Welcome to the Chaos Rift

Swoopo is a nice gambling site. It’s scammy, it’s tricky and it can save you a ton of cash or cost you 4 times the item worth if you are a moron.

Take this guy for instance. He spent a total of 3347bids to win the Nikon D90 camera. That’s $2,599 on a camera that you can get for less than $1500 off amazon complete with a starter kit for you camera.

Note: I did not bid nor loose on this auction.

This Extreme moron spent  744 bids and $77.45 to win a 300 bid pack. That’s $635.45 spent for an item with a virtual cost of $225. Either Lifestyle36 completely flunked 3rd grade and above math or just has tons of money to waste and enjoys grieving people on a whole new level. There was another guy who did the same last week.

More exmaples of Swoopo: Extreme morons to come.

I ran across swoopo.com the other day through admittedly one of my very own banner ads. That was pretty funny. So I watched the site for a few days learning the way it operates, how things go and what goes on.

On the exterior Swoopo is an auction site. They post items for “sale” and people bid on them. The price goes up by a fixed amount each bid, either a single penny or 15 cents. When an auction starts there is a counter from 24 hours down to zero. But… when the counter is under 10 seconds to go the magic happens, the counter goes up again when a bid is placed. Anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds depending on how the auction is set up.

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When it comes to the pencil and paper series, Warhammer 40k reigns the shops along side other greats like Dungeons and Dragons. When it was first brought to the PC, it was an uninspired turn based game that was so painfully slow and hard to control and understand it fizzled out of existence.

Then Came Dawn of War, the full 3D Real Time Strategy (RTS) that caught us all off guard. The game was fantastic, it had an involved story line, engrossing campaign and well balanced units. Each unit had a weakness that could be exploited by the other side. They had wargear that your general could collect to improve his own strength. Base building was quick and to earn money you’d only need to capture strategic points.

It was a success that was followed by 3 stand alone expansions that pretty much sucked. They had the same basic “feel” of the original, but they lacked any real story, a poor narrative and a rather boring campaign layout. The interface was cumbersome making it a chore to do simple things like save your game. There was no autosave so if you forgot to save and quit 3 tough missions in, well, you’d probably put the game down for a while. I know I did.

Read on for how I really feel about this new addition to theVenerated Warhammer series.

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I’ve been “griping” about the cost of new games for a while now. $50 to $60 is just far too expensive for me to jump on the wagon. I mentioned a while ago that when Steam dropped Red Alert 3 and Dead Space to $30 and $40 respectively I jumped and bought them both.

Ok, I confess, I just bought Warhammer 40,000 2, but I wanted it. I love the outright brutality of those RTS games. They also carry with them a decent story line and some serious religious overtones.

Anyway my new favorite guy Valve co-founder Gabe Newell ran an actual experiment backing up my until now “theories” that games are simply overpriced. He had my favorite online store Steam drop Left4deead by 50% in price and unsurprisingly they saw a 3,000% increase in sales of that game. Steam also had an increase of 1600% new customers the weekend they dropped the L4D price.

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I’ve heard it somewhere that a third of all games made in the US ever make a profit. Those are some horrible numbers. Many people, including the game industry would be quick to blame software piracy. That is only a fraction of the big picture.

Piracy and theft happen in pretty much every industry. I’m very certain I could very easily buy a “back of the truck special” 62” LCD HDTV for a good 50% or less I would off of even Amazon If I would just bother to take the time to head to an area popular in these trades. Would I? Not on your life, or mine.

Intangible items of infinite quantity like software and music on the other hand are quite easily “pirated” or “stolen” without ever needing to leave your house. Also, because there is no “global inventory” of these items, counting the losses is nearly impossible. Unlike easily accounted for tangible items “we shipped 400 TVs but only 350 were received”, software and music is ethereal. The lack of sales can be easily blamed directly on pirates.

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Amazon recently released the second version of their rabidly popular eBook reading device the Kindle 2. It’s on their front page, it’s all over news sites, it is pretty much everywhere.

But I’m not here to rave a bout how great this device is, not yet anyway as I dont own e ither one. I will admit though, I’m close to buying one, after seeing the pictures, screens and specifications of this new version.

Anyway, what I’m a little livid about is the “Author’s guild” and their new “bitch and moan campaign” about the Kindle’s “Read to Me” text to speech feature. From the marketing information below, whatever you are reading, it can read it to you in those horrible emulated computer voices. You can even read along while this thing drones out the words to you. Here’s the feature print:

Read-to-Me

Now Kindle can read to you. With its new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free. You can speed up or slow down the reading speeds or choose a male or female voice. Anything you can read on Kindle, Kindle can read to you, including books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and even personal documents. In the middle of a great book or article but have to jump in the car? Simply turn on Text-to-Speech and listen on the go.

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Ever since we’ve entered this “Great Depression” or so they call it, I’ve noticed a huge step up in police enforcement. I guess it’s a sign that people are driving more erratic and faster because they’re, I don’t know, depressed or something. Or maybe they’re (the police) trying to save their own jobs by raising revenue while at the same time pushing out inflated numbers “speeding violations have increased by x percent since last year meaning we need to bolster the police force instead of cutting it”.

I have the Beltronics STI Driver radar detector that I’ve been using for a year or two now. It’s a great device that has amazing laser and POP detection, two of the tougher technologies to detect. When I first bought the detector I had maybe one POP alert a month if I were lucky. Ever since around December POP alerts in my area skyrocketed to a near daily alert, morning and nights. My one way commute to work is literally 8 miles.

In fact I saw POP in action just last week. A Cop was at a stop light with his KA on, he then turned on the intersection I was at and continued up the road. I took the same turn and was about ½ mile behind him. A few seconds later my detector switched to POP from KA alert for about 4 seconds, then it went back to KA again. Right there, on the busy 4 lane avenue the cop pulls a U-Turn, without his flashing lights or signals, floors it finally turns on his police lights and pulls over the guy he tagged as witnessed in my rear view mirror. He did all in the name of safety? Nah, that cop was more of a danger than the guy going 40 in a very long and straight 35mph zone. He almost got hit in his sudden U-Turn and the people in front of me slammed on their brakes nearly causing a 6 car pileup. Yeah I feel “protected”.

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It’s somewhat nostalgic that I’ve been running this site in one form or another for over 10 years now. It’s funny really, just how many incarnations the domain has had for so many years. Chaosrift started it’s life June 1999, as a way for me to practice how to run my own DNS, web and email server. I write up some crappy basic HTML site, threw up (more on the line of vomit) some pictures and called it my home page. That was so long ago.

At one point in time this site was also a host to my other side projects. An Ultima Online newbie page, a spoof on Whinny the Pooh entitled “Mafia the Pooh”, and a text based game “Kick the Puppy”. Those were the crazy days. I never did finish my Mafia the Pooh story. Such a shame really.

How I thought of the term Chaosrift slips my memory. I don’t even remember the act of registering the domain. To me at the time, it was insignificant. I just needed a name to register and a domain to use. It just needed to be easy to remember. All I know is how I’ve tried to explain the name over the years. “Chaos is a part of life, you wake up, the dog runs past tripping you up, the dishwasher decides to gush water all over the floor and the car wont start. A rift is a disruption, a tear in fabric, opening in the clouds or even a difference in opinion. The words together are harmonious, like Yin and Yang, a Chaosrift is a random disruption, a tear in time.“ Or so I’ve written many times in the past. Now, to me it’s my email address, my domain and my identity.

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I’ve been watching Heroes “almost” faithfully since Season one’s Premier oh so long ago. I lost faith during the Season 3 writers strike and gave up on the show for a while. It seems that the writers were just a little burned out and didn’t really know where to go. Season 3 started to really lag and I shortly lost interest after the first 2-3 episodes. Some of the guys at work kept faithfully watching though and would talk about Heroes at lunch.

Near the end of Season 3, I went to my Verizon DVR box and started to watch all the shows that were faithfully sitting there since the season began. I was catching up finally and somewhat understood what was going on. The writers obsess over this future, past and present theme a little too much with Hiro traveling around breaking things in time. Matt was in Africa visiting a mystic, and Claire was being that stupid little whiney teenager she started to become at the end of Season 2. I had prayed it was a little phase that would pass after her father worked so hard to hide her identity, send her away with “the Haitian” and even had his memories taken away and shot.

Sylar was getting more and more powerful as he was killing everyone, but now he was different. He wasn’t just getting indiscriminate powers, he was seeking out the ones he needed like a shopping list. He was being selective, I guess from learning his lesson in when he took too many powers and some were not beneficial. I do like how he took advantage of El, then kills her on the beach. It was the first time Sylar killed someone without the need to. He had her powers, it was a mindless “I’m Baaack” sort of killing after the eclipse.

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I’ve been playing the Guitar hero series since Guitar Hero 2’s debut on the PS2 and 360. I was introduced to the series at a “game party” I have with several co-workers and friends. My first attempts ended in complete embarrassment as I could only hit 1 of 10 notes and was promptly greeted with the “You suck” screen and the crowd throwing rotted fruits at me. It wasn’t pleasant, but “I’d show them” I thought to myself as I ran to Best Buy to purchase Guitar Hero 2. I later purchased “Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock” for the PS3 once it was released soon after.

I come from playing the 6 string in High School. I had my amps, distortion pedals, picks and the whole assortment. My friends and I would get together once in a great while and Jam in the garage thoroughly annoying my Parents. Thankfully we lived in a sparsely populated area with the two nearest neighbors being about ¼ mile away. Coming from this, I could never “get into” the 5 button design. It feels like a simplified guitar to me. Here come the “but”, but the game is still a lot of fun. I jammed through all the guitar campaigns and completed every song a couple of times on Medium difficulty. I never really ventured to “hard” as I’d loose interest in the game after a week or two, then pick it up every now and then to keep my skills up there a little. Sadly, I can say that I can never really come close to my top scores when I was actively playing.

When World tour came out, I was somewhat excited, but that darn price tag just scared me. It sells for $173 at the local Sam’s club, and the full price everywhere else except amazon where the PS3 version is $153. I bought the game disk used at Gamecrazy for $30. It was fun, but I cruised through the game, then I bought a microphone a little later on. The kids loved it (had a huge family gathering for the holidays) and the game took the spotlight as kids and adults fought over the mic. At that point I decided the drums were needed. I found them used on Amazon.

What a mistake buying the drums became. …

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