They say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a mark of insanity. It can also, in my experience, be the mark of foolishness.

For the first half of Stargate Universe’s first season, I watched each episode desperately wanting to like the show. Unfortunately, I never quite reached that point. The show wasn’t horrible, but it just didn’t grab me the way the previous two series had done.

Still, the last couple of episodes had shown a little more promise than the initial “need of the week” ones, so I came back to give it another shot with the mid-season premiere, Space. It was much better than the first half season, though I’m 98% certain that’s because there was no use of the communication stones (well, not used to communicate with Earth, anyway) and we weren’t in the NotW mode that took up way too much of the first half of the season.

I’m going to stick around a while longer. Hopefully, Stargate Universe will grow on me.

Finally got Master of Orion 2 to work, no thanks to Digital River and Atari. Instead, I requested a refund for the purchase, and ordered a used copy from Amazon. Add Dosbox, and the game’s working great!

I’m not a big fan of his in general, but kudos to President Obama for his support of new nuclear power plants. Granted, this isn’t so much an instance of his doing something right as an instance of his continuing a good policy that President Bush laid the groundwork for, but it’s still a good thing.

I’m also pretty pleased by recent moves to lift the stupid DADT policy. I may be pretty conservative and prudish personally, but I see no reason why an individual should be disqualified from serving one’s country simply because of their sexual orientation ^[a]

1. Incidentally, I also wouldn’t mind supporting homosexual marriages, if it’s a.) passed as an actual law, not forced into place by a judge with delusions of legislative power and b.) passed with language that explicitly states that a wedding officiant cannot be sued if he/she refuses to perform a homosexual marriage for whatever reason (I’m actually thinking of ethics/religious objections, but prefer to err on the side of freedom for the officiant here).

I can’t tell you how badly I want to encourage people to do this. Unfortunately, I can’t actually do it in good conscience, since Atari (and their e-commerce vendor, Digital River) are apparently trying to sell games that are unplayable.

I anticipated problems playing the game – it came out in 1996, after all. It was intended to be played on Windows 95 (they don’t sell the DOS version, as far as I can tell, which means Dosbox won’t work). That’s six versions of Windows ago by my count. People have trouble getting software from Windows XP to run on Windows 7 – I never imagined that getting software intended for Windows 95 to play would be easy.

The problem is, I haven’t gotten that far.

I purchased both Master of Orion 2 and Master of Orion 3^[a]. I received a serial number for Master of Orion 3, but no such luck for Master of Orion 2. I contacted Atari technical support (as the confirmation e-mail from my order told me to do). Then, I waited. And I waited. And I waited.

The response? “Don’t bother us. This is a Digital River issue.”^[b]

So, I contacted Digital River, which led to another awesome round of waiting. Finally, I got an e-mail telling me that my order couldn’t be found, and that I’d need to provide several different pieces of information in order to help them find it before I could get a serial number.

In theory, confirming that I actually bought the game is reasonable, but are there really so many people trying to scam a free serial number for a thirteen year old game that was purchased for five dollars? This really doesn’t serve to combat piracy, it just serves to make reasonable people who actually respect the concepts of intellectual property think seriously about turning to piracy themselves.

In conclusion, I have to recommend that anyone who really feels the need to play Master of Orion II again just hit themselves in the head very hard. If you’re really, really lucky, you might have a dream in which you’re playing the game. At this point, that still puts your chances of being able to play this game again somewhere considerably above mine.

1. That makes the third time I’ve bought MoO3, and it still just isn’t really fun. I keep thinking that, this time, if I am patient with it, I will start enjoying it. It’s not worked yet.
2. Not a direct quote.

With the help of sheriff’s major Steve Rogers, Roberson began gathering information on Hightower through a number of sources. That is how they discovered that their suspect was a World of Warcraft fan.

Captain America’s a sheriff’s major?! Why are we bothering making a show about Steven Seagal, then?

As an interesting little experiment, before I’ve seen any such responses, I suggest you go around the internet and look at liberal responses to this, then come back here and look at conservative (or conservative-libertarian) responses to hospitalizations of Teddy Kennedy and Robert Byrd (among others). Then see which side of the political spectrum is really “compassionate.”

My thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Limbaugh.

Also, a quick, unrelated note: I have internet again, no thanks to the storm a couple of weeks ago. Just in time to get hit by a new storm this weekend. Yay.

I’m less pleased about the fact that my Xbox 360 died, again, but rumors that this fact had anything to do with my completion of the Read 100 challenge are absolutely incorrect.

Trudy had a LAW professor? Wasn’t she a journalist? And she had an affair with him?

I wanted them to give me a Trudy marathon before this episode to remind us of the clues, but if they didn’t care about being consistent with any of the previous Trudy mythology, they shouldn’t have bothered.

She had a daughter in ’83? Before she met Monk? But they went to college together, and graduated in 1981…

Trudy had an affair with her eventual killer, who could easily be called Monk’s nemesis… they had a kid… I can’t help but thinking of the Spider-Man story, Sins Past…

I wonder if the daughter didn’t die…

Guest Star Alona Tal? Meg, from Veronica Mars? Wonder if that could be the daughter, still alive.

I realize there were probably some twists we don’t know about yet, but I’m glad they’re not keeping the murderer hidden. It was pretty obvious that it was Craig T. Nelson talking to the hired killer last episode.

Good for Monk, getting some hits in on the Judge.

Poor Leland. He just couldn’t tell Monk no, even if he knows he can’t commit murder.

Did he kill someone else and bury them in the yard? Is that why he won’t ever move?

I told my wife last week it was the wipes!!

Holy crap. We’re a half hour in already?

The commercials have shown Leland confronting Monk in the rain, so he’ll get here and stop him from killing the Judge. Then they’ll have to find incontrovertible proof and motive.

Too…many…commercials!

Randy’s selling everything because he’s moving to be with Sharona?

Oh… Monk isn’t having him dig his own grave. He’s trying to dig up whatever he thinks is buried there.

“You take care of her”? Yep, Alona Tal’s the daughter.

I knew they couldn’t leave it with just the resolution. He either had to die (which I couldn’t believe they’d do) or he had to have someone new to love.

I actually like having the mystery over so we can have 20 minutes of “epilogue.”

This Sherlock Holmes movie looks like it might be decent, if Jude Law hadn’t tried his best to turn me off of it by going on about all of the “homosexual overtones” of the original stories. I don’t mind the idea of a gay detective, but Sherlock Holmes is a classic character, and shouldn’t be messed with.

She’s a reporter, too!

She’s ON the internet! Wow.

Lots of other Trudys out there? Not to mention a few Meg Mannings and Lilly Kanes, right?

He’s in the middle of the bed.

Heh. “Whatever’s in theater 10.”

Well, good. Monk’ll go back into the detective business, and we can have some reunion movies now and then.

I have no idea, honestly, whether these e-mails are legitimate or not. I believe they are, but, at this point, I am skeptical. Even assuming they are, this wouldn’t disprove the theory that the earth is warming, or even the theory that said warming is being caused by us. All it would prove is that some scientists deleted, edited, or otherwise falsified data in order to support the theory of global warming. It damages the theory’s credibility, but doesn’t utterly destroy it.

I suspect that these scientists are so confident that their theory is correct that they’re willing to throw out a single set of data that disproves it. Unfortunately for them, we’ve only got one planet, and, therefore, that single set of data is all they have. This isn’t a guy flipping a quarter ten times and having it come up heads all ten times (which would happen about once every 1,024) and then throwing out that particular set of data as an outlier. This is the opposite – a man trying to prove that quarters almost always come up heads and throwing out his first 1,023 experiments simply because they don’t prove his theory.

It probably will take the wind out of the sails of those individuals (See: Al Gore) who’ve made a career out of using the threat of global warming as a selling point for the idea of stripping various freedoms from pretty much anyone who isn’t Al Gore or one of his friends. Unfortunately, though, there are more of these people, who have various other crises (manufactured or otherwise) that they intend to use as an axe to chop away at our freedoms.

I’m anxiously waiting for further developments in this story.

The response? “Yeah, if we’d wanted to wait this long just to get into a game, we could’ve played Gears of War 2.”

The problem was, it wasn’t just the waiting. This was a problem we’ve had before (With Call of Duty 4, I believe): we’re in a party, we join a game, all of us are in the pre-game lobby, and just before the game starts, one or two of us are kicked back to the party lobby. At that point, whoever’s in the game can’t quit without getting penalized, which means that the “leftover” team has to either find something else to do for a while or wait.

The problem is made worse by the absolutely idiotic decision to disallow party chat during some game types (where “some game types” means “every game type you have access to when you start playing the game”). So, the process now goes like this: the party’s in party chat, and we join a lobby. Immediately, we’re removed from party chat and kicked to the in game chat, where we are “treated” to a dozen or so immature frat boys (and their sixth grade counterparts, who are often more mature, but somewhat chattier). We tolerate this for a minute or two, the game starts, and two members find themselves back in the party lobby. We’re now unable to tell our party members that we were kicked out (because God forbid we should be able to talk to our friends… thanks, Infinity Ward!), which makes the fact that we were separated from the game that much worse.

There’s no evidence that the booting is related to anyone’s connections being bad – the person “booted” is usually not the same person, and we can almost always find our way into another game with a very good connection speed beside our names. If that is the issue, IW and Microsoft need to make that clearer – if there’s something wrong with our connections (something that, I might add, doesn’t seem to interfere with any other games), we can fix it.

Like I said, though, that’s an issue we’ve hit before, and we dealt with it. The breaking of the party chat, though, is nearly unforgivable, and it’s only because I’ve already spent the money (and it’s not like I can return it now) that I’ll continue to play this game.

I can think of no good reason to break party chat this way. There’s no way it can be used to cheat, to my knowledge, since it’s only effective in-game if you’re on the same team, in which case you can talk to each other anyway. Contrast that with a game like, say, Chromehounds, which would have a perfectly good reason to break party chat – the idea that you can go out of contact with one another is a major factor of the game’s atmosphere.

One could say that it promotes team play, but my immediate reaction whenever I have to join a game with chattering twelve-year-olds or drunken idiotic frat boys (Oops, I repeat myself) is to mute everyone in the game except for the people I want to talk to (i.e., my party). Listening to the people on my team won’t promote team play – it will promote team killing.

I’ve never friended anyone on Xbox Live except those people I knew outside of Xbox Live or people who joined our games because they knew people I knew outside of Xbox Live. I have no interest in trying to make new friends via Live – the signal-to-noise ratio there would make trying to find a halfway likable person nigh-impossible (especially since the likable people are either silent or in their own party chats) anyway.

I realize it’s probably too late to save anyone’s money (and even if it weren’t, 97% of the people who read this blog were in my party last night anyway), but if you value the party chat feature, save your money until Infinity Ward and Microsoft come to their senses and fix this issue.