Typical Day at Work

So recently I was made aware of this little program that will draw your cursor movement across your desktop. Since I'm in front of a computer for a majority of my day, both at work and at home I thought it would be interesting to make a little comparison. However, given my mac's recent problems I decided that I should maybe stick to the work computer. So after 8 or so hours of work I was left with this.

Cursor Movement at Work

The circles represent a stop, so the bigger the circle the longer the cursor was idling. The colors don't really have any significance [I think] other than helping to differentiate between stops. There is also an option to track your movement across dual desktops, although it wouldn't work for my setup so I tried to stay on one desktop as much as I could for best results. There are plenty of other option including overlaying your graph over your wallpaper. The program doesn't need any installation so I was able to run it on my work computer where I don't have install privileges.

The biggest circle in the graph is lunch, I left the program and my computer running so I could compare it to other stops. A couple of the other bigger stops are meetings where I stepped away from my desk, but a lot of them are due to me stopping the cursor to either type or read something. There is also probably more stops than movement in my graph because whenever possible I try to use keyboard short cuts, also when I read text on a browser I use the scroll wheel  instead of moving the mouse all over the place.

The majority of the action [or inaction] seems to be center around... well the center. I wonder whether this is true of all actions or only because I was doing work. It would be interesting to see a similar graph for me playing a computer game, or maybe just browsing reddit on the weekend. I recommend checking the program out yourself and seeing what you find about your computer use. It could make a cool wallpaper or printout and you could probably even convince someone that it's a piece of modern art, just give it a complicated title that talks about the "human condition".

Cowboy Bebop

Since I only bought the EPL pack for my cable, I don't have much actual TV to watch, so I decided to get to a couple of classics, that I haven't watched yet. I decided to start with anime, mostly because of my recent visit to the anime fest here in Singapore. The only rule I imposed on myself is that I would watch an anime series that was ended, that way there would be no waiting period for any new episodes which can get frustrating.

Rule in hand I went to good ol' google to find a number of "best anime" lists, and after reading a couple it became clear that "Cowboy Bebop" was high on a lot of those lists. The entire series is made up of 26 different sessions, each a half hour long. Having completed the series I have to agree with the many people who think that Cowboy Bebop is the best anime series of all time.

Cowboy Bebop is the story of a bounty hunter, called a cowboy, and his ship, the bebop. Each episode deals with either a job or goes into the backstory of the characters. The story moves at a good pace and unlike many other animes there isn't a single episode that feels like it is filler. The story is well written, and deals with concepts like: existentialism, belonging, and they gray of life.

Also, unlike other animes Cowboy Bebop is loved by general viewers. Within the series Cowboy Bebop refers to itself as "the work that will considered a genre" and although it's an extremely gassed opinion to have they might have a point. The series doesn't contain a lot of the things that puts people off from other animes, there's no magic, no teenagers, no big sweat drops or power levels, Cowboy Bebop could have easily been a Hollywood movie [and it might be]. Even the opening sequence feels more like it belongs more to a Bond movie than an anime.

Besides the iconic opening song, music plays a big part in Cowboy Bebop. The series takes influences from Jazz and Blues as well as Heavy Metal. There is an episode in particular with some mean blues harmonica, and another entitled "Mushroom Samba".

But what make this series so great has to be the writing and character development. The characters feel real and are given depth tot he point where you feel invested in their storylines. I could go more into the story but I feel like saying anything about it would be robbing the viewers from the full experience.

With the holiday season coming up, I think it's about time to start dropping hints that you want the Cowboy Bebop box set or just buy it for yourself, saying it's really good is being unfair and you are likely be lending it out to all your friends.

Review: Fallout New Vegas

Story

You get shot and left for dead and the beginning of the game, in one of the few cinematics the game has. You are the awakened in a small town where the town doctor tell you he's fixed you up after being near death. Here is where you get to choose your appearance and stats, which is done through some interesting psychology test, I especially liked the ink blot test. After these basics are taken care of you are tasked with finding out more about the men who shot you and left you for dead, and if you want to, get revenge.

It's a pretty basic story, however, it is not the only one. As you move through the wasteland you will find different factions who will give you side quests that will either have their own plots or contribute to the main story.

Gameplay

Gameplay is very similar to Fallout 3 with the only addition of a "grab" action that really didn't have much use for me. Your inventory is still limited by weight, which is determined by your strength, you still have the V.A.T.S. shooting, and you still have attributes like speech, sneak, and science. Shooting in the game is changed a bit by having the option of iron sights for weapons when you zoom in, but don't expect to be the shooting as refined as you would have on a FPS.

Your interactions in the wasteland are determined by your character's attributes and perks, which you gain upon leveling up. For example, the "sandman" perk allows you to instantly kill any character that is sleeping. Overall the game controls very well, although jumping is a bit iffy at times, and trying to jump onto objects can get frustrating.

A huge part of the gameplay is conversations with NPCs. These conversations play out through a typical dialogue screen, but your character traits can unlock different options. Have a high enough speech rating and you could sweet talk your way out of tough situations. 


The biggest drawback of the game are the glitches. There was a patch available when I bought the game so I can't compare and say if it made things better, but there were definitely times where the game either froze, shutdown my PS3, or my character was stuck in the background. However, considering that the game auto-saves whenever you enter a new location, the frustration of having to re-play a huge section due to a glitch is avoided. 

Presentation

The game supports 720p although there isn't much eye candy there. With very few exception the game will look post-apocalyptic: gray, desserted, and vast. The most prominent visually gratifying aspect of the game are the slow motion kills.

The music in the game helps add to the nostalgic atmosphere and you have the option of listening to the radio using your pip boy as well as from radios scattered throughout the wasteland. Although there are a couple of different stations, they are only differentiated by their hosts as the music will stay the same across the stations, perhaps only a few vinyls survived the war.

Aside from the music of the game, the sound effects are spot on. Carving into a large fire ant sounds real enough and there are parts of the game where the sound helps add to both the tension and horror of the situation. There is one section in particular where I had to mute the game to check whether the whispering voices where coming from the game or not.

Recommendation

This game is for compulsive side quest completers. While you can finish the main story rather quickly, it would defeat the point of this type of game. A large portion of the story content can be found in conversations, notes, and terminals. The game can move from being funny to making you regret playing it at night with the lights off, I can honestly say there where times where it made me jump and not because of a cheap startle scare.

Also, because of all the factions, characters and options, you can play through this game more than once and still feel like you're playing a new game. The game does a good job of making you weigh every option because you feel like they will have actual consequences.

Mac Down

This is not the post I was originally planning for today, but my Mac decided to start acting up. I got back from lunch and could hear a loud whirring noise coming from the direction of my cubicle, immediately I suspected it was coming from my laptop and upon confirmation I decided to shut it down. I let it rest for a while [not really sure why I thought that would work] but every time I turned it back on it sounded like I was turning over a really beat up engine, which although is kind of cool wasn't what I wanted to hear from my computer.

Naturally, I bought some tools [31-in-1 screwdriver thingie] and opened up my laptop. I'm pretty sure that the problem is coming from the fan, and while it doesn't seem like it's a constant problem [it decided it wants to be good right now] I still think I'm going to have to replace the fan. This is both good and bad, good because it means I have another blog post idea, but bad because I'm in no way certified to be doing this sort of thing. There is no better evidence of this than the fact that I already have an "extra part".

I've setup a twitter account for myself [@ramosisms] but for now I don't plan on doing much with it other than tweeting when I have a new post up, which I'm hoping will be two to three times a week.

Visualizing My Facebook Data

As I said in the intro to this blog, I started this blog as an alternative to my facebook account which I would be deleting. However, it seemed sort of anti-climactic simply to delete the account without some type of closure. The idea for this closure came to me after I found out that you can download all of your facebook data.

Remembering an assignment I had for my visualization class, I figured that a fitting end for my facebook life would be to sum up all the text on my wall in some sort of visualization. So, while I don't intend this to be a step by step guide on how to do the same, I will document the mini-project that was visualizing my facebook wall data.

The first step was to get all of my data from facebook. In your account settings you will see an option to do this.

Account Settings

After you assure facebook that you are who you say you are and that you want your data it will take some time to compile it all. Once this is done you will get an email with a link to your data. After downloading this file you will realize that it comes in HTML form. Basically, facebook will give you a  local version of your pages.

The file of interest here is wall.html, however, you can't really use the file as-is because it contains all the extra HTML stuff that you don't really need if you just want the actual text that you see on your wall. For example, for the simple status message "will be moving to ramosisms.blogspot.com once he deletes his facebook account" the actual html file will contain:

<div class="feedentry">
<span class="profile">Alan 'Salvacion' Ramos</span>
will be moving to ramosisms.blogspot.com once he deletes his facebook account
<div class="timerow">
<span class="time">November 18, 2010 at 10:12 am</span>

So in order to really start seeing what's been on my wall I had to get rid of all the HTML tags. My initial idea was to use python and RE to extract only the text from replies and posts. However, after much failure and insult to my coding skills, I decided I needed an easier solution. Luckily I had a light bult moment and realized that if I knew what I didn't want, I could use find and replace in TextWrangler to replace whatever I didn't need with an empty space.

TextWrangler does support RE searches which made my life a bit easier. I decided I wanted to remove all the tags, the time stamps, and the random special html entities using the following searches:

<.*?> - tags
&.*?; - special entities
\d\d?, \d\d\d\d at \d\d?:\d\d \w\w - timestamp

With my data file now cleaned up, I could proceed with making the visualization. IBM has a pretty cool site that lets you upload data and make a visualization using the styles they offer, and it's all free. Each visualization also has multiple options. For example, the one I used "word cloud" lets you remove common english words, which is very helpful. After customizing my visualization I had the following:

Words Appearing on My Wall

Originally I decided to leave in the month portion of the time stamp because I wanted to see which months were more active for my wall. However, after seeing the result, I thought that the months overshadowed everything else so I decided to remove them and create the visualization again.

Words Appearing on My Wall Sans Months

I was more happy with this result than the first. While I intended this to be more of a tech case study than an analysis of the results, I will say that the "alan" instance is the amount of times other people wrote my name on my wall since I removed all instances of my name as an author of a post.

I still think there is more value I can get out of my facebook data, perhaps next time I'll make a graph of the number of comments over time or something like that.

MG Musha Gundam Mk-II

I recently finished building this MG Musha Gundam Mk-II. Not being a follower of the gundam canon I have no idea what the backstory of the gundam is, because even though the instruction booklet comes with an explanation, I don't read Japanese [yet].

However, a quick search on the gundam wiki [whose existence isn't that surprising] informed me that the Mk-II is the Dynasty Warriors Gundam game variation of the regular Musha Gundam. Fascinating stuff.

Box Cover

I picked up this model at the "Gundam Roadshow" after I saw a version of it on display. The model on display had some cool looking kimono stickers thing, which I noticed wasn't pictured on the box. I figured I'd ask one of the salespeople there about this and would buy it if it came with the stickers.

Japanese Pattern Motif Stickers

The build was pretty straightforward, nothing too complicated. The one quirk in this model is that it came with some sor of rope, laces thing that is used to model hoses. I was really worried I would cut some section too short or too long and then screw the whole thing up, but luckily it all worked out well. Another thing that made this model pretty fast is that the plastic is all dark colored which meant that I could skip the lining. I tried to pose the model in a Samurai Jack inspired katana sheathing but posing these things is extremely difficult because of all the moving parts.

Constructed Model

I put off adding the stickers for a while because I thought they were decals and those are generally a plan. However, once I realized they were just stickers I cleared up an evening and got to it. I think I spent at least three hours adding the stickers. It took a while because I had to remove parts [carefully] and often I would be unhappy with the orientation of a sticker so I redid parts. I realized that while the stickers gave me some flexibility with redoing parts, it also meant that there would be obvious overlaps that kind of still bother me.

You Can See the Overlap

Regardless of that I think he's happy in his new home on my desk.

New Cubicle Decoration

Intro

I decided to start this blog as an alternative to my facebook account, mainly because as I see facebook getting more and more "features" it has become increasingly worrisome to me that facebook will pretty soon own my life, or at least a big part of it. Since I do not wish to be owned and packaged by facebook, I decided to stop complaining and do something about it, so here I am.

In the beginning, this blog [if it survives that is] will be very much a facebook surrogate. I'll post random links, pictures, updates on my life, etc. Eventually though, I hope that this medium will give me more of a kick in the butt to do some actual writing which might take the form of reflections, analysis, rants, or even prose.