AtomicInternet Archived News

Archived News starting from 10-31-2011 and earlier

The depths to which automated bots will go to get SEO keywords placed has reached a new low today. While viewing my site stats I noticed the join_success page on my ancient Cougar Club site had fairly high traffic. Upon further inspection, I found over 200 new accounts all generated by some bot. Unfortunately for the bot, none of my registration fields were compatible with linking to anything, so all the processing cycles were for nothing. Whoever developed it must have just took a stab in the dark at fieldnames and sent it on its merry way. I guess this is the future we all knew was coming, but instead of legitimate machine intelligence we just get spam bots.

After several long months of anticipation, a teaser preview at E3, an alpha and a beta, Battlefield 3 is finally here. At 12:10 today I obtained my pre-order from Best Buy and played till 4:00am with some pretty good random people. After initially picking up a kit that was actually worse than mine it was clear this was launch day, and surprisingly the servers worked. The decision between PC and Xbox version was easy for me as 60% of my friends are Xbox exclusive. While the graphics suck compared to PC I stopped noticing after my evening of full squad domination. I can see a good chunk of my life disappearing to this game.

Today marks the 4th day of Occupy Detroit, an entertaining group of 100 people (or less) who decided to march from the spirit of Detroit statue to Grand Circus Park. I find them entertaining not because they have outrageous demands, but because I'm stuck working here and they are easily the most interesting thing happening in the city. Today we toured the tent city which was disappointingly empty aside from a few people banging on a plastic bucket and someone spouting off about aliens. We were accosted by a homeless person, but he had no political agenda to push and nobody else approached us during our visit. Disappointed, we returned to have a red wings player serve us donuts.

Over 8 years ago I caved in and bought a multimedia head unit for my Cougar. At the time, it was exciting enough to watch DVD movies and store a whopping (at the time) 8.5GB dual layer DVD of MP3s. Little did I know it would lead me down the path of mobile Xbox and mobile rock band to elevate my nerd status significantly. However, in the age of cheap 64GB USB flash drives, blu-ray movies, streaming radio stations and WP7 gaming its cutting edge feel has worn off. Fortunately nobody told eBay this, and it's currently fetching over $150 with 2 days to go. The nav system saw me through 21,000 miles of fun, and provided proof a Cougar can indeed reach 130mph. While the stock radio has warped me back to 1999 and doesn't even play MP3s, I can take comfort in the fact that this time next year I'll be crusing in my new Focus ST.

After replacing my lamp in my projector, I noticed the 1/4 life bulb was angled at 45 degrees from center (as compared to the new one). Further inspection revealed the bulb itself was in perfect condition, but the metal mount had bubbled it into the angle. Furious, and anxious for a rage target, I began searching in vain for a class action lawsuit or other such manufacturing defect complaint site. Fortunately one of the results explained mercury vapor lamp technology and I was quickly lulled into a wikipedia coma. My injustice forgotten, I humbly swapped lamps and am finally back in the 120" 1080p club, $125 poorer.

iOS 5 released today, and Enorym and the Senator were in full fanboy mode. As one of two WP7 fanboys, it was my duty to refute any claims of superiority despite a complete lack of compare points. The wars began with a smackdown from Enorym, followed by myresponse. Then enorym talked to himself and I went hands free, after which the war devolved into unrelated baseless claims of superiority. While each side will claim victory, the only conclusive result is that fanboys rule. Oh and Joseph (the other WP7 fanboy) chimed in about 3 hours later with nothing significant to add.

With much pomp and circumstance, I upgraded to 120 inches of Epson HC 8100 1080p goodness almost 2 years ago. Now, only 1120 hours into the life of the lamp, my Battlefield games have a new challenge of perpetual twilight. Currently the highest brightness setting for the projector gives an image that is almost passable, but it's clear death has come 3,000 hours early for my lamp. After checking the warranty, my lamp has indeed expired and I'm left with a $200 repair, or in the case of my cheap self a $125 knockoff eBay version. We'll see if the knockoff ends up beating the OEM's 1,000 life, I doubt it can do any worse.

Almost five years ago I was sucked into the Battlefield universe with Battlefield 2142. Late nights of battling with 3 other friends and the ability to revive fallen squadmates had me hooked. Little did I know the kool-aid would launch me into Battlefield 1943, Bad Company 2 and now Battlefield 3. Having received my beta invite on Xbox (and already played the alpha on PC) my anticipation is beginning to peak. How long until I get bored of the Beta map? Will I be as totally awesome at BF3 as I have been at the other BF games? (of course, silly question). Be still my heart, only 31 more days until release!

In what has become possibly the fastest turnaround on a game for me, I completed 4-player co-op campaign in Gears of War 3 and already have it listed on eBay. We also slammed through the 50 levels of horde mode and 12 levels of the new beast mode. If it wasn't for 20 other games I want to play coming out shortly I might hold on to it and finish some more leveling and multiplayer. I credit Lila for my speed play, she was able to take over for bathroom and food breaks.

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