Archive for April, 2006

I’m currently enjoying some vacation from work (essentially today and tomorrow), so I have some free time to get stuff done. Perhaps Googlebar Lite 4.0 will show up soon. I’m still waiting on one of my translators to respond; once he does, a release is quite possible. Much of my free time has so far been spent in Oblivion. I just can’t get enough of that game!

The Referrer Bouncer plugin I mentioned recently seems to work OK, but it doesn’t bounce referral spam from Apache; it only bounces it from WordPress. As such, I’ve begin tailoring a custom .htaccess rule set to keep those nasty referral links out of my referrals list. Broad filters like *.info and *.biz should keep most of them at bay. So far, so good.

I’m also switching over to the AWStats package for statistics tracking, rather than Analog (the default program provided by DreamHost). AWStats provides a better looking report, and I can view more data than I can with Analog. The default installation needs some tweaking, but the program is incredibly customizable. The update manifest for my Firefox extensions was hit over 16,300 times yesterday! And over 86% of visitors to Born Geek apparently make use of the Firefox web browser, which is great to see. Site stats have never been so fun!

Posting may be slow over the upcoming days. I’m very busy with something that I’ll talk more about soon.

Thus ended my last post which, to be quite honest, wasn’t that long ago. Regardless, I have to admit that I’ve been ‘busy’ with Oblivion. I purchased the game from Amazon last week, got it on Thursday, and have been enjoying it ever since. Here’s my quickie review of what I’ve seen so far.

Visually, this game is stunning; one of the best to date. The lip-synch seems poorly done, but I know that’s a hard thing to get right, so I’ll cut the developers some slack. But everything else is truly magnificent to behold. My personal rig seems to be able to handle the game, albeit at 1024 x 768 (with all the eye candy, mind you). The forest areas are a real treat to behold, as are the caves and dungeons one gets to explore.

Content-wise, this game is gigantic. I’ve played for several hours, and have only scratched the surface of what is available. I’ve restarted the game 3 times so far, for a variety of reasons. The first two times, I was unhappy with the way I had set up my character. The third time, I unwittingly turned into a vampire and died, with no cure in sight (and I didn’t have a save game from before my sickness). My current character, Rolande, is a “Wanderer” (a custom class I created; part Thief, part Mage), and he’s doing very well so far. I have yet to start the main quest; I’ve simply been too busy getting sidetracked. Joining the Mage’s guild is quite an involved task!

This game isn’t without its problems. Game installation was flaky, and I got the game into a state where it wouldn’t start and couldn’t be uninstalled. After wrestling with that, I’m now facing a problem where the game crashes every time I exit. Granted, it’s not a major problem (I am leaving the game, after all), but it’s an annoyance. There are other minor quibbles: the AI system has its flaws (although it works surprisingly well on the whole), the enemies are (and remain) incredibly difficult, and it stinks that you are only given 8 hotkey slots.

But I am very pleased so far. This game is awesome. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Morrowind.