beat, yours truly, was only about 25ft away from him and only going about 45mph! (Unless his car is capable of accelerating and moving him across the two lanes (24ft) in less than .37 seconds from a dead stop. Which I don't think a 1982 hatchback can do. *which happens to be about 64mph in less than half a second.) Moron.

All this to say, since the laws of physics say that opposites attract, and these people are all morons, I must be of a reverse-moronic polarity. Meaning, I am clearly not a moron. So, for anyone out there that ever says, "Hey, you know, that Tommy guy is a moron", I say "Correction sir, you are the moron, the laws of physics require that you be the moron".

Right you are, Ken.