Tag: geek

#oneaday Day 152: Geek Post

Computers are bloody clever sometimes. It’s almost as if the people who designed them know that you’re going to fuck things up sometimes and put in various fail-safes to ensure that you can de-fuck yourself in most circumstances, barring catastrophic hardware failure. Having been a Mac user for quite a while, I’ve got used to using Time Machine to recover things that I’ve deleted (often as a space-saving measure) but I hadn’t used Windows 7 that much until I got my new PC a short while back.

EA released a patch for The Sims 3 today that was ostensibly to update the main game and make it work with the new expansion Generations, but it also added a bunch of new functionality to the base game. Trouble is, the patch they released didn’t patch the other expansion packs, leaving the game in a mess of unsynchronised versions that didn’t quite work with each other, causing slowdown, flickering inventory and all sort of other shite.

And so it was that I came face to face with the Restore Previous Versions dialog box for the first time. I’d installed the patch a little before 10pm tonight, I remembered, so out of curiosity I checked the Restore Previous Versions option from the Windows right-click menu. Sure enough, there were old versions of my folders backed up from 21:39, and after a bit of whirring and clunking, I was able to get them back where they were, theoretically (hopefully) erasing all trace that the patch was ever there until EA fix it. Not only that, the installer for the patch had the foresight to put a restore point in for my save game, too, so hopefully that should be in sync with the game, too. I’ll have lost about half an hour of gameplay, but I’d rather do that than have a juddery game that doesn’t work properly.

I realise that the Restore Previous Versions feature is something that you Windows users will have been taking for granted for a long time now, and I’m sure there was an equivalent in XP — I just never had cause to use it. I’ve got to say, though, colour me impressed — it was quick and simple and didn’t require any faffing around. Nice job.

#oneaday, Day 68: #PAX East, Day 1

Wow, what a rush! Day one of PAX East is already over and it’s been awesome so far.

Early part of the day was spent meeting, greeting and showering off our respective journeys. Chris “RocGaude” Whittington and I made it into the show just after Wil Wheaton’s keynote speech, which is a shame because the buzz on Twitter made it sound rather inspirational. Still, immediately after that was Gabe and Tycho’s Q&A session, which was seven degrees of pure-grade awesomeness. I’d never actually seen them in person before but their banter was hilarious and they have huge amounts of stage presence, wit and talent. I can see why they’ve become the huge successes they have.

Later, we tried to get in to a panel about the current state of storytelling in interactive fiction, hosted by, among others, Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin and Emily Short. Sadly we were just too late for that one, but we did manage to attend the first screening of GET LAMP, an extremely well put together documentary about the rise, fall and rise again of interactive fiction. The filmmaker had managed to interview a huge number of luminaries of the genre, including Don “Adventure” Woods and Steve “Infocom” Meretzky, both of whom were in attendance along with Plotkin and several others from IF’s past for a post-movie Q&A session.

We also spent a bit of time with the BitMob crowd at the puntastic “Pour House” where the beer was flowing freely and, by the sound of his tweets, Jeff Grubb is absolutely wasted. Holla. I won a T-shirt too. Awesomesauce!

Tomorrow should be a busy day. Hitting the show floor to scoop some stories for my new gigs at Kombo and Daily Joypad, then later am getting the chance to catch up with my brother. Hopefully, then, later in the evening, the Squadron of Shame will be recording something awesome from PAX to share with you all.

Anyway, it’s 1:15am EST right now and I should probably go to bed. Suffice to say that so far PAX is proving to be everything I hoped it would be. I wish there were more in the way of nerd superconventions like this in the UK. I had to cheer when Gabe and Tycho said their next aim for PAX is to do EuroPAX. That would be awesome.

Anyway. Good night!