Joped.com

We went to the Sunset party on Treasure Island tonight.  The music was good, and the sights were amazing … let me just tell ya  I spent more time taking pictures of San Francisco, but sadly I wasn’t happy with any of those pictures.

Here are the pictures that I sorta approved of.  Nothing epic or anything, just some average pics.

Click the image for larger version, than click again to return to normal view.

Fire dancers 1

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I was invited to be a guest panelist on Cranky Geeks. With John Dvorak, Cade Metz and John Markoff. Not going to give away the topics, you will just have to watch.

I am still really annoyed over the whole AT&T iPad data plan bait and switch. Over the course of the day it has started to upset me more knowing I am locked into paying $30 a month as long as I want unlimited 3G. I will be calling AT&T tomorrow to express my hatred for them, their service and pricing plans. Anyway will rant about this on twitter for now.

I had a lot of fun doing this and look forward to being invited back in the future.

A friend of ours Stephanie is leaving the bay area this week and held a going away party. The backyard was illuminated using these blue spot lights that created an awesome effect on long exposure pictures. The following picture has had NO Photoshop effects applied to it (besides the text in the lower right corner).

The camera used was a Nikon D80 that I borrowed from my friend Nick Mcintyre. This was my first experience with this camera and I had some trouble with the settings, so sadly only 3 or 4 pictures of the set came out. This picture is hands down the best.

Click the image for full size

I only watched the first season of lost, but for some strange reason I want to watch the last episode tonight. I searched a bit to find some good recaps, and wanted to share them with others in the same position.

I couldn’t find a good season 5 recap, but this video recaps some of the above in a shorter way.

This video is a little long and drawn out, but funny none the less.

The time has finally come, its time to move on from Evony. I have really enjoyed playing this game with many of my real life friends and met a lot of new friends along the way. Our alliance FUBAR has really made a name for it self using a well defined mixture of co-ordination, hard work, spies and cleaver guerrilla tactics. The most fun challenge was to destroy the biggest back stabbing alliance on the server, LEGENDS. Very early on they were welcomed to our family of allies with open arms. The immature leadership found it amusing to declare war on us only to apologize for the attacks a few hours later. We presented them with forgiveness twice, but you know how the saying goes. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” We weren’t going to let this happen again, so we embarked on a successful campaign to see their demise. In their death throws they managed to convince another one of our allies WDC to turn on us forming the alliance Nemesis.

All of FUBAR again answered the call of war and turned the Nemesis cities into firewood. While sending their cavalry off to the glue factory. Following this war came another war against a number of alliances that were so easily rolled over that its not even worth the time to mention them.

Why have I decided to move on ? The list is actually pretty long, but the most basic summary is. I am bored with the game and might as well call it quits before I end up hating the game. Who knows, in a few months I might come back. Which is why I have positioned my remaining city in such a way that a return would be very easy. I have grossly neglected a number of personal projects in the past few months, the time has come to jump in and finish them off.

What are my ending thoughts about Evony ? I honestly have to say that their customer service is hands down worse then Sony (Everquest). At least Sony answered requests and did bug fixes. There are countless bugs and problems with Evony that will never be fixed. The company is busy working on “Age 2″ of the game, which is a whole new version of the game. However, it is very hard to trust a company with another game when they poorly support their existing products.

Lets face it, Evony has some very questionable advertising techniques. The banner ads entice you with large breasted woman that need to be saved in the game. Players very quickly realize that this content doesn’t exist in the game what so ever. You also very quickly realize that the company spams you constantly trying to encourage you to spend money on the game to quickly advance your empire. Yes, I did spend some money on the game. The amount of money I spent is equal to 2 of your average console games yet provided me with 3 times the amount of hours of entertainment. Do I regret it ? Absolutely not! Honestly, the spam is very annoying and turns a lot of players away. But, I am awesome at ignoring advertising in general.

I personally did not start playing the game from these ads. I started to play because some real life friends were playing. Let me tell you, the LAN parties have been a lot of fun!

Cheating is a tremendous problem with this game. The game mechanics force players with very large armies to either invest incredible amounts time farming or cheat to feed their armies. Some players take this cheating to the next level to automated their attacks and defenses. As it stands, taking a city from a player who is online is difficult. Trying to take a city from a bot is impossible. Sure, people cheat at all sorts of games and that is nothing new. Sadly, there is nothing that Evony can do to battle this outside of banning players. There is just no way to protect a flash game from automated actions. Yet surprisingly they don’t even take basic steps to encrypt their network stream, which leads to interesting programs used to SMS you of an incoming attack. Most top players use this types of applications and that prevents a legitimate player from climbing the ranks.

We are presently looking for a new game, something with far less of an upkeep time investment. Just something to hold us off for a few months until Starcraft 2 comes out. I have discussed it with all of my friends who play Evony and we all agreed that it will be our next major game.

Joped Vice host of FUBAR, out!

This cartoon take Terminator and mixes it with another time travel movie. Don’t want to spoil it, but its perfect.

This is a very long rap that covers the entire Terminator 2 movie from start to end. Very very well done, I am impressed. This must have taken a shit load of work to complete.

Here is a new category on my blog where I am going to repost all things Terminator.  Lets start it off with a bang.

This is a very well done remix where the creator took all the sound effects from Terminator 2 and remixed them into a song.  I totally love everything after 3:07 of it.