The other day I purchased GTA: IV for betahouse. I figured it would be a good change from Rockband since we’ve gotten several noise complaints from the neighbor and it’s a game that’s practically impossible to play quietly. I picked it up at Radioshack of all places for $60, but it came with a $10 gift card which I’m using on electronics parts (maybe some blue and green LEDs later).
I bought the Xbox 360 version, as that’s what we have at betahouse. I’d really like to get a Playstation 3 myself, although the news that the Xboxes will soon have Bluray players does make them tempting. I personally just want to play Metal Gear Solid 4, GTA: IV, and Gran Turismo 5 however, so it looks like I’ll be on a PS3 soon enough.
Took it into the office, fired up the projector, turned on the sound system. This game is jawdropping. The shadows are the best I have ever seen in a game. The characters don’t look “real” as some screenshots of MSG:4 are looking, but they are really enjoyable to watch. Turn on sub-titles as they are a must since they have heavy accents for most of the game.
The driving is better, but much more difficult than in prior games. The missions so far have been ok, but nothing amazing. Overall I think I just enjoy the world.
A few things that they have done to the game. No longer are there vast expanses of wilderness and farms. It’s all NYC! No empty random spaces. They did a great job at modeling the city. It feels much more vibrant. At the same time, a few things feel a bit less interactive than before, but they really did take out some of the random tedious things that you had to do in prior games. I’m only around 8% through it, but so far this is looking to be one of the best games ever.
This weekend, as per my last blog post, I attended ROFLCon (also on Facebook) as a volunteer. I wish I could say that I had intended to volunteer from the beginning, but I must admit that truthfully signed up initially because I needed a ticket as I didn’t register in time (I had known about it for a while, but the not-registering is another story). However, upon meeting the ROFLCon organizers and starting to get into it I was totally hooked. I set out originally to volunteer for just one day (Friday) and attend regularly on Saturday but once I got into it there was no was I could stop.
Let me be clear about one thing, this was absolutely the best executed convention/conference I have ever attended that and that sentiment seems to be universal. I can also say without qualifier that this was the best weekend of my entire life. I met some wonderful people, had many lolz, drank much Brawndo, partied like a rockstar, danced the night away, took a ton of photos and some great video, and I was Rick Rolled on several occasions.
All of the panels were superb. Everyone was so friendly. Everyone who was cool was there. I feel sorry for people at PodCamp NYC, as there’s no way it was anywhere near as cool as this. Seriously. PodCamp is cool, but there’s a ton of them. This was unique. There are talks of another ROFLCon next year, but it’s going to take a lot of work and there is some feeling that it might be like getting lightening to strike twice. Surely it would be bigger, have yet more coverage and such but I do wonder about recreating the experience again. It really was something magical.
I finally met iJustine and Brook. For some reason I really felt that with all of the other social media bloggers and podcasters that I know that surely I’d have at least ran into them before, but I hadn’t. In case anyone has any doubts, Justine and Brook are both very nice, smart, articulate, funny and great people. They are by no means simply just cute faces on the internet and to discount either of them as such is a severe mistake. I was somewhat shocked to find that moot from 4chan is actually a nice guy and doesn’t really like anonymous being assholes to everyone either. Negative points for anonymous (outside of their talk) for being assholes. Very uncool. Props to the girl that stole their boombox. She’s cool. When Anons were trying to Roll everyone Moot stood up and wrote on the chalkboard, “This Sucks”. Oh, and Ben Schultz (LeeRoy Jenkins) is the shit. Super cool guy. It’s odd to find that the Tron Guy (Jay Maynard) has almost the same day job I do.
I had some great conversations with the Brothers Chapp from Homestarrunner. They are very laid back guys that obviously have a great sense of humor. I hope to get to hang out with them some if I travel to Atlanta at any point as they really are great. The Mozilla/Firefox guy, Alex Polvi, was really awesome and bought me a drink while we were at Great Scott dancing. Seeing him (as the Firefox) fight the TripAdvisor Owl in a brawl outside the MIT Media Lab was amazing. I got to talk to Bre Pettis again from Etsy/iMakeThings/NYCResistor. Cheez from ICanHasCheezeburger was really funny. I feel really silly using all of these positive superlatives here, but there really is no other way to describe the events of the weekend.
The Barbarian Group threw an amazing little VIP event that really gave everyone some great time to connect in a more intimate setting. Afterwards at Great Scott there was much dancing had by all. Each night there was little sleep, but that is to be expected. I look forward to the next ROFLCon as well as to getting to know all of my new friends that I have made there, especially the organizers and volunteers.
I took a TON of photos during this, but so did many others. Check out all of our photos on the ROFLCon Flickr Pool. I wish that I could have blogged more during this, but all of the time on my laptop was spent editing/selecting between the 15GB of photos that I took. I still didn’t get a chance to color correct anything past the first set, but maybe I’ll see what I can do in the future. I’m thinking an EyeFi card might be useful for the next events I go to. I love Aperture, but the edit/upload process does take a bit of time.
I’m volunteering at ROFLCon (being held at MIT). It’s a really sweet conference on internet memes, humor, viral marketing, etc, etc. There’s gotta be 700 people here at least, if not more.
Right now is just the opening panel, and I can’t type much but I’m putting video/photos to my flickr account. Check it out! Updates coming soon. Tickets all sold out, so if you aren’t in… you’ll have to live vicariously through the web.
Did you like TechCocktail last year? Do you enjoy great conversation, amazing people, free food, free drinks and an awesome time? Are you a member of the local Boston tech community? If yes, then you should really clear your calendar for May 15!
Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle are putting together an awesome event called POPSignal. It is Thursday May 15th, 6:30 – 9:30pm at Tequila Rain near Fenway and is just a great informal get-together of the Boston Tech/startup community. If you’re looking for a new job, trying to break in, or just want to see everyone you already know and have a great time come on by!
If you are like many digital photographers, you may shoot a rather excessively large number of photos compared to what you would have shot with film (keep in mind that Ansel Adams only generally took a dozen or so sheets of film with him on a camping/photography trip). If you’re shooting with a camera that is capable of it, you should be shooting RAW at all times. The only downside to this is that every image takes up a lot of space!
Basically you’ve got gigabytes full of awkward poses, poor exposures, or just boring and crappy photos that should never see the light of day. Aperture can save your hard drive space however!
You should take all photos that are absolute horror stories as an “X” in Aperture when sorting them out. You shouldn’t put anything rated as such unless you’re basically saying that you want to trash it later. Then, make a smart folder of all photos rated as “X or lower”. You can now select all of these and delete them. This will cut the size of many Aperture libraries in half. Then simply empty your trash and thats it! So simple, but I’ve seen a lot of Aperture users not doing this for some reason and running out of drive space quickly.
