by Matt | Apr 25, 2008 | Personal, Work
Now that all the papers have been signed, all the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted, and all the announcements and notices given, it’s probably safe to tell you guys. As of May 12th, I’ll be employed at a large (if not the largest) NASA contractor as an art director/graphic designer in their internal art department.
It was an opportunity that kind of came out of left field and that I wasn’t really expecting at the time. I had no intentions of leaving my current job but the chance to work for NASA was simply too good to resist.
Leaving will actually be very hard. This job has been very good to me and I valued highly the advise and wisdom of my boss. I’ve grown a lot here and I’m sad to leave but I’m looking forward to new challenges in a more “corporate” environment.
Compensation didn’t play a large part in my decision but from a benefit stand point, I’m very happy. I’ve never had things like dental coverage or a 401k before.
My new job will mostly involve working on job proposals, brochures, internal graphics, photos, posters, trade publications, etc. I’ll be doing quite a bit of Photoshop/Illustrator work as well as redesigning their intranet site.
I’m also excited that the job might involve a little bit of travel. They need quite a lot of photos and stock material for the brochures and and proposals and they want to start doing that internally as well. But that’s further down the road. For now I just need to brush up on my Illustrator skills, since that’s where it sounds like I’ll be starting.
I also get to play with a wide variety of new fangled toys. My work station will most likely be a quad-core Apple with 16G of ram and a cinema display. There’s also talk of getting a laptop, most likely a powerbook. I don’t really know how to feel about that. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with any of that, and the cinema display will surely ease the pain, but being thrown into Apple-land full force from what currently is a 100% PC world will take some adjusting.
I’m excited. This is a big change for me and I think it’ll be a good one. I can finally start saving some money for a house. I can pay off those student loans, start a retirement fund and all those things that normal grown-ups do.
These next two weeks will be long ones. Not from the “it’ll be uncomfortable because I’m leaving” standpoint, but because we have a lot of work to do before I leave. I didn’t want to leave my boss in the lurch, so I have a lot of project and loose ends to tie up before I go.
Anyways, just wanted to share the good news with everyone.
Matt out
by Matt | Apr 14, 2008 | Personal
If I’m delayed in posting, often it’s only for the best of reasons. Over the past two weeks, my father in law has been hospitalized with severe intestinal problems, surgery and compications arising from both. He had surgery two weeks ago and just got out of the ICU a day or two ago. There were a lot of post-surgery problems and they were complicated further by bad anesthesia. He’s doing better now, but he’ll be in the hospital recovering for quite a while. He’s not expected to leave the hospital for at least another few weeks, and then a 6+ week recovery at home. So, we’ve been at the hospital pretty much non-stop for two weeks now. We’ve been back to the apartment only to sleep. I’m borrowing a laptop for the time being so I can do little updates like these and try and stay occupied. So, my appologies on in-frequency, but like I said, it’s all for a reason.
by Matt | Apr 3, 2008 | Web
I updated WordPress today as a result of what happened to my friends. I figured it was better safe than sorry, especially if it was the XML injection Chip mentioned. I was already up to date with 2.3.3 but now we’re running the hot out of the oven 2.5. For those of you needing to update as well, let me recommend the WordPress Automatic Updater.
Really a slick deal. It backs up your core files, your database, your plugins, rolls them all into a zip so you can download them, downloads the most current install, stops your plugins, updates the install and restarts everything for you. Very handy. Took me 2 minutes to update and I didn’t even have to download the install ahead of time.
I’ll give you my impressions of 2.5 later, but I just wanted to pass on that tidbit in case anyone else is updating in the near future.
by Matt | Apr 3, 2008 | Friends and Family, Web
I had my good buddy Matt call me up last night. He’s the one I had set up a WordPress install for a couple months ago. It seems that someone hacked his hosting account/WP install and inserted hundreds of hidden porn links all over his site. For some reason, surfing the page on his Blackberry revealed them, probably since the phones browser didn’t understand the “u style=”display:none” tags. The links were inserted into both the individual pages (single.php) and the footer (footer.php) for every page resulting in a ridiculous amount of links per page. I looked like only the default (kubrick) wordpress theme was affected until I checked out the splash page for the entire site and found them there as well. I had thought it might have been a wordpress exploit that allowed someone to change the themes code, but having it in the splash page (index.html) means they would have had FTP access.
I cleaned up the mess as best I could, changed all their passwords to 12+ characters and I’ll install WP 2.5 tonight just in case. I’ve got the dates/times that the files were changed but I haven’t pulled the access logs yet to cross-reference. I have a pretty good idea what site it came from though since all the links share the same domain and the id= tags are all the same as well.
I’d like to find out exactly how it happened so I can try and prevent it from happening again. Now, with the index.html page hacked, I need to find out if this is a super serious WP exploit or if there was a security failure at the host level. If there is I’m going to recommend they find another host ASAP.
If any of you guys have heard of something similar happening and have any clues or insight, please pass it along. The website the links point to isn’t a porn site but I think they might have had their RSS feed hacked, because all the links are things like domain.com/rss.php?something_adult_sounding.
What the hell is wrong with the universe? Hacking a site to make porn links and then hacking another site to link to those porn links, all to what? Increase your Google rank? This shit has got to stop. Its destroying the interwebs.
by Matt | Mar 25, 2008 | Games, Reviews
Now that I’ve finished it, it’s safe to talk about it. That’s my rule. That’s why you haven’t seen a review of half the games from this winter (see previous post for aforementioned rule breaking).
Army of Two isn’t a bad game. At least not in the same way that American Idol Karaoke is a bad game. It’s entertaining, fun to play, has good current-gen graphics and has a fairly interesting storyline. Army of Two’s problem however is that it just doesn’t try hard enough. Whether this is a direct result of EA putting it “back in the oven” and delaying it a few months to iron out the kinks or if it was actually worse off in the first place will always remain a mystery.
The fact remains that it was a great concept for a game that was unfortunately executed poorly. Let me give you an example. In style, the game closely resembles Gears of War. Third person perspective, lots of swearing, “military” guys kicking ass in a tag-team sort of way. We’re only really swapping aliens for terrorists. Unfortunately, where Gears shines is in things like the cover system, creative camera angles and deeper style. Ao2 has one of the weaker cover systems I’ve seen in a current generation game. Gears, Rainbow and even CoD (which doesn’t have one) put it to shame. You can “slide” towards an object of cover by pressing Y and you’ll grapple on to it in the loosest sense. Pressing Y will also randomly cause you to vault over the object or forward tumble roll towards it. This can happen if you’re already standing near it of course, resulting in equally confused players and AI enemies. You don’t necessarily “look out” from behind cover. Holding the left trigger which lets to you aim, will automatically stand you up and zoom in your sights. I can only assume this was an attempt to save buttons by the developers. It’s a novel concept, but when you’re in the middle of a fire fight with 30 guys surrounding you, standing up and aiming isn’t exactly a brilliant tactic. You’re dead before you can get a shot off. There is an alternative however. Blind firing from behind cover typically produces unworldly results. I’ve scored headshots from 50 yards away by blind firing. This takes realism in the complete opposite direction. No long do you actually need to “aim”, swinging a wild arch of fire around proves sufficient enough. You can imagine my frustration when attempting to “play the game correctly” only to discover it doesn’t really give a shit.
So realism is completely gone. We’ll put that down as a given. Why then, does my super solider need ammo at all? Surely he’s so super awesome to hit people blindly that he doesn’t need actual bullets to do it. Oh no, no, that would be too weird. No you still have to pick up ammo is the typical ways. This is of course, not a law of the universe that’s shared by your partner. At any given time you can tell you partner to lay down cover fire. In doing so he gets the attention (the game calls it “aggro”) of all the enemies allowing you to sneak past or behind someone or something and give it a firm kick in the balls. That’s a great idea, but your partner NEVER runs out of ammo. You, yourself, depending on your gun, usually haave about 250-300 rounds. At 20-30 rounds per mag, you’ve got about 10 mags, give or take. Considering that you’re using your own gun like a fucking bullet hose, you’re always running out of ammo. I spent the vast majority of the game telling my AI buddy to lay down covering fire not so that I could kill bad guys but so that I could sneak around and loot their already dead corpses in peace. At one point I left him firing at will on a hidden enemy, walked away, went to the bathroom, made a sandwich, came back and not only was he still firing, but he hadn’t managed to kill any of the dozen bad guys near us. Useless would be an understatement.
Co-Op is really the only point of this game. It’s single player is so damn short (6 missions???) that it’s hardly worth multiple run throughs except if you’re playing with someone who hasn’t played it before. It’s really the perfect example of what I call a B&B game. Buddies & Beer. It’s the game that you get out when you’ve got 4 or 5 guys over and you feel like blowing some shit up and don’t really care about the specifics. You’re tired of playing 4 player split-tiny-ass-screen Halo and want to try something new. This will keep you entertained for about a 12 pack. Beyond that it’s not worth it any more.
It’s got a smattering of semi-interesting play modes that should keep even the most bored co-op player busy for at least a little while. It is however, kind of pointless to keep replaying the single player missions. After beating the game once you get all the weapons unlocked and all you’re playing towards then is in-game money. The in-game money is used to buy things that don’t make a damn bit of difference… like crappy face masks. Apparently, realizing that changing your mask from “creepy gray” to “creepy green” isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be, the developers decided to entice someone to actually do it by making it an opportunity for achievement points. Oh, and lest I forget the “pimped guns” you can purchase. Ever wanted a gold and diamond crushed AK-47? Yeah, me neither.
In all fairness, I didn’t give the online modes a try. Presumably, that’s where you make the “big bucks” so that you can buy, umm, more masks. I doubt I would have wanted to play with other random XBL users and my buddy Dane (the only person who seemed mildly interested in the game) wasn’t around.
Wrapping this up, it’s not that Ao2 is a bad game, it’s got attitude, humor, stuff blowing up, but when you get down to the finer points, you get more content out of any number of action movies that have been edited for broadcast TV. It’s over too quickly, it has zero re-playability and without friends around to go through it with you, it’s pretty pointless. I think this will be a trade in, and that concept is something I’m against on principle. It would make a fine rental, but beyond that, don’t bother.
6/10
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