This week, Circuit City is selling Half-Life 2: Episode 1 for $8. You read that right: eight dollars. I paid $17.95, thinking I was getting a "pre-order discount." Although I am aware that I recently said I'd gladly pay $19.95 again for another episode, I'm afraid that this revelation has changed my mind. Never again will I pre-order a game from Valve. It's highway robbery, plain and simple.

Another thing that I'm mildly annoyed with is that episodes 1 through 3 are Half-Life 3, according to Gabe Newell. What? So why aren't they being called Half-Life 3: Episode X? Well, it seems that the folks at Valve screwed up. Things seem to be getting a little sloppy over there. Could this be the beginning of the end? I certainly hope not.

I know it has been live for a few days now, but the new design over at Slashdot is a most welcome change. The site had become quite crufty, looking more like a website from the mid-1990's than a hip, modern site of today. This new CSS redesign has made the site much cleaner, and I have to believe that they are now enjoying significant bandwidth savings since they've gone the CSS route (though their markup still isn't the prettiest in the world). Hopefully this face lift will boost the site's apparently sagging popularity. I for one, am most pleased with what they've done.

Even though the month of June has just begun, it has already been phenomenal in regards to web traffic over at Born Geek. On June 1, the folks over at Lifehacker.com featured my CoLT extension as their download of the day. The resulting traffic was simply tremendous; many thanks to everyone who came from there.

On June 5, a story was submitted to Digg about a tutorial discussing how to write Firefox extensions. Though the story link itself pointed to the tutorial over at Roachfiend, the second comment made on the Digg post pointed to my toolbar tutorial. The comment author remarked that it was "the best reference I have found so far..."

Residual traffic is also coming in through other sources: del.icio.us, diggdot, and others. I've already had a total of 8050 unique visitors this month, with over 1/2 of a GB of bandwidth served up. That's in comparison to the 18,952 visitors last month and 1.94 GB of bandwidth: nearly half the visitors and a fourth of the bandwidth! What's more shocking is that we're only 6 days into the month. Hopefully I can keep up with the demand. I hope to have a new version of CoLT out in the next few weeks, and perhaps a tutorial or two will pop up soon. As always, good times.

The only pet I've ever owned had to be put down this morning. Her liver was failing, her cardiovascular system was shutting down, and she could barely breathe yesterday. My dad took her to the vet this morning and made the decision to have her put down.

For the past 14 years, our cat Sugar has been such a joy. I'll miss her greatly. If I can find a picture, I'll try to post it for those who didn't know her.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised. – Job 1:21b

I've now played through Episode One a total of three times, having just wrapped up the final run with the commentary system turned on. All I can say is wow! Having commentary really adds to the game, and provides some interesting insight into what challenges the developers at Valve faced when making certain decisions. Make sure to enable this at least once if you own this expansion (and if you don't own it yet, what are you waiting for?). My main goal for this post, however, is to focus on the "what-ifs" coming up in Episode Two (and possibly Episode Three). If you have yet to play Episode One, or if you haven't watched the Episode Two trailer yet, you may wish to avert your eyes from the rest of this article. A few spoilers lie ahead, so consider yourself warned.

The trailer for Episode Two makes it appear that Alyx meets a rather early demise. Is this true? Here's a quote from a recent Episode One review:

Half-Life boss Gabe Newell has revealed that "primary characters" will die over the trilogy of new Half-Life 2 episodes. "People need to feel that characters are genuinely at risk," he says. "Otherwise they lose investment and the significance of their actions is diminished."

If Alyx truly is the character who dies in the upcoming saga, I might literally break down and cry. After investing so much in character development over the past two installments, would Valve really snuff her out of the picture? She is the one realistic female lead in computer games today; hopefully that fact alone will prevent such a travesty. Or perhaps the developers have something else up their sleeves. Could Episode Two be to the Half-Life 2 episodic trilogy as The Empire Strikes Back was to the Star Wars trilogy? The dark note before the final, brighter conclusion? At this point, only the developers have that answer. I'm hoping that Alyx lives on for another day, at least so that we might have further opportunities to enjoy her flirtatious personality.

Other questions have also arisen in my mind. The alien beings which talked with Dr. Breen at the end of Half-Life 2 are clearly on Earth (residing in those pods you run across while in the Citadel during Episode One). What are they doing there, and what will they do now that the Citadel has been destroyed? Where is Judith Mossman, and what "Project" has she uncovered? And what does the G-Man have to do with all of this? According to Gabe Newell, he might be behind the demise of whatever primary character gets killed off.

Hopefully Episode Two will shed some light on all of this. Unfortunately, we have to wait another six months or so to find out. I haven't been this riveted in a long, long time...

After about roughly four hours of game play, I've finished Half-Life 2: Episode One. I fully intend to go back through the game at least twice: once on a harder difficulty, and once with the commentary system turned on. The following points are those I think most worth talking about.

The Good

• Incredible Atmosphere: Throughout the entire game, you literally feel like a refugee fleeing City 17. You never have enough supplies, the Combine are always on your tail, and it's literally one narrow escape after another. I was literally on the edge of my seat the entire game.
• HDR: High dynamic range lighting in Half-Life 2 is simply awesome. This is the best use of the technology of any game I've seen, and it adds so much to the overall presentation.
• Excellent Level Design: This goes hand in hand with the atmospheric presentation. Each level, although shorter than the ones in Half-Life 2, is incredibly well designed. The locales feel quite realistic, and the attention to detail is astounding.
• Alyx: Nearly all of Episode One takes place alongside Alyx, and that simple fact adds so much to the action. Not only does she cover your butt a number of times, but you must look out for hers as well. And who could resist fighting to save a girl as sexy as her? Her AI is incredible; she never gets in the way during a firefight and she's a damn good marksman. Did I mention that she's really sexy?
• The G-Man: I won't spoil it, but the G-Man gets some much deserved comeuppance.
• Voice Acting: The voice acting is top notch. No other game that I've played in recent times comes close to the quality presented here; every actor is convincing to the last.
• Story Line Advancement: This goes without saying. Episode One answers a number of questions, asks a number of new ones (so exciting!), and advances the storyline considerably.
• Episode Two Trailer: A sneak peek at what's coming in Episode Two is included with the game (and it looks wickedly cool).

The Bad

• Incredibly Short: I want more Half-Life! Four hours just isn't enough (although I do still have the commentary system to check out, and I'll definitely play it through again).
• Too Expensive?: This is a sore point with a number of gamers on various forums that I peruse every once in a while. $19.95 just seems a tad too expensive for this amount of gaming. Make it $14.95 and you've got yourself a deal. (Will I continue to pay $19.95 for future episodes? Absolutely. Half-Life is just that good.)
• Stuttering: Maybe it's just my system (I wouldn't be surprised), but the game seemed to stutter more than I would have liked. Most of the time it seemed to be related to loading sound effects.

The Ugly

• Episode Two Trailer: Once you beat the game, the trailer for episode two is launched. At first, I thought my game had crashed. I tried to exit Steam and got a warning that a Steam application was still in use. A little notice on what they were doing would have been helpful.
• Character Appearance: How is it that Barney looks like crap but Alyx is still as hot as ever? Doesn't everyone get a little dirty in this deal?

If you enjoyed Half-Life 2, I think you would really enjoy Episode One. If you thought Half-Life 2 was just a mediocre game, I would recommend avoiding this next chapter. Plenty of people will no doubt complain about the length, but I don't think anyone can argue about the level of execution. The action is tight, the levels are well designed, and the story gets pushed along nicely, leaving the player with a number of new questions. If you're looking for a fun little action romp, I highly recommend Half-Life 2: Episode One. I for one am eagerly awaiting Episode Two.

Bug 242207 was recently fixed on the Firefox branch, which means it'll make it into Firefox 2.0. This is great news, especially since I run into this problem all the time. The issue is that removing an entry from your address bar using Shift+Delete occasionally nukes your browser history. I can't tell you how many times I've run into this and then wondered what was causing my history to get lost. It's nice to see that someone has found the problem.

In preparation of this Thursday's launch of Half-Life 2: Episode 1, I fired up a little Lost Coast this weekend to reacquaint myself with the Half-Life world. Unfortunately, all those nights of playing Oblivion have taken their toll. I found myself repeatedly trying to use the Oblivion key mappings in Half-Life 2: pressing 'E' to jump, 'F' to sheathe my weapon, etc. It took quite a while for me to adjust keyboard schemes, but I finally got back into the groove.

I find it interesting that game developers have accepted a 'standard' WASD control scheme for player movement, but don't agree on any other controls. Quick-save and quick-load always seem to vary (although they are almost always between F5 and F12), jumping is always different (some games use the space bar, some use shift, others use something else entirely), and the ubiquitous 'Use' functionality is never what you expect (I prefer using my middle mouse button for that particular action, but Oblivion makes use of the space bar). Switching among games becomes a bit of a challenge in and of itself, much like switching between programming languages can be (the old 'else if' statement comes to mind: variations include else if, elseif, elsif, and elif).

Anyways, I'm glad to be spending time with Half-Life 2 again. Unfortunately, my video card conked out while I was playing through Lost Coast. Hopefully, this won't be the case throughout Episode 1. It's high time that I built a new machine...

I've just installed the latest alpha build of Firefox 2.0, and things are looking real good. The Burning Edge has a change log for this latest release, displaying what's new between these alpha builds and the current 1.5.0.x line of Firefox browsers. Alpha 3 adds session saver support, anti-phishing support, search suggestions in the default search box, and more. If it proves stable enough, I might just switch to this alpha build for my main browsing platform. The inline spell checking feature is great!

Half-Life 2: Episode One has gone gold! I finally pre-ordered the other day, and I'm looking forward to playing it on June 1. But enough about my excitement...

Will the episodic content model work in the long run? While no one really knows for sure, I'm remaining fairly skeptical. Gamers are used to paying their $40, $50, or even $60 for a complete game (although the term complete is fairly ambiguous, especially since game lengths differ so drastically). Forking over $20 for a game snippet is something new. Something that, to some people, is fairly frightening. Whether sales are strong enough to warrant doing it again remains to be seen. Valve has apparently announced that there will be three episodes, the last of which should be available around Christmas of 2007. That means that they are at least willing to take the risk. And I salute that boldness.

It's my hope that the quality of this episode will match that of the original game. But can a 4 to 6 hour game hold up against its 40 to 50 hour parent? I don't think we'll really know until after June 1. The strength of the Half-Life world lies in the powerful story telling. With any luck, it will be just as strong as it always has been.

It's rare that I have a problem with Firefox. But I can consistently make it fail when loading up a Java applet. I use the official Java distribution from Sun (version 5 with fix pack 6) to no avail. One particular applet that resides locally on my machine causes my browser to lock up instantly, every time. Perhaps the problem is with the applet itself. Or perhaps it's "just Java." But the applet works in (yuck) IE. Shouldn't Firefox yield the same results?

I have yet to poke around in Bugzilla to see if there are any bugs filed on this problem. I can't believe that I'm the only person who runs into this on a semi-regular basis. Granted, I do my best to avoid Java at all times. But every so often, I have to make use of this technology, regardless of my level of disdain.

I don't follow horse racing at all, nor do I have any interest in the Kentucky Derby. But I wasn't surprised when I heard that the Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro broke its leg in the Preakness. Not too long ago, I watched a 60-Minutes episode on ESPN Classic (from way back in 1979) that discussed horse doping, and its surprisingly legal status in the world of horse racing. Apparently, horse owners drug their horses with pain-killing "medication," allowing them to run a race even when they really shouldn't. It's a shame that this kind of thing goes on, especially since horses can't tell people how they feel. Hopefully this tragic turn with Barbaro will be the wake-up call the horse racing world needs.

I've been incredibly busy at work over the past week, due to the fact that I had a due date today for one of my projects. Thankfully, everything has wrapped up (for the time being, that is) and I can rest a little this weekend.

Only a few more days until Half-Life 2: Episode One is released. I still haven't preordered, but I'm hoping to do so soon. It's neat that you can preload the game before you preorder, and it didn't take too long to do (although I already have Half-Life 2 installed). Whether or not episodic content will be a winner is still up in the air. All I know is that I really enjoyed HL2 and I'm really looking forward to this next chapter in the Half-Life universe.

I'm making this post from the Bon Echo Alpha 2 build of Firefox. The greatest new feature by far is the inline spell checking feature for textarea elements. It works exactly like the spell check feature in Thunderbird, and it makes blog posting that much easier.

The new tab UI is nice, but I haven't yet opened a ton of tabs to see how they handle overflow and the like. I also like the new "Addons" window, which is essentially the marriage of the "Themes" and "Extensions" windows from current Firefox releases. Other cool features include an improved default search box (although Googlebar Lite is still the greatest one around ... ;) ), session saver (in case of a browser crash), greatly improved feed discovery capabilities (I really like this), and more. All in all, Firefox 2 is starting to look really good. I can't wait to get my hands on a more mature release; I will definitely make the switch once the public betas arrive.

The only gripe I have is that the few extensions I have tried to install all fail (the maxVersion isn't set high enough), so I'm currently extension-less. :(

On an entirely unrelated note, I have added a new Extensions category here to this blog, and I have placed all Firefox extension related discussions under that category.

I'm not much of a movie person, but tonight, thanks to a storm-related cable outage, I watched The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe for the first time. What a great movie! I've always been a giant fan of the Chronicles of Narnia, and this movie was particularly well done. A few key details were left out, however. Aslan didn't mention the deeper magic when the Stone Table was broken in two, He simply explained that the witch didn't fully understand what would happen. Also, the professor never hints that he too has been to Narnia. Take, for instance, this passage from the book:

And the professor, who was a very remarkable man, didn't tell them not to be silly or not to tell lies, but believed the whole story. "No," he said, "I don't think it will be any good trying to go back through the wardrobe door to get the coats. You won't get into Narnia again by that route. Nor would the coats be much use by now if you did! Eh? What's that? Yes, of course you'll get back to Narnia again some day. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia."

Nowhere in the movie does the professor make such a statement (the last sentence in particular). That omission really took some of the surprise out of it (although anyone who's read the books already knows the story). There were some interesting additions to the movie as well. Aslan says to the witch that he was present when the deep magic was written, a statement that isn't in the book (I checked). It will be interesting to see what other movies they decide to make. I really enjoyed this one; hopefully they will stick to the books, and not alter the stories too much.

All hail the Highest of High Kings!

Beginning with Googlebar Lite 4.0, an interesting problem has cropped up with the search history edit box. Take a look at this screenshot sent in by a Googlebar Lite user:

See how the drop-down marker is all the way to the left of the search box? The actual edit control has been resized to 0, while the popup element (which should be invisible) has been resized. I can get this problem to occur on demand using the Charamel theme. What's most frustrating is that I cannot make it go away. I've tried forcing the edit control's style via CSS, but the rules get ignored. I've built a bare bones toolbar from scratch to try to isolate the problem, to no avail. This is apparently a problem with the autocomplete textbox itself. A Firefox bug? Perhaps. If you happen to run into this problem, there are three courses of action you can take, none of which are very appealing:

1. Use the default theme (if you already aren't). I have yet to see this using the default theme, although my dad has run into it using the default (he uses large fonts in Windows, however, so that might be the difference).
2. Disable search history.
3. Use Googlebar Lite 3.3.

Again, none of these solutions are ideal.

Do you know what's going on here? Know of an existing bug in Bugzilla that references a similar problem? Found a workaround or a fix? Please let me know! I will continue to investigate this issue, but I don't see a fix at this time. If only everything would just work as it is intended to …

The Simpsons is the greatest television show of all time, regardless of what the clowns at TV Guide say. I mean, how can you go wrong with quotes like this?

Skinner: And, in a gutless act of political correctness, pizza day will now be known as Italian-American sauce bread day. Italian Chef: Ah, now that's a-sensitivity. Right Giuseppe? [the monkey claps...] Giuseppe is such a happy monkey!

Homer: I'm not looking for fame or glory. I'm just trying to buy that stairway to heaven Jesus sang of. Flanders: That was Led Zeppelin. Homer: Psh. Get back to your bong hippie.

Homer: So, a graduate student, huh? How come you guys can go to the moon but you can't make my shoes smell good?

That kind of writing is simply classic. The greatest episode of all time? Quite possibly, Homer: Bad Man. It just doesn't get much funnier than that.

Half-Life 2: Episode 1 began preloading today yesterday and I'm seriously considering pre-ordering it over the Steam network. There's something rather appealing to purchasing software online: no traveling to a store and no waiting for a package in the mail. It's instant gratification, pure and simple. Lots of people seem to dislike the fact that the game is "locked" until June 1 (the official release date), but that doesn't bother me too much.

One thing that I dislike is the fact that I don't get a game box. I know that may sound silly, but I have quite a collection of boxes (I have nearly as many as I have computer games). Having a game box provides a tangible token of ownership for something that is intangible. My collection is unfortunately still packed away in boxes from our move; otherwise, I would post some pictures.

It looks as if Firefox Places will be disabled for Firefox 2.0. This is a disappointing turn of events, but the developers apparently feel it needs more polish before it can be let loose on the public. I've only briefly played with the latest implementation in recent trunk builds (it has since been disabled), and what I saw seemed pretty good. Live bookmarks need work, and accessing the Places window is still a little clunky. The feature set for 2.0 is still fairly interesting. Hopefully, 2.0 will be an exciting release.

So, apparently, the Nintendo Revolution has been renamed to Nintendo Wii. Let the jokes commence.

This is the primary problem with using "code names" in the wild. When an official name comes along, replacing said code name, early adopters are thrown for a loop. It happened with the Firefox web browser not too long ago. Early builds of Firefox were known as Phoenix and later Firebird. I actually happen to prefer the Firebird name; it keeps some semblance of continuity with their Thunderbird product (plus, it just sounds cool). At first, the Firefox name seemed really stupid. But as time has passed, it has become ingrained in our culture, and has lost that silly feel to it.

Can Nintendo's new console do the same? I don't really think so. The name they've chosen is so incredibly stupid, that it will be an uphill battle to win back the respect they had earned. We'll see how they fare in the long run with this decision. I have a bad feeling that they won't do as well.