Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Chie, Rui and I went and caught Fahrenheit 9/11 today at Ebisu. Good movie, we all enjoyed it.

Holy shit, there’s some kind of hostage situation in Toronto going on right now.

Update: Derek just let me know that they shot the gunman.

Your tax dollars at work. It’s a little, um, swankish with the marble floors and walls, and the pond outside the window - which is only visible from the bathroom. Very nice though:

One of the places Chie and I went in Singapore on our trip last month was Sentosa, a resort island. We took cable cars to get there, and here’s the photos (late as usual).

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Since I own Counter Strike: Condition Zero, I’m eligible to play the beta of the new Counter Strike: Source (CS:S). CS:S is pretty much exactly like CS:Z, which is pretty much exactly like Counter Strike. Except the new game uses the Source engine from Half Life 2. My theory is that I’ll be able to see if this laptop can actually handle HL2. (Love these acronyms).

So Valve uses this content delivery system called Steam to push their games out to all the owners and players. Yesterday Steam “pre-loaded” Counter Strike: Source to my laptop, but when I try to play I get an infuriating message about how I’ll be able to load the game when it’s released. So there’s a big on/off switch on the Steam servers, that just says “Can these jerks play”. The grand switch was supposed to thrown about 5 hours ago my time, yet no one can play it yet (save Cybercafes registered with Valve).

To top it off, the Steam/Valve forums - the only realistic place to ask what’s going on - are down. Probably because a million people like me are all trying to login there to ask the same questions.

Yes, I sound fanboyish. I’ll admit it - I’m turning into a Counter Strike fanboy. But the game is awesome, and I get from here pings of 30 to servers in Japan and Korea, and these guys are hardcore. I’m not (yet), but it’s still an awesome game. That being said, I don’t recommend it to anyone that doesn’t like being absolutely blown away by other players massively honed skills.

And de_dust forever.

Update: It finally ran. And by ran, I mean I got about 6 frames per second - and due to the graphical settings being at their lowest, they were not nice looking frames. Hey, it’s my underpowered laptop though. So I’m not very disappointed.

The infamous Roberto Shamasio finally has a weblog. No longer will his ravings be confined to other blogs, and no longer will his insane ramblings be moderated.

So it’s my twenty-fifth birthday today. Which in itself is no biggie - but my good friend Ron decided to give me a shout. Like months ago I gave him a number to reach me in Japan - Chie’s number. Figuring that since I already had lost my phone once, and that I may do it again, I gave him the most surefire way to reach me. Although in retrospect, the probablity was pretty low.

Anyways. I’m hanging out in the coffee shop where Chie works part-time, and her phone rings; it’s Ron. Which was even more probable, since it’s total chance that I was here when she’s working. To slim the odds more, she usually never carries her phone with her while working - except today. She left her watch at her parents house, and had her phone on her for the time. So it was massively cool to get Ron’s call. Now just wait until he finds out how much international calls to Japanese mobile phones cost :-)

Chie and I hooked up today after work (heh) to watch the latest Harry Potter flick. We were coming home and actually thought we found a dead body; like 3 blocks from our house, we round a corner and almost walk onto someone totally immobile on the ground missing one of his shoes. On closer inspection, he was just drunk out of his mind - and the other shoe was being used for a pillow. I’ve done that.

On the same note, the other night I was waiting for the aforementioned lady at the coffee shop where she works part-time for her to finish. Must have been around 11PM and the streets were full of drunk salarymen. So I’m sitting in front of a closed mall on like a garden wall, smoking and waiting. So three drunk guys walk up, and piss into the garden less than a meter from me. It was pretty funny.

Luckily the drunks here are all non-threatening, and usually make me laugh my ass off.

Anyways, the movie was good. Great in fact, probably my favorite of the three so far. Tomorrow we’re off to Kamakura, where we both have work to do from her parents house there.

Read the review and download it; it’s about a six minute clip. Pretty dissapointing after being so hooked on Family Guy.