Welcome to the new year. I need to write something here, and then go back and see if it breaks my indexing program. I’ll write more in a bit.
01/01/99 05:31
That took major brain surgery, but my war-torn indexing program now works for more than two years, and might even be a step closer to being Y2K compliant. I have no respect for people who meticulously hand-code pretty calenders for their journal pages. If you think you’re hot shit, try automating everything with a nice, messy C program. Machine-generated HTML is where it’s at, and I’m not talking FrontPage.
I wanted to write a bunch on Rumored tonight, but ended up playing the Star Wars game on the Nintendo. I found cheat codes that let you fly a TIE interceptor, or the Millenium Falcon. The TIE kicks ass – you can really weave around, and it’s great to be able to follow other TIE fighters through tight manuvers. There are many times in this one level where I am 3:1 against TIEs in an A-wing and during a quick approach, I’m lucky to randomly pick off one. In the TIE, I can stay on them like stink on shit and quickly destroy all three without thinking. The only bad thing is that the TIE has no shields, and no missiles. It’s a poor weapon for attack runs on ground equipment. The Falcon, on the other hand, kicks complete ass. It manuvers tight, turning on its side in corners. It has some heavy shields, and can take some serious fire. And, it’s weapons systems aren’t aimed with the craft – the guns swivel on turrets, and there are proton torpedos that home in automatically – you just get the target in your sights for a second, and a targeting circle will follow the ship while you move off in a different direction. I’ve been stuck on a level all week, and with the Falcon, I was able to completely pummel everything and finish. Unfortunately, you can’t use it on all of the levels – I’m now stuck on a level where you have to use the snowspeeder. The snowspeeder is really odd to fly – the weapons suck, and you can’t loop or dive too much, because it hovers. You can slam on either brake and turn on a dime, which is cool, but it usually runs me into a building. On this level, you are in these shitty little hovercraft, trying to down TIE bombers, which is like fighting an M1 abrams tank with a Schwinn bike and a ball-peen hammer. And at the end of the level, you have to do the little harpoon-cable-on-the-AT-AT’s-legs trick, which I’ve found impossible with the Nintendo controller. Oh well, maybe I’ll find another cheat.
So yeah, no writing. A little, but not much. I flipped through the channels a bit at 12, and luckily haven’t heard that fucking Prince song. Leno was pre-empted, which meant Conan was either late or gone, since Leno was in his spot.
Not much else. I should get back to work.