This has been a long time coming. A way too long time coming. I mean this actually took place in April of 2010, almost a year ago. Way to go, me.
If you care about it, you probably already know what happened, but for those who are still intrigued, here’s a little synopsis. Halo 2, which would be the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, had its Xbox Live servers turned off. What does that mean? No more online play over Xbox Live on Xbox or Xbox 360. Without going too far down this road, it’s actually a unique thing and a problem historians are facing. YES! There are Video Game historians that are trying to preserve the history of Video Games. The problem is you can always save the code and whatnot, but you can’t recreate exactly what it was like to play multiplayer on a massive scale. It’s a little easier with games like Halo 2 because you can sort of copy it by having LAN sessions. The real problem comes in with MMO games. Those you can’t just fire up. Ok, that is not the topic at hand. So, Halo 2. It was such a popular game. When the game came out people were so excited. I still remember the launch date : 11/9/2004. Midnight launches are pretty commonplace these days, but they were not so much when Halo 2 came out. I remember I missed school to get Halo 2. Yeah, it’s nerdy and a little extreme, but I don’t regret it at all. Although reception of the game was mixed, tons of people played it. I remember when Xbox 360 first came out most people just used it to play Halo 2 while waiting for some more meaty titles to be released.
When I heard that the Halo 2 servers were being shut down I decided to take one last night to fire up H2 and play some games. It was fun and here is some pictures of the events. It was fun because almost everyone had the same idea so there were plenty of people playing. Dedicated fan base. So dedicated that it took Microsoft a long time to actually turn off the servers for good because some people were playing marathon sessions and apparently it was against their policy to kick people still playing. Anyway, here is to you Halo 2, thanks for all the fun times.
On this blog I post quite a bit of quirky information about Japan, so I thought it would be good for me to post about something fairly important. Unless you have found residence on the underside of a rock you are aware of the situation in Japan right now. If not, here is a quick synopsis. On March 11, 2011 at 2:46 pm a 9.0 magnitude earthquake occurred off the coast of Japan. The worst in Japanese history and the 5th largest in the world. I want to write this for a couple reasons: to preserve this so people don’t forget and because there is so much misinformation flying around. 24-hour news networks are sensationalizing the effects of the quake or at the very worst providing patently false information. I will try my best not to get into the politics of the matter, but just try my best to help people understand what is really going on as well as what should be focused on. I have modified a map from CNN with some pertinent information about the disaster.
A large tsunami was created following the quake which is what happens when you have sea floor that is moved due to an earthquake and that created a large wave which moves inland. This caused thousands of people in northeast area of Japan to relocate due to their destroyed homes and businesses. If you can picture a wave washing up on shore and destroying a sandcastle it’s like that but on a bigger scale. It’s devastating when it rolls in as well as when it recedes back into the ocean. Probably the biggest city hit the hardest during the quake was Sendai, which I pointed out on the map. It has a population of over 1 million. Tokyo was minimally affected despite many claims. It did experience an extended quake, but it was most likely around 6-ish on the Richter Scale, a far cry from 9.0 in the northeast. It is about 200 miles from Sendai and about 230 miles from the epicenter, a pretty sizable difference. Most of my friends in Japan are situated in or around Tokyo and everyone has said that while it was scary, life is relatively back to normal. The really terrible damage happened in the northeast.
Now to the most mis reported part of the whole disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. First, I’ll give a pronunciation because it is important to a certain extent. Foo-koo-shi-ma Die-itchy. It’s not proper, but you can say it now! Here’s the scoop on what’s going on. Due to the earthquake and how close to the shore the plan was it experienced some heavy damage. This damaged the facility and cooling systems. The concern is that not being able to cool the spent nuclear fuel rods will cause radioactive spills. The situation as of this writing is that they have sent firetrucks with water canons to shoot water to cool the fuel rods down until the cooling system can be restored. Power has been restored to some of the cooling systems and from here it appears they are starting to gain the upper hand in containing the reactors. An area of 20 kilometers has been evacuated around the plant. The concerns are talking about how this is the next Chernobyl and how people in Tokyo are receiving all this harmful radiation and how everyone is now a zombie. Not true. Chernobyl was a meltdown and far older technology. Nothing has melted down and it seems to be contained. While there is more radiation in Tokyo and in Japan, it is about 4 times background radiation. Which to put that into perspective. You receive more that while in an airport and on an airplane. It’s nothing to be concerned about.
The current dead or missing toll is over 21,000 as posting this. If you want to help I will put a link to donate. It is really the northeast who needs help as they are running low on supplies and medication for the people who require it. Anything you can donate can help, too. Sorry, for so many please donate posts, but this one should take precedence now, obviously.
Again, anything you give will help out in this horrible event.
I am providing a video from a guy I have been following for a couple years who lives and works in Tokyo. He is a bit crass, but he does a good job explaining what is happening.
Here is some photos from people on Twitter showing people in Tokyo following the quake. The ones with the bare shelves are a day after, due to panicking people. They were fully restocked the next day and are currently stocked. I urge you to watch the video above for some good insight. Thanks to @johntv @tokyocooney @cvxfreak and whoever else I took pictures from. If you want most accurate news coverage about the disaster you should go to the NHK world website and watch their free English stream. It is the Japanese governments broadcast and is in my opinion the best source.
This has been in the hopper for a long time and I haven’t really had a chance to get around to it until now. Especially because this was actually relevant about 3 months ago. It’s about the loss of a dear friend of mine. Before you go off the deep end, it’s not a human friend, nor an animal friend, but a friend of the computer persuasion. Her name was Michelle and she was a Lenovo Thinkpad T61p. This might seem a little over-sentimental for something as replaceable and as frequently changing as a computer, but just as the stuffed animal that you can’t seem to give away, it’s the memories that give it its inherent sentimentality. Let me give you a little background as to why it meant so much to me.
When I started college my parents were ardent in their conviction of not getting me a computer. To this day I am not exactly sure why. The cost of a computer is not something to be scoffed at, but seeing as my major was/is computer engineering, one would think that this might be something worth the investment. I really wanted a laptop so I would be able to bring it around campus and take notes and study in the library, you know college stuff. The only thing I had at the time was an aging desktop and that wasn’t going to cut it. I was working as a tech support goon for a local publishing company at the time and they had this dilapidated, stripped, broken, and all together homely looking “laptop” in the back of the shop and I asked if I could adopt this shelter computer. They obliged and I spent the next months getting it in working order. It was old though, to put it into context, it was old for then, no built-in wifi, IDE HDD, 1 GHz Pentium III proc, it was a dog. At least I had a laptop though, but it was glaringly apparent that this was not going to be able to slake my computing thirst for long though.
My parents struck me a deal, if I got into the engineering program (I didn’t start in it due to high school GPA) they would fork over the cash for a new computer. After two years of busting my hump I was accepted and I immediately began to look at shiny, new laptops. I ended up finding a great deal on a beast of a laptop (at the time of course) through my dad’s AMEX reward program.
This was over Christmas break I ordered it and I remember refreshing the tracking number roughly a quadjabamillion times. I’m pretty sure the IT people at FedEx were about ready to block my IP. It was a little torturous waiting day in and day out in hot anticipation of my new best friend. I was comping back from doing some errand I had to run and I saw, sitting on my doorstep, a relatively large cardboard box, be-speckled with the Lenovo logo. I sprinted to the door and tore into that box, you know in a totally civil and organized manner as to not break my new god.
It was love at first boot. I had so many good times with Michelle. (I have a penchant for naming all my important things girls names that start with M) She helped me get through some really tough classes. She is where I learned Linux really well. She is where I learned the anatomy of a modern laptop. She was where I wrote some heart to hearts and where I blogged some really fun moments. Sadly, in December of 2010 she died, it sounded like an overheating issue with the GPU, but she wouldn’t boot. I replaced her motherboard and got her working, but she was showing her age, and it was time to move on. I sold her to a nice Indian family who needed her right way. I want to thank her for he many years of service and just how many great memories I shared with her. Bye Michelle!
Who writes a love letter to a computer? This guy. This. Guy.
