Archive for December, 2009
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas everyone. This is the closest that I can remember to having a white Christmas but I don’t think that it should count. The snow that is on the ground fell over a week ago and just hasn’t melted yet. We haven’t had any new snow since then. It is just ice now really.
The ponds are frozen for the first few inches at least. The dog was walking around on it yesterday and didn’t fall through but I wouldn’t like to take my chances and try myself.
This is a photo of the garden this morning. It may look nice and snowy but in reality it is just a sheet of ice.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
I’ve had Modern Warfare 2 since shortly after the release date a few ago and I have since completed it. I have to say that it is by far the best in the series so far. I haven’t been able to play the multiplayer as much as I would like due to a poor Internet connection, but the single player was brilliant.
Firstly, I played it on regular difficulty, as I expected, it was particularly challenging. I then started it again on veteran. It was in this second play-through that I tried to find all of the intelligence items and pick up the achievements that I missed the first time around. I found it to be a lot more challenging but still doable. Eventually, after about 7 hours I had completed it again. It is a shame that it isn’t possible to player the campaign cooperatively, I enjoy playing coop gaming. That is why I played the majority of the Special Ops missions on coop. It took us a long time but we finally completed all of them.
Once we got through the first few easy ones it started to take us more and more attempts to get past each one. Fortunately they don’t have to be done in order so occasionally we would skip one and come back to it. After a couple of weekends we had done all but one. Snatch and Grab, I don’t know why this was so annoying for us to complete but we must have spent 8-10 hours on it over a couple of days before we finally completed it.
By this point, I already have every other achievement in the game except for the ones for completing Spec Ops so this got me my 1000 gamer score.
I have tried to play the multiplayer through the lag we get here and it is very good. I am up to about level 19 or so, mostly playing Team Death match. I would prefer it if the weapon unlocks were a little more frequent but I suppose that they have to spread them out over about 60 levels. There isn’t much new it the multiplayer, but that doesn’t matter because it is still just as good as it always has been. The new features don’t take away from the game and if anything, improve it. Such as the boosts for death streaks and the choice of bonuses for kill steaks.
On the whole it is a very good game, Infinity Ward have made an excellent sequel to Modern Warfare and I hope that they continue to make such good games in the future.
Home tomorrow
It’s been quite a while since I last posted on here, but then I haven’t really had anything to write about. Following up from my last post on Windows 7 I am still using it and haven’t had any problems with it so far. I have installed Power Pack 3 on my Windows Home Server now and this had improved Windows 7 support, I can now add shared folders to my libraries without having to make them available offline. It has also fixed a few issues with running backups.
Today is my last day of work before Christmas. Tomorrow I will be flying back to England and leaving the cold and snow behind me until after the new year. It has been snowing this afternoon and is forecast to continue long all weekend. I have been quite busy for a while now at work, we recently made a beta release of my program and so I have been fixing bugs and getting it ready for the final release. There are so many different configurations and environments that it runs in there was no way that I could test them all prior to a release. Just this week I have fixed over a dozen bugs and added a couple of new features.
While at home I may start to look at my FYP properly and start to do some research. I have considering getting myself an e-reader for Christmas as this will help with all the reading I plan to do. I am currently torn between writing it in C# or C++. I have already done a lot of the simple reusable code in C++ for previous assignments so I would be tempted to use that and build on it rather than rewriting it all in C#. It would make it easier to use OpenGL as well rather than having to rely on a third party library. I have plenty of time to decide anyway.
I have downloaded Windows Live Writer, I heard about it yesterday and thought that I would try it out. I’m writing this with it now. It seems to be quite good. It recognises that this is a WordPress blog and downloaded my theme so that I can edit it in a window that looks like it will when it is on the site. It isn’t perfect but close enough.