Was helping a friend with his programming assignment yesterday and realized most of the difficulty in doing something that I have already learned is finding out what the teacher wants. I wasn't in his class so I don't know what his teacher had told him but we somewhat struggled understanding what was needed to complete the program properly. Doing the same problem back when I took the same class a year ago, I can only recall doing the assignment with ease.

So it makes me think what else gives us trouble when trying to remember we have done before? Does riding a bike give us a little trouble after some time? Using a computer? Driving? How hard would the task actually have to be to give trouble when remembering it from the past?

I couldn't think of a task where it could give trouble as the above all seem hard to forget.

Rift PvP

This is probably more about PvP in MMOs in general, but more recently I have experience in Rift.

First I'll start with my philosophy of people. "People are stupid" This is not to say that everyone doesn't have their smarts. Everyone has something they are exceptionally good at while not so great at other things. This also does not exclude myself. I will do things wrong, in the case of mmo's, in pvp and in pve.

I say this because people in warfronts concentrate on things that will either get them killed faster or are not worth doing. For instance, the leader of a warfront marks a healer to focus fire like a good leader should be doing. We want to get them killed obviously but there are 10 people between me and that marked target. As a melee if I were to go into that crowd of people I would get focused myself not because I'm attacking their healer but because I became a lone target.

There are two ways to deal with that situation. Either have your entire group get up in their group of people or focus fire people in the front first. Both are hard to coordinate but the former is even harder to do so. So focus firing a person closest to your group of people would be the best thing to do. I don't care how much defense/valor/healers a guy has, it is hard to stay alive to.

Some day I'll write detailed strategies on how I think the warfronts should be done. Some may disagree with me, but screw them.

SWTOR

First I'm gonna say that I am being quite bias with my opinion in this post. I currently play Rift for my free time. I love the game despite its faults and love the company, Trion, even more.

Recently I've been reading a lot of posts on the Rift forums about 'Rift will die with Star Wars The Old Republic.' I can understand how some people will like the game, but I don't understand how it will be superior. I tested the game for a long evening once. I was impressed with certain aspects, but not so much overall. I played a evil lightsaber wielding dude (excuse my lack of knowledge of terminology of the franchise). I went through the starting area until I had to kill some big thing that I had a hard time soloing easily. Not sure if it was me or not being high enough in level to take him. But anyways, I experienced nearly the entire starting area. I was not impressed. It felt like any other MMO out there.

The combat felt really slow and I mean Really slow. This might be contributed to the fact that I only had two skills to use but I wasn't doing much. Mostly a bunch of visual parrying and single animation attacks per skill. I didn't actually feel like I doing anything exciting.

The PvP battleground or whatever it was called for the game was actually good, to a point. The point of the one I joined was to get a ball and bring it to your opponent's spawn area. I'm not sure what this is called in other games, but I'll call it football with obstacles. The two points I thought was nice about this PvP game. First, there are traps in certain places around the arena that if you don't pay attention to will kill you near instantly. And secondly, everyone's stats were equalized. Though the problem with it was that it took players from every level and as a level 6 I was fighting people that were level 30+ that had so many more skills than me.

One other thing I can give praise to the game for is their little instances. I guess these are story instances where you walk through this glowing wall to enter your own special instanced. Except it wouldn't require much, if any, loading. The smooth transition was a good thing for it. And another other thing. I don't know how it will go further on in the game, but during one part of my class story I would have to decide to let some prisoners free, kill them myself, or just execute them. I was surprised to find out there was a specific way to please your commanding officer for each prisoner. In matter of fact, one of the decisions he wanted me to do was a light side choice when dealing with the prisoners.

But again in all I wasn't impressed. It's another MMO except with a single player story element to it. Unlike Secret World, that I also shortly tested, that I actually was impressed. I won't go too deep in that game though since there is still a lot in that game that can still change. Guild Wars 2 looks a lot more amazing than swtor and even that I have a gripe for, though actually playing the game will determine if that gripe is worth noting.

Swtor in my opinion will not be an amazing game and will be another game that will lose subscriptions early on easily just like many mmos before it.

Profile Pictures

Was looking through Facebook reading updates and read an update one of my friends made. I read it thinking it was one friend when it was actually the other. The reason I got confused was the profile picture.

This particular friend's profile picture consists of herself and her boyfriend. This bothered me a little. You are not your friend, your friend is not you, nor is the profile for the both of you. In all honesty, it doesn't matter what you put for your profile picture. But at least try to put something that pictures only yourself or something that is unique for you. I say that because it doesn't necessarily need to be a picture of you, but something that none of your other friends have. Having a picture of yourself and someone else in the same picture can cause confusion, especially if the other person stands out more in the picture.

Again, it doesn't bother me too much just that I rarely look at the name of the poster only the profile picture. And if that picture has two people in it, I can get confused.

Getting to Sleep

Hah, it's such a hard thing to do sometimes. At night, when I want to be sleeping for a couple hours till morning, I always seem to have a hard time getting to sleep. Tonight has been even harder. Normally I have thoughts rushing through me that I have to literally think about nothing, or my breathe. And that takes effort to do. My mind wanders so much when I'm just lying in bed. I go through the day, think about the most random of things. But tonight I couldn't for the life of me get comfortable. I'd relatively easily half doze off, but would toss and turn so frequently that I wasn't getting anywhere in actually falling asleep.

Thus I've decided to stay awake a bit longer. Get myself even more tired. Then hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep later. It's a good thing nothing is really happening today, but that's usually every day for me.

Facebook

So I come up to my first post on this and it will be about the changes to Facebook that came on 9/20.

A couple of people actually don't like these changes. Some just don't like that it got changed at all. I dislike that attitude. Change is progression. We can't just let stay the same all the time.

As for the change itself. It looks like there are two major changes that took place. First, the updates. This looks a lot more streamlined. You can even organize these so that certain things from people show most of the time, all the time, or even not at all. I can see it being useful for pages of companies. Like say you 'liked' Google, but you don't want to get all the updates they would post on that page. Before you would have to unlike them to stop that. Now you can just exclude them from showing up on the main page.

The next major change is that of lists. To put it simply, Lists = Circles. That's right, Facebook copied Google. A couple of things though. Facebook, like Google+, has preset lists. Except on Facebook, these lists are automatically populated based on your and other peoples profiles. For instance, the city you live in, or a school you went to. There is also precreated lists that you have to add people into, then you can create your own lists. I'm not sure if Google+ has this, but you can view only posts made by people in certain lists. Meaning on your Facebook page, clicking your city list will show only posts of friends that have set their city to the same as yours.

There were also some better organization tools put in, which is nice.

In my opinion nothing seemed bad about the change. Though for anyone that liked email notifications, they're streamlining that into a single email at at time, probably once a day. But that is revertible back to normal in settings somewhere.