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Mike “Gabe” Krahulik doesn’t like Tiger Woods Golf (scroll down to his entry, under Jerry’s).

I don’t know why I keep buying Tiger Woods games every year. …Tiger is essentially an RPG. That is to say as you play, your skills improve and you get better equipment. That’s just not what I want from a golf game. Starting Tiger Woods is like walking on to the golf course wearing vendor trash and everyone else is in their tier 8 gear. You can not compete unless you put the time in. What I want is a golf game that’s more like Halo or any other shooter. What I mean is that everyone has essentially the same character and what determins the winner is the players skill.

Personally, I enjoy the heck out of the “RPG” aspect of Tiger Woods; my only real complaint is that it’s possible to get your player SO good that you can do things like shoot a 52 at Pebble Beach, which is just ridiculous, although part of the problem is that game is too easy. That seems like a self-evident statement, but the problem is that once your player gets good, the possibility of making mistakes is just removed. Screw up a little on the timing of the drive? No problem, your player is 110% in the category, so it still went 370 yards, straight down the fairway. Same thing with putting and chipping. My Tiger Woods player hasn’t failed to eagle a par 5 in recent memory. Why? Because I’m on the green in 2. And not “on the green 75 feet from the hole” 2. I mean, it was a 600 yard par 5, I drove the ball 380 yards, then 7-ironed it the remaining 220 and stuck it 12 feet from the pin. My guy gets a hole in one every 2 or three rounds.

Since you never make mistakes, the mental aspect of golf is pretty much removed. Ugly dogleg? Doesn’t matter, my player hits a 9 iron nearly 200 yards. I can go right over the trees. Lots of water around the hole? Not to worry. My shots never vary more than about a half-degree from the point of aim. Let’s put the brains back in the game! Golf shots should occasionally go off-course, something that you’ll have to account for when lining up a shot.

The other problem with the “RPG” aspect is that you start the game fully capable of shooting in the high 70s, particularly if you’ve played it before. What I’d prefer to see is starting the game shooting like 109, losing balls, occasionally failing to drive it past the ladies tee and then having to play the remainder of the hole with your schlong hanging out of your shorts. Just like real life!

As you play, you develop skills, so after a few dozen rounds you find yourself creeping into the low 90s, then the 80s, entering a few amateur tournaments, and then finally getting good enough to enter the professional stuff.

I realize that not everybody wants a career mode that doesn’t start them off as a semi-decent professional; I’m saying the option should be there. It wouldn’t be hard, really. A few more lines of code.

Gabe’s complaint seems to be that he can’t just play the game without going through the career. I don’t have the latest version of Tiger Woods yet, but can’t you just play? You don’t have to do career mode, right? Why can’t he just fire up a match and play as Tiger Woods?

I want to see everyone start with a character that has the same basic skills. Then give everyone the same number of points that they can invest in their character to improve things like driving or putting. Then that’s it, no more points no more stat upgrades. Now you’re talking about creating a custom build for your character and then matching your skills with that build up against everyone else.

This does have merit. I’d definitely enjoy a game where you spend a few minutes outfitting your player with boss points and then go up against somebody. (I’d spend almost nothing on driving, since it’s been well documented that you drive for show, but putt for dough.)

Immagine if everytime you tackled a guy in Madden your players got stronger. Then immagine [sic] you could buy footballs that flew further or were easier to catch. Sure some people might like it but most fans would say “this isn’t football”. Well that is essentially how Tiger Woods works and I guess I’m just tired of it.

But Madden, as well as NCAA Football, include this as an option! You can make a player, have a career, and slowly build him into an MVP/Heisman winner! Also, you can just fire up the game and play. I can’t imagine that EA took this ability out of Tiger Woods Golf, so I’m not entirely sure why Gabe can’t do it.

Huh. Another older woman gettin’ it on with a teenaged boy. Happens all the time, let’s open the article to see if she’s hot OH GOD MY EYES

(Mother I’d Like to Run From, if you couldn’t figure it out.)

As a father who is also a geek, I have a question for nurses, childcare professionals, physicists, etc. Can someone explain to me why I can’t warm breast milk in a microwave?

Sarah and I got into a small argument the other day, and I acceded to her wishes, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. When you heat a liquid in a microwave, it tends to heat unevenly. This is why anything you heat in a nuker usually have to be stirred halfway through. So when heating breast milk, you end up with small sections of the milk that still cold, and sections that are infant-searingly hot. Obviously this is bad. The recommended technique is that you heat up a bunch of water in the microwave, and then sit the bottle of milk in it for a few minutes to warm it.

I did that the other day, and left the bottle in for longer than anticipated; the outside got quite warm, while the inside was sort of tepid. So: I shook it up. This caused the colder milk in the middle to mix with the hotter milk on the outside, bringing the whole thing to just about body temperature.

Why can’t I do that when microwave heating? Throw the thing in the nuker for 5 seconds and then shake the bejebus out of it. I don’t stick it in Josephine’s mouth without testing it on my arm either way, so what’s the problem? Why can’t I do this? Why?

One interesting side effect of my current diet is that it’s gotten me cooking more frequently. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but it’s hard to find the time, particularly if one works all day. If you want to cook anything complicated, it can take an hour or more of preparation; if you don’t get home until 6, suddenly you’re not eating until 7:30, which is unacceptable when small children are involved. It’s no wonder busy families tend to eat fast food, or ready-made meals in boxes from Stouffer’s.

When dieting, though, the easiest way to fill up without taking in a lot of calories is to eat vegetables. Salads are highly recommended, but boring; after a while I long for something with a little more flavor. Cooked vegetables are the next best thing, but the “vegetarian” ready-made meals you find are horrifible. The solution? Slice up your own veggies and throw ’em in a hot pan. A cabinet full of tasty spices also makes a big difference; curry powder, for example, makes anything, even plain cauliflower, into Special South Asian Cuisine. Yum.

It also helps having Sarah home with the kids for the summer, because it means she can get a head start on dinner. She’s awfully good about timing it such that I can come home, quickly slice some veggies and fry ’em up, and she’s already got a low-calorie meat like pork or chicken a-roasting. (Last night was pork tenderloin, and it was better than sex.) It seems to be working so far; in the first 9 days of my diet, I went from 271 pounds to 261. To be sure, a lot of that is the heralded “water weight,” but hey, I’ll take it.

Now I just need to start going to the gym. I’ll, uh, get right on that.

If you’ve an eye for pleasant vistas and fine architecture, it’s time you checked out BLDGBLOG. It’s full of interesting tidbits about urban planning and building design, and the occasional poignant observation:

Malfunctioning fire alarms going off inside foreclosed homes have become a major distraction for fire departments in suburban Arizona, according to ABC15 News. Fire fighters, however, cannot legally enter a property unless they see smoke or have obtained the owner’s permission. But in an era of bank ownership and rampant foreclosure, even finding the owners can take weeks.

The result is that “neighbors have to listen to the alarm until the battery dies, which can take days.”

First we were surrounded by ruins, and then those ruins began to sing.

What in the crap?

Oh, I believe it all right.

If you’re a dork like me, you love to read things like this: 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes. Note that while it says “PC,” it means this in the broadest sense; Macs and Apples are included, as are a number of old “legacy” systems. If you like that, you should also check out: the Ten Worst PC Keyboards Of All Time. The modern keyboard has become so universal (aside from minor differences in backspace keys and the like) that we forget how insane some of the early keyboards are. I had forgotten how kludgey my old C64 keyboard was.

Now that digital photography is all the rage^[1], I think it’s time to stage an intervention: folks, any printer you can afford is not going to make a nice photo.

I know HP and Epson and Canon have promised you that your printers will make quality prints, but they won’t. They will make “half-decent” prints for a short while, and then things will get clogged and the pictures will be streaky. Even when they’re new, the shots come out grainy, with colors out of a cross-processing nightmare. IT’s fine if you just want a picture of your kids to go in your wallet, but here’s the thing: too many people, myself included, are hanging framed artistic shots that look like seven asses in a speedo.

There’s no reason to put up with this. Sure, you have to wait a while, but places like Shutterfly can produce fantastic, inexpensive prints and mail them straight to your door, and they charge you nothing to store your pictures (unlike Kodak, which is now asking you to cough up for that service). There are even options wherein a local pharmacy or megamart can produce them for you to be picked up later in the day! Walgreens will do it, and also Walmart, although if you’re like me going to Walmart causes me to donate vast sums to whichever political party supports eugenics.

If you’re looking at a photo printer, ignore internet advice or anything you might read in Consumer Reports. The only thing you need to know about photo printers is this: can you afford the one you’re looking at? If so, it’s a piece of crap. The only photo printers worth their salt are the ones purchased by professional printing services, which are thousands of dollars. You do not have thousands of dollars to spare, or you wouldn’t be reading this: you’d be sitting on a beach in Cabo drinking heavily. At least, I sure would.

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1: Apparently it’s 2004 in my brain.

(From ICanHazCheezburger.com)

Ah, sweet, sweet desperation.



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