Lately I’ve been enjoying Urban Dead, a browser based multiplayer zombie apocalypse game in which you can either play a survivor in a zombie infested city or one of the infesting zombies. Or more likely than not, start out as a survivor and end up as a zombie. It’s a good deal of zombie-smashing/brain-eating fun and, unlike most multiplayer games, not too time consuming. That’s because you only have a limited number of actions you can take each day and once they’re gone you have to wait for them to slowly replenish. That can lead to some suspenseful moments because when you’re out of actions, you’re pretty much an easy target for any zombie that comes along. As a human, the game mainly revolves around finding safe buildings to hide in and barricade, along with venturing out to kill a few zombies or help out your fellow humans from time to time. As a zombie, well it’s all about those sweet sweet brains. At any rate, if you’re playing and happen to see a scientist named Gorman running around in the suburb of Dulston, stop by and say hi and please don’t try to bite my face off or anything.

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2005-08-23 23:13:50 +0000

Awesome. I just created a character by the name of Brew Slee.

Comment by Will on 2005-08-24 09:10:57 +0000

Cool, what area did you start out in? I’m up in the upper right corner of the map, where it had been relatively safe until recently. This morning I logged in to find that the well barricaded hospital I had been hiding in with a bunch of other people had been compromised and there were 5 zombies inside. I managed to make it out with brain intact but the whole suburb seems to be more heavily infested now.

Comment by Phil on 2005-08-24 11:55:50 +0000

Hey, I made a character named Kavis that I’ve played for about 80 actions so far, but for some reason I haven’t gotten a single point of XP. None of the zombies have ever attacked me, and I used ALL of my ammunition without getting a single hit. Also, I haven’t found anything apart from the items I started with.

Is this normal?

Comment by Will on 2005-08-24 14:23:43 +0000

It sounds a little unlucky, but not unusual. Your chance to hit starting out is pretty low, so it’ll take a while to earn XP. You get XP equal to the damage you do. The quickest way to earn XP through damage from the start is to be a firefighter and use the axe, since you start with the axe skill and don’t have to worry about finding ammo. My character is level 6 and hasn’t even attacked a zombie yet because i’ve been getting all my XP by healing others and extracting DNA from zombies, or every once in a while reviving them. As far as not being attacked by zombies yet, that’s normal too. All the zombies in the game are actually player characters so unless one of the zombies near you just happens to be someone who’s logged on to use their AP you won’t see them doing anything. It’s pretty rare to actually get attacked while you’re running around. The trick is to hide someplace good when you’re low on AP where you won’t get munched on. In general you shouldn’t hide in hospitals, malls, or police stations since they attract the most attention from zombies. Find a good, non-descript apartment building or something near a hospital or police station and hide there (especially if its barricaded). Rest in there and then head out to search for ammo/med kits and hit and run on some zombies. It’s not worth it to try to kill them really, unless they’re already almost dead since they can just get back up again. Just attack them to get some XP and make sure you leave yourself enough AP to get back to your safehouse.

Comment by Jeff Eaton on 2005-08-26 18:03:26 +0000

Heh. Thanks for the heal, by the way. Found your site via Gorman’s UD profile. A number of compatriots and I are throwing in our lot together and trying to carve out a safe haven in Dulston. Viva la humanity. 😉

Comment by ian on 2005-09-24 02:28:21 +0000

ha! my own dan fern just met your boy pustulent in st. george’s hospital in greentown. i tried to open a line of communication (someone had suggested offering candy) via my own native understanding of zombiespeak. i really thought we’d be able to keep you as a pet, man…

…did they kill you and throw your ass outside?

Time once again for Yet Another Google Maps Web Application. This time it’s a map that shows cellphone towers and has reviews of the signal strength for the various providers in a given area of the map. It definitely seems like it would be a useful tool to check when considering places to live so that you don’t end up stuck someplace with terrible reception. The only downside is that generally the towers are owned by third party companies and so it can be tricky to figure out what provider a given tower supports. That’s where the signal strength reviews start to help out. Downtown KC has towers everywhere but out by us there are actually a lot fewer that I would have expected. Our signal strength is decent though, so I can’t complain.

Our tent

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

There’s something magical about mornings when you’re camping. That moment when you first open your eyes and think “Oh crap, I’m still in the woods. What was I thinking? I need a shower and an internet connection.” Jolayne and I went on a float trip on the Niangua River this weekend with some friends from work, and despite the horrors of “roughing it” (ok, we did have an air mattress but that’s more of a necessity than a luxury in my opinion) we had a good time. For those that don’t know, a float trip seems to be something of a Missouri summertime tradition that involves a bunch of people drifting down a river in canoes or rafts. In our case we went with the raft option and bungee corded together 4 rafts in a massive, river traffic blocking, bottom dragging, sunken log hitting, impossible to steer flotilla. However, the point is really to get down the river in the most leisurely manner possible usually while flinging nerf balls around and pushing people out of the boat so the lack of steering and glacial pace wasn’t really a problem. Well, it wasn’t until we realized that we still had quite a way to go and it was almost time for the last pick up at the take out point. That’s when we all de-bungeed and began to paddle in a not so leisurely manner, but we managed to make it on time. Afterward we camped out overnight before heading home. Even though it was fun, I definitely can only handle nature in small amounts at a time. When it was time to leave I was more than ready to come home and fall in love with indoor plumbing all over again.

Comments

Comment by Nathan Hessler on 2005-08-22 14:54:57 +0000

I don’t know how you did it. No internet, did you get the shakes? Anyway, Sounds like tons of fun.

Comment by Nathan Hessler on 2005-08-22 20:27:21 +0000

another post, but I just thought of this. if you plan on going camping alot you should try to get this.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how2/article/0,20967,1076525,00.html

Comment by Will on 2005-08-22 21:58:55 +0000

Wow, that’s pretty cool but where we were I couldn’t even get any cellphone signal, much less EV-DO. We were living like savages I tell you, savages!

Comment by Sarah on 2005-08-23 09:43:09 +0000

Guess what? I am sleeping on an air mattress for the next two weeks. It is like camping inside! Did your mattress lose as much air during the night as mine did?

Comment by Will on 2005-08-23 21:41:58 +0000

I don’t know how much yours lost, but ours stayed inflated pretty well.

I think I may have found a new hobby. StuffOnMyCat is website where, well, there’s stuff, cats, and pictures and you can probably guess where it goes from there. I think the only reason why it’s so much fun to put stuff on cats is that they look so pissed off but they (sometimes) put up with it. I’d really love to try this out with Cleo but there’s a slight problem. It just so happens that the 2 things she’s afraid of most are as follows:

(* including but not limited to: plastic bags, paper bags, remote controls, shoes, plates, cans, cd cases, cds, loose change, stuffed animals, books, back issues of PC Gamer, headphones, and the second law of thermodynamics.) The triumph of getting any stuff on the cat would certainly be short lived as any attempt to photograph the result would definitely send the cat bolting behind the couch in a shower of upended household items.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2005-08-10 07:29:37 +0000

Someday cats will join together and enslave the human race … and when that day comes, you, Will Gorman, will be the first in chains!

😛

LMFAO, by the way.

Comment by Carrie on 2005-08-10 07:31:47 +0000

PS — You should put Cleo on Catster. It a special kind of crazy when you start making a webpage for your pets.

Join in!

😀

VNC Client for the PSP

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

Here’s another one for the more-cool-than-practical files. PortableVNC, a VNC client for the PSP. It’s amazing how well it works, even if it’s pretty awkward to try to view a 1280×1024 desktop on a 480×272 screen. The only major drawback right now is one that’s common to all homebrew apps that make use of the 802.11b connection. Apparently no one’s figured out how to get a connection using DHCP to work yet so they all require you to assign a static IP. While that works fine at home, it’s not really a viable solution for using a public access point on the go. I’m sure that that will get taken care of eventually though. Meanwhile, Sony’s released version 2.0 of their firmware and it finally includes a web browser. Of course that comes at the cost of losing the ability to run any homebrew apps. I think I’ll pass, thanks.

Kimmee has just posted an awesome video taken at the San Diego Comic Con featuring amazing footage of nerds in their natural habitat. (And yes Carrie, they even got Stormtrooper Elvis.) SPOILER ALERT: She meets the actual real honest to goodness Lando Calrissian and wins at life. Man, I’ve really got to make it out there one of these years.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2005-07-21 03:14:06 +0000

You MUST come to Comic Con sometime. It’s completely surreal and absolutely fun.

I swear to God my friend Lee is in the background of that video and I had to have passed Kimmee (and crew) at least once beacause some of the stuff they filmed I saw at the exact same time — I swung by to see Lando twice, for example.

Stormtrooper Elvis rules!

Yay Nerd Prom! 😀

Having recently discovered both Geoblogging and Google Earth, the immediate thought that came to mind was: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a way to view Geoblogger’s data in Google Earth?” And indeed there already is. It turns out that one of the more powerful but less advertised features of Google Earth is to allow what they call “Network Links“. What that means is that you can point to a remote source to display a point or set of points on the map, complete with descriptions and links to other content, just like a point from Google’s own data (like a result from a local search for a restaurant, for example). This makes Google Earth very open ended in terms of what data it can display and opens up some interesting possibilities. In a sense it’s like having RSS feeds for location based content, and Google Earth could be thought of as the feed reader. For example, if you wrote blog entries while traveling a lot, it would probably be pretty easy rig up a script to associate each blog post with the location where it was written in a network link file for Google Earth. Then any user of Google Earth could add the URL for that file as a network link and be able to see on the map where each post was written. I’ll admit I’m hard pressed to think of any practical use for that particular application, but I sure think it would be cool. Actually now that I think about it you could already do this since Geobloggers will already pick up any bookmarks that you geotag in del.icio.us. So you could just save the links of the relevant posts to del.icio.us, geotag them, and your travelling blogging would be mapped.

Hollywood Museum

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

We got back from L.A. Sunday evening, and as much fun as the trip was it was kind of a relief to be back in the calm, quiet, somewhat not insane midwest. Mostly for the driving. I don’t think I’ll ever complain about the traffic out here again (hah) no matter how much construction there is. Traffic in L.A. is crazier by several orders of magnitude. As an example, the entrance to our hotel in Hollywood was on a 7 lane street. That meant that turning into it required a left turn across 4 lanes of heavy traffic. And that’s to say nothing of the freeways. I don’t know that we would have survived without the GPS in the rental car. It was a good trip though. We saw some sights (Hollywood Blvd, Santa Monica beach/pier, Beverly Hills), the wedding went well, we got some good pictures, and we even got to briefly meet up with kimmee and ovalteens at Amoeba Music. I definitely wish we could have spent more time with them, but the weekend was just too short. Out of everything in L.A., Amoeba was my favorite by far. It’s probably just as well that I don’t live near it or I’d probably spend obscene amounts of money there regularly.

Jolayne and I are heading out to LA tonight to go to a friend’s wedding this weekend. We won’t be there long but hopefully we’ll still get the chance to see some sights, get some good pictures, and possibly even hang out with Kimmee. It should be interesting since I’m totally the stereotypical paranoid midwesterner who’s convinced that LA is a gang-ridden, celebrity-infested, Mos Eisely-esque hive of villany, and that was even before I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Seriously though, it should be cool and it’s too bad we’ll only be there a couple of days.

Mobile GMaps is a Java app for cell phones that displays maps and satellite images from Google Maps. Pretty cool, seeing as how I now consider access to Google Maps to be a basic element of survival ranking somewhere in between food and shelter. Of course, most of what makes Google Maps what it is is its responsive interface, somethat that would no doubt be lost as a slow loading cell phone app. At least I would assume so. While I was surprised that my aging phone could run it, it turns out that my phone only supports .png images and this only displays the maps as .gif’s (since that’s what Google serves up the images as). As a result, I can see the interface but no maps and that’s no fun.