I finished Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander last night. This is the second time I’ve read the book; the first was probably 10 or more years ago. But I saw the movie (very good, btw) and just felt like taking a second look.

The first time I read it, I found it hard going. It was just too heavy on verbosity and too light on action. I’d just come off reading the entire Hornblower series and O’Brian’s style just wasn’t snappy enough for me at the time.

Well, I guess I’ve mellowed in my old age, because this time ’round I absolutely adored the book. The interactions between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (the doctor — if you saw the movie I don’t think they once used his name) that I once found dull as dirt I now found quite amusing. And Aubrey himself is so much more interesting a character than his movie-version self. In fact, the film bears very little resemblance to the book (the film is based on both M&C and Post Captain, the second book in the series) which will no doubt disappoint some film fans.

Instead of chasing a Frenchman around the Cape into the Pacific, the book finds Aubrey in command of the HMS Sophie doing convoy duty along the coast of Spain and into the Mediterranean while trying to whip the crew into shape. Maturin is somewhat stranded; the patient he has accompanied to Port Mahon died en route, and Maturin finds himself adrift with no means of support. Aubrey needs a ship’s surgeon. Maturin is a physician, meaning the surgeon position would normally be beneath him. But being down and out, he accepts the job and off they go on an adventure that lasts through many, many books.

The nice bit about Maturin is, he’s no seaman. So as he tries to puzzle things out, you, the reader, are brought up to speed on the workings of the Sophie. O’Brian’s writing style reminds me somewhat of Dickens in that he tends to embellish and elaborate in an attempt to put you in the moment. So between that tendency and the technical details that trip some people up, you get a book that has more length than story, in some senses. Still, I found it to be a rewarding experience the second time through, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Yesterday I vegged out in front of the TV and watched two movies: Apollo 13 and Igby Goes Down.

Apollo 13 is a great movie, but everyone knows that by now. What really struck me was how, even though I lived through the events and even though I’ve seen the movie a few times, I still get totally caught up and find myself perched on the edge of my seat, tense as can be. Seems to me that says volumes about Ron Howard’s abilities as a film maker. If for some reason you haven’t seen it, make a point to do so.

Igby Goes Down on the other hand… well, I did like it, but if the lead character was supposed to be garnering my sympathy, well, I didn’t get that. I find it hard to feel for a bratty trust-fund kid who has issues with his parents. Growing up in The Hamptons, I just hung out with too many of these kids during my late teen summers. I mean, yeah he has problems, but so does everyone else, y’know? At least he’s got people handing him cash every 5 minutes so he isn’t going to starve.

But maybe I’m reading too much into it. Watch it as a dark comedy and its fairly entertaining. Everyone in it is a caricature, but they’re all played pretty well, in my very amateur opinion. I especially liked Jeff Goldblum as “D.H.” since I’ve not often seen him in a role like this one and he was pretty good.

[Disclaimer for all the above: I am no student of film. I don't really take movies all that seriously. So this is just the opinions of an average joe...]

So I got out of work at 10:30 tonight. I was packing up to go off to a weekend of relaxation at about 6 pm when someone came over and said the site was blowing up. I looked, and sure enough it was. Worse was, I couldn’t connect to the server to see what the heck was going on. The ssh daemon had died. Performance got worse and worse until finally no pages were being generated. And blah blah blah.

The details aren’t germane.

But as I went through this some part of my brain was watching me go through the stages of a tech emergency:

At the risk of proving what you’ve already suspected — that I’m a complete and utter geek-nerd — I have to draw your attention to a Major Error in the “100th Episode” of Angel (the one in which Cordelia returns). And yes, I’m sure this has been pointed out by many others, but darnit, I’m behind in my Tivo watching.

Anyway, in this Angel ep, Spike is shown playing a video game. We’re facing him so we can’t see the screen, but we can see the console. It’s an XBox. But we can also hear the sounds, and he’s playing Donkey Kong, of all things! In fact his dialog even says something about a big ape throwing barrels.

So what’s up with that? Playing Donkey Kong on an XBox? If they’d gone with Galaga or something, we could pass it off as him playing one of those Namco Museum type games, but a Nintendo property on Micrsoft hardware! That just ain’t right!!!

I jest of course. Actually, it was a pretty damned potent episode, and yet one more reason to lament the fact that the show has been cancelled.

According to the Jan. 04 issue of Play and confirmed here at IGN, Konami is porting Y’s VI: The Ark of Napishtim to the PS2 for a worldwide release (its currently out for the PC in Japanese).

Old-school gamers will remember The Legend of Y’s being one of the ’system sellers’ for the TurboGrafx-16 CD Drive add-on gizmo (and later, for the TurboDuo). Fond memories…I’m looking forward to playing the latest Y’s title!

To whet your appetite, check out this trailer from the PC game!

Sony delays launch of PSP

Sony has informed publishers, developers and retailers that while it still plans to launch its handheld gaming and entertainment device in Japan this holiday season, the PSP will not hit shelves in North America or Europe until calendar year 2005.

More specifically, it should be out by March 2005.

This changes things a bit…the Nintendo DS handheld will be the only new hardware on the market for the Christmas ‘04 season (unless Phantom actually ships, of course).

Universe Today - Astronomers Find a Huge Diamond in Space

This is a mostly silly piece; perfect for passing on to the kids or something. But I found the basic idea that the core of a white dwarf becomes a huge crystal to be kind of interesting.

As you can see, we’re in a bit of a transition state just now. Moving to WordPress, the follow-on to the b2 software we had been running (listen to me with the “we” stuff as though there were more than just me here).

I think I’ve got all the data imported, though I’ve dropped all comments since 90% of them were porn spam and I don’t have the time or patience to clean it all up.

Tonight I’ll start working on look and feel…

Comments now need to be approved, so if you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up right away, that’s why. Down the road I hope to figure a way to make comment appear immediately for friends, but have to be moderated for strangers (just to keep the spammers away).

Brian Fargo visited G4TV.Com (G4’s weekly gaming ‘talk show’) to talk about his new company, inXile (warning for folks at work: the site makes noise), and more specifically their upcoming remake of The Bard’s Tale. Since I had the ep Tivo’d I thought I’d transcribe a couple of Q&A’s for you folk.

G4: What is the storyline, and what genre is the game?

BF: Well, its a role playing game, and certainly thats a genre that I’m well known for, and its an action-rpg, so anybody familiar with say, Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath would know the style of gameplay, but at the same time its more like my old PC games and I’m bringing a deep, non-linear PC mentality to the console world.

G4: What characters are we going to be playing as?

BF: Well you’ll be playing as The Bard, which is not your typical RPG hero. In fact he’s not a hero at all, he’s more like Han Solo in the fact that he’s really not interested in saving the world. He’s interested in ‘coin and cleavage’ as we say and that’s about it. If there’s not something in it for him…tch, no interest.

G4: What makes this a new adventure, what kinds of things from the original game are in there, and what kinds of things are completely different?

BF: Really most of it is completely different. The thing that made the original Bard’s Tale work back in the 80’s…what made that work has nothing to do with today. I’ve been playing and making role playing games now for 20 years and so, I sorta looked at the genre and I thought “We gotta do something completely different.” And so, for us, I’m just tired of breaking open barrels to find the skeleton key. We can’t stand that stuff anymore. So we came at it with a very mature sortof perspective on it. It parodies, in fact, many of the old rpg… some of the conventions that we actually helped create.

G4: Tell me a little bit about the RPG genre. Obviously there are millions of RPG gamers out there. You’ve obviously made some of the best. What is it that sets RPG gamers apart from the regular kind of shoot-em-up crowd?

BF: Hmm. Well, I think they’re looking for a deeper experience, really, for the most part, you know?. More of a narrative experience. Action games are just purely a function of beating it and getting to the next level, and there’s a certain amount of that with RPGs but you know we focus on looking at the human side of things. And on sortof good and evil, and in our case humor, and human motivations. And so I just think they’re looking for a deeper experience.

I have to say that the idea of combining the fun and fast gameplay of action-rpgs with a storyline with some meat is pretty intriguing to me. I’m looking forward to this one!

Reuters has an interesting article up: Microsoft Planning New Xbox Live Features. There’s some talk of server-side data storage, and speculation as to if or how that interacts with the rumors that XBox Next (or whatever the next console ends up being called) won’t have a hard drive.

I dunno, I’m skeptical. I’m not going to rip songs for a custom soundtrack and store them on MS’s servers! Nor would I save my games there. And to rely too much on server-side storage would be to cut out all the people who don’t have their XBoxes online (which is probably most of them).

I just hope MS rethinks this. Not including a hard drive just seems like a huge step backwards…

So my latest Britcom ‘discovery’ is Next of Kin starring Penelope Keith (To the Manor Born) and Richard Gaunt (No Place Like Home). They play an older couple whose son and daughter-in-law were killed in a car accident. Now their three grandchildren have come to live with them.

It’s a comedy with a definite dark edge. First, the basic premise…here’re 3 orphans, after all.

Second is, the couple, and especially the wife, really aren’t thrilled with the arrangement. They’ve been living the good life: weekends in France, lounging about drinking wine with friends…just a comfortable life of idle retirement. Now they’re going to football matches and cleaning up after kids and pets and frankly, they resent it.

One of the few things I’m not liking about my new system is the CD/DVD drives. They’re LOUD. Incredibly loud.

So, inspired by Kevin Rose of “The ScreenSavers” I bought a copy of Alcohol 120%. This is CD/DVD copy software, make no mistake. But it also handles the creation of virtual drives.

So I can put a game in, rip an image of it, and mount that image as a virtual drive, which is of course silent, and also very very fast! Plus I can put the CDs away somewhere safe and sound.

There is one more piece to the puzzle, and that’s determining what kind of copy protection the CD uses. For that, I snagged a freeware program called ClonyXL.

For more info, go to the source and read Kevin’s article on the topic.

Its funny how I still feel guilty about doing this, even though I’m just ripping the games I own onto the hard drive I own in order to play them! (I’ve got enough friends in the business that I don’t pirate game software.)

There are probably cheaper ways to do this. I used to have a thing called Daemon-tools that set up the virtual drives, and used a trial copy of CloneCD to rip the images, but Alcohol 120% is a fairly complete all-in-one package, only costs $50 and has some nice convenience features, like multiple virtual drives and loading an image by double clicking it. There’s a 30 day trial version if you want to see for yourself.

I just got this all setup so don’t consider this a mini-review. I’ll have to see how it all works for a couple weeks before I pass judgement one way or the other.

So I finally got around to installing BF:1942, patched it up and installed Battlefield: Pirates today.

What fun! Zipping around in sloops firing broadsides at each other, or manning the shore batteries (cannons, of course) trying to fend off a cutting out expedition (and getting hacked down from behind my a cutlass wielding mad man!).

Honestly I didn’t play for long since my BF 1942 skills are so horribly rusty. I can’t remember any of the basic key commands and I was costing my team in a big way. At this point there’s no single player game available.

So I think I’d best play some straight BF 1942 in single player mode to get the controls down again, then head back for some more Battlefield:Pirates. Well worth a look!

So I must be getting old. A few months ago I bought a new pc and it came with Norton AntiVirus pre-installed. Not only did I leave it running, but I just decided to renew it since the free 3 month trial was up in March. The old me would’ve snorted at NAV and continued to live life on the edge…taking the ‘eyes and ears open to signs of trouble’ approach to fighting virii, rather than put up a sturdy (I hope) fence.

But now I’m old and tired, and the the $30 for a year’s protection sounded a lot more appealing than a weekend spent rebuilding my system because I slipped up and let one of the little varmints on to my system. (I should note that my PC is a gaming machine…I do my ‘real work’ on a Mac and I’m not so cavalier with that machine.)

All of which is totally tangential to the point I wanted to make. So I’m filling out the web based form to get my $29.95 yearly renewal to NAV, right? And I get to the screen where I enter my credit card and I noticed something. They give you the option to call up and give someone (presumably a warm body, but maybe a voice mail system) your credit card info over the phone, but they add a processing fee. I thought that was kind of odd…I mean isn’t customer support part of the cost of doing business? But what staggered me was when curiosity caused me to click on the link. The processing fee was $10!!! A $10 processing fee on a $30 item, just because you’re uncomfortable entering your credit card number into a web site…damn, that’s harsh. $2-$3 I guess I could understand, but $10 seemed really steep to me.

But then, I never call anyone if I can possible avoid it, so now I’m wondering if this is a common practice, or is Symantec just being brutal?

I was going through my email and saw in the Fileplanet weekly newsletter mention about a new mod for Battlefield 1942. Talk about original! This one turns BF:1942 into a game about pirates!!. You get stuff like sloops and galleons, coastal mortars, and ‘turtles’ (little submarine things) and balloons.

I haven’t played it yet, but I’m going to have re-install BF:1942 and check it out. BTW, the lead developer worked on the XBox version of Crimson Skies as an environmental artist.