Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is everything I hoped and heard it was. Wow what a game. If you dig Star Wars and you have a Xbox go and get this game. You can see the influence of Baldur’s Gate in this game. The boys at Bioware have another hit on there hands.

I’ve already become a Jedi and I’m working through Dantooine right now. The D20 rules work perfect here and my guy is one duel wielding bad ass. I need to find another saber. Right now I’m using a lightsaber and a vibro sword. A cool thing they did with items is allowing some items to be upgraded. Kind of like the way items are handled in Diablo 2.

I guess I’ll be on vacation from Dark Age of Camelot for a little bit. But don’t worry I’ll still check in now and then while I enjoy my time in a good Star Wars rpg.

So I’m playing the Xbox game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and I’ve been enjoying running around in this rpg. It’s a game made by Bioware, the same folks that made the great Baldurs Gate games. Kotor (as it will be refered to here on) plays more like the above mentioned Baldurs Gate games than Bioware’s other rpg Neverwinter Nights.

And this is a good thing. Really it is. I mean come on who doesn’t want to have fake romances with computer controlled npc’s? And this little point is were I may have a problem with the game.

First let me explain the setup here. As long as you haven’t had your head buried in the sand for twenty years you will probably guess a Star Wars game is going to let you be a Jedi. And I say this because I don’t want to ruin anyones experience with the game.

My biggest problem is I want to be evil. I like being evil. I’m not Gawain evil, but I enjoy taking candy from babies. So I want to become a Dark Jedi. No problem there right? Wrong. I picked this goody two shoes Jedi chick and she constantly rides me about my “so called” evil deeds. And some of the things I do don’t really rate high on the evil meter.

How bad is it to threaten a weakling npc vendor with death so I can get a discount? Not that bad the way I figure it. But oh no, the game gives me a Dark Force Point! Bad me. And the nice Jedi chick tells me she’s so disappointed in me. This should be no big thing, right?

Well I notice that I reload my game and I go and be all nice with this little puss vendor. I pay full price for my purchase and everyone is happy. Except me. I didn’t really want to reload my game. It was some kind of guilty reaction to a stupid computer game character. I mean how bad is my life that I have to worry about how computer characters think about me?

Not a lot really is the answer I expect I will get. But of course I do plan on murdering this nice Jedi bitch and getting some nice Dark Force points for it. Of course the damn game probably won’t even let me kill members of my own party. But hey I wouldn’t be truly evil if I didn’t try.

Originally appeared at Digitalalloy.com

Ok I don’t often reveal secrets regarding myself. But today I am. Here it is. I hate being called buddy. I just can’t stand it. Nothing annoys me more. I really mean it. Even my friends don’t refer to me as a buddy. And my friends would be the only people I would allow calling me buddy. Of course people who don’t know me just won’t know this. If you read this you can consider yourself warned.

Of course there is nothing I can do to stop people from calling me buddy. It is a free world. I just wanted to make sure that this is known. An example of the usage buddy in a sentence (just so everyone understands what I’m talking about):

“I’m sorry for being late to work Buddy.”

There I hope everyone is on the same page now.

Here is a neat little program I found. Here is the info on what it is and what it does (cut and pasted from the site):

IECapt is a small command-line utility to capture Internet Explorer’s rendering of a web page into a BMP, JPEG or PNG image file.

You can use IECapt for example for batch processing, to make screenshots of the entire web page rather than the currently visible area or in a CGI script hosted on a Windows web server to provide access to IE’s rendering engine from non-Windows computers.

I can’t think of any real reason to use this little program. But it’s handy for taking a whole screenshot of a webpage. It does seem to default at a screen width of 800. I say that only because most sites are best viewed at 1024×768.

Ramada Inn getting $2 million make-over is a Beloit Daily News article that appeared on the 25th of this month. It covers a lot of ground, which makes it an interesting read. Here are some amusing bits, well amusing to me.

Tejany said he had been looking to invest in the hospitality business in this area and liked the location, but he also admitted the project has been a challenge.

“I couldn’t find anything right,” he said of the facility’s initial condition. “It was hard to know where to start, the parking lot, the roof, the signage …”

How about the air conditioning? That would be my suggestion.

The big news in this article is the part where it tells about the new hotel restaurant and bar. The name (and I’m not joking here) of the place is called Cattails. And no it’s not a titty bar. Here is a bit that tells about the menu of Cattails:

The food is described as new American with an infusion of Asian, French, Hispanic and Mediterranean.

“It’s fine food served with a flair in a relaxing atmosphere,” Thompson said.

Some of the house specialties include steak Dianne, chicken Marsala, pork tenderloin thermidore, veal Marsala, chicken Parmesan and pecan crusted chicken. One entree with an intriguing name is “devils on horseback” or sauteed veal scaloppini and cappriccola ham wrapped shrimp.

Flaming desserts also are served and salads prepared table side.

I’m not sure who their target audience is with a selection of fine cuisine like this. But I can tell you I sure as shit won’t eat there. Not with a menu like that. And what the fuck does “new American” mean exactly? Of course me being a “common” employee (peon) I have yet had the opportunity to sample this selection of “house specialties”, which makes it hard for me to recommend Cattails to the guests. They ask me I tell them to go across the street.

One last bit from this piece and I’m done. This is an example of how informed employees are of the goings on at the hotel.

The conference area will be renamed the Rock River Valley Conference Center with each of the five rooms named after the counties which have come together to form marketing strategies, including: Rock County in Wisconsin and in Illinois, Winnebago, Ogle, Stephenson and Boone counties.

News to me. It’s a good thing I read the paper or it may have been ages before I knew about this one. This kind of thing is nothing new. Follow the link at the beginning to get the bits I didn’t cover.

So there has been some minor excitement over my last post. I heard through the grapevine the owner was pretty pissed when he saw his name here on my site. I made a Disclaimer page and was going to make people click an “I agree” or an “I disagree” link to get to the main page. But then I remembered I hate that kind of shit.

What I decided to do is just ban the ip and the domain of the hotel’s internet access. Fuck them, they can go without my site. For those that want to join me in banning these simple minded fools block this domain and ip: direcpc.com (66.82.20.150).

Also I figured it was a good time to explain some more of these concepts that I hold dear. If you don’t like seeing your name here at the site I have advice for you. Don’t get your name printed in the newspaper. Because it brings me great joy to explain to you Fair Use. I don’t do something here at the site unless I’ve done my research when it comes to the “getting my ass fired/sued” kind of deal.

For those who savey the law, you can point your browsers to this Copyright Office page which explains it in that lovely hard to understand law language. Now if this last page was to much for you give this Stanford University Libraries page a try. My favorite bit from the Stanford page sums it up nice and simple:

In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner.

Now because I’ve grown use to dealing with my friends children (who are great, but can be whiny) I have removed the owners name from my quote from the Daily News article. Not that it makes a difference. All someone has to do is follow the link and they will see who’s name it is I have replaced with <Name Removed>. This whole thing is funny. And it adds to the odd little mystique of this website.

And from know on I will always replace names from the newspaper articles I quote with <Name Removed>, because these people apparently have something to hide or they are embarrassed when questions are asked. I find this all very amusing. Of course I’m just a stupid night auditor who couldn’t possibly know what I’m talking about.

City of South Beloit aids Ramada Inn opening is a Beloit Daily News article from the 5th of this month. Per my usual with this kind of thing, here are a few quotes followed by my comments/opinions:

The South Beloit City Council approved Monday allotting $10,000 in Hotel Tax Funds to help pay for the Sept. 19 grand opening of the Ramada Inn of Greater Beloit.

Well that sure is mighty white of the City Council. Everyone put the Sept. 19 grand opening on your calenders. This next quote brings up some skeletons in the hotels closet:

The Ramada Inn has undergone more $1.5 million in renovations over the last year, and another $500,000 is expected to go into the hotel and conference center, said Kimberly Thompson, director of sales for hotel.

The money will be used to help market the grand opening. Thompson explained a Mardi Gras theme is planned, with entertainment and food centered around the New Orleans-style event.

Alas poor Mardi Gras themed party, I knew you well. Do you remember the last time Mardi Gra and the hotel tried to mix? No? I do. Of course this next and final bit was also pretty amusing:

Cattails Bar & Grill, will have its grand opening at 5 p.m. Wednesday. In addition to a ribbon cutting, a press conference is scheduled. A private reception will take place after the press conference.

A press conference? I’m sure that was a hoot. It’s funny how this newspaper article appeared on the 5th and here it is the 7th already and no article is in the paper about this titty bar sounding Cattails grand opening and press conference yet.

**Update**
For those really interested in the sounds like a titty bar named restaurant at the hotel, head over to this page.