Chatter Of The Squirrel

Game: The Two Towers

Blogging about those VAX/VMS terminals reminded me again of The Two Towers.

Harken back to 1996, when the web was new, and Netscape 1.0 was the cool new thing.

I was enrolled in NUS to do pharmacy. Endured a month of orientation. And was really eager to start using this Internet thingie, which at the time was still somewhat exclusive to academic institutions. I managed to find a terminal at the crowded medical faculty library and logged onto the Leonis server.

Wasn’t anything on Pine. I only had a dozen friends with email then. Wasn’t anything to surf on Lynx either.

Next to me, two medical first years were talking about the previous night’s faculty dance, and Pauline’s hot body. That’s my NJC class rep you’re talking about you lecherous fungi!

Eventually, I started surfing the newsgroups. Can’t remember what reader I used then. That was the one and only time I’ve used that Unix based newsreader.

The first thing I learnt, was pyramid scams and Nigerians who desperately wanted to give me money. But somewhere along the line, I searched for a Tolkien newsgroup.

And there was a post about a Lord of the Rings game. I emailed the guy, remembered the server address, and promptly thought nothing more of it.

Mogwai

Months later, I was in the UM med library. With the three new computers. And there was still nothing to do on the internet. No one will have heard of Hotmail.com for another few weeks. I couldn’t access the Leonis server from an IP outside the NUS campus. Alvin was watching what I was doing… I guess I was a curiousity at the time. Some people were watching me with the same fascination as anyone who saw Mogwai for the first time.

On a lark, I telnet-ed into towers.angband.com:9999 to show him The Two Towers MUD. (MUD means Multi User Dungeon). That’s the grand-daddy of MMORPG for you damn fool kids of today. In our days we didn’t have your fancy 3D G-Force graphics. Or any kind of graphics for that matter. But we had an acronym that you can PRONOUNCE you snotty little MOe-PERG-Gers…

That was how Ganong the Silvan Wizard was born. Followed by Takezo the Dunedain Ranger/Assassin. And Gaster the Warlord. Kidd the Sheriff. Then Haomahru.

It was absurd how a whole bunch of quasi-adults spend weeks on this game, typing “Kill orc” and “Get all from corpse” repeatedly. And when I said weeks, I meant multiples of 7 x 24hrs… Everyone of us was at least 2 weeks off before the craze tapered off.

Irregardless, some of us still maintained their characters. My Takezo is already deleted after such a long period of non-activity.

I just checked.

But I hear that Gaster is still alive. Hibernating the last 255d 18h 24m. His age is 21d 17h 9m.

That still doesn’t beat Ganong at 35d 13h 27m old.

Making Games

Just repaired a 10yr old laminating machine. One of the roller popped out of its moorings. Now I can use it to laminate cards from boardgames that I might want to protect.

Also, pretty much finished building a boardgame.

Presenting, 18AL. I printed out most of the components on card-stock, and used sap-film to laminate both sides. I’ve also salvaged a rotary paper cutter from the big office-move-and-junking-old-stuff. The cutter which I also repaired back to working condition. And it helped a lot making this boardgame.

This is one of many series of 18XX games. 

A boardgame geek introduced me to 18FL some years ago. The game simulates a period of history when locomotion changed the world. When robber barons manipulated companies for their own greed and profit. And to win, that’s how you must play.

The greatest appeal of the game is that there’s no randomness. No dice. No shuffled cards. You always have all the information. It’s up to how you play against your opponents. Thus also, the mind games is quite high.

In a zero-sum game, what benefits you, will screw someone else over. And tension can mount through the course of the game.

Makes it exciting and always interesting

Thus far, the only way we’ve been able to play, is when this friend can find the time, and invite us. Cos these 18xx games are usually handmade and hard to get hold of. It’s like the garage band of boardgames.

Now, I’ve got a set made myself. Just need to find the time to round up some players and teach them the game one weekend.

More Pagerank Info

A detailed and informative article from Smashing Magazine on this topic.

Very interesting to know.

Link here for own future reference…

Review: Ubuntu Eee

I wasted no time messing with my EeePC.

The original Xandros Linux is pretty cool, but there were some issues with it that made it unacceptable:
- Memory support limited to only 1GB (although there’s an update for this)
- Takes up 2Gb+ of the 4Gb SSD. And on top of that, the original OS files are ‘protected’, so deletion or update of packages will not free up space, but will just be copied onto new unoccupied space.
- And I couldn’t find the way to get a terminal screen.

Okay, so there’s a keystroke to get to the terminal screen. And the original software also has a very nice Longman Chi-Eng dictionary that I miss. But how can a tech geek use unmodded hardware?

So at the very first chance, I went and installed Ubuntu Eee 8.04.

Very cool. Very easy.

Downloaded the .iso file. Downloaded the little program on Sourceforge, which copied the .iso into a thumbdrive and made it bootable.

It was easy enough to boot from the thumbdrive, and install Ubuntu. Post install, you have to access the BIOS and set the OS Install setting to “Finished”. Or, as I found, the Webcam doesn’t work.

But otherwise, it was as easy as a WinXP install.

All the hard-earned skillz and experience from since I installed Slackware 3.5 on my 486DX 66MHz notebook in 1996 thru the many versions of Mandrake, Red Hat & Fedora LInux, all that don’t seem to be relevant anymore.

Everything just works.

When I needed to install .rar file support to unzip something. It’s easy as long as there’s an internet connection. Just access a repository, search, click, update, and things work. I don’t know how it works anymore. But I didn’t have to edit a config file, run the make, cross my fingers, read the compile output if there’s an error, re-edit the config file, re-run the make, cross more fingers. Probably give up, and look for another version of the same software or another program that does the same thing, and re-attempt.

These are good times. To have such choices. Alternatives to the Microsoft monopoly.

Clear to Caecum

Ginger lemon flavoured laxatives taste just horrible.

And I probably don’t have colon cancer.

That’s always good to know, innit?