A race to destroy buildings
News ·Friday November 24, 2006 @ 19:03 EST (link)
Played a (purported) level 3 undead in Warcraft (I was also playing as undead); it looked like I was going to lose; he'd foregone any sort of teching or other upgrades to mass fiends; he almost wiped out my army (and my base) a few times, until I made him portal out by attacking his hero, who got to level 9 by the end of the game. I had an expansion for a large part of the game, so had managed to tech fairly well. Toward the end of the game he was calling on me to give up, but when he came in for a final assault on my base I sent the rest of my army, including a catapult (meat wagon) to his base, and started destroying his buildings. From there, it became a race, which, to cut a long story short, I won. He wiped out my main base, but I had several buildings at my expansion, which I'd rebuilt several times (and eventually built a necropolis there). He'd started to expand too, but his buildings were just starting and I wiped them out to win the game. I'll bet he was pretty upset, but he annoyed me so the win was very sweet.
(The original) RtError is almost gone... (from 700 to 0 in three days). Now it's just an error return, not a longjmp.
We're going up to Abbotsford tomorrow to take Grandma Martin out for her birthday.
Thanksgiving—plans to go anywhere fell through, but a good time was had by all nonetheless, although we miss our families.
The Office 2007 ship gift was a digital picture frame, which I recently set up. All seems well, except there's a little purple arrow in the top right corner that I can't remove; since it's there when the unit is powered down, it could be a sticker, but it doesn't seem to be removable. It's reasonable for what it does, but the manual and setup pages are written in Engrish, that is, badly-translated English chock full of lovely bloopers. You'd think they'd've been able to distribute the cost of a few hours of an English speaker's time among all the units sold without taking too large a hit to the bottom line. Seems that kwaliti is job #1!
Note that just because I work for Microsoft doesn't mean I like Windows. Frequently it shows itself to be a truly lousy piece of software. For example, using Linux I've never had to reboot unless I'm upgrading the kernel. Windows forces reboots for the stupidest things; the latest was because it had got itself into a crap-all-over-itself state when I tried to VPN into work: I managed to get a partial fix by killing one of the random SVCHOST.EXE items in the task manager, which bounced the PPTP protocol service (daemon), but the system still didn't have enough marbles to let the VPN client work, so it went on its merry way counting a timeout to infinity (I know this because I forked off another quantum thread and timed it).
Task manager is also an idiotic application; it should try to find a "true name" of sorts for particular OS-related running tasks (e.g. don't say RUNDLL32.EXE; that's a wrapper for just about any DLL in existence; tell me which DLL; same goes for SVCHOST.EXE), and also (optionally) pull a secure short descriptor from a reliable online source, e.g. "PPTP network service".
