Heath C. Ice

Starcraft II looks beautiful with all graphics settings at high, but many people have computers that are a few years old and cannot handle these higher graphics settings. While I was messing around earlier today I decided to get a screenshot of the same scene with high graphics settings and then low graphics settings.

Starcraft II with High Graphics Settings

Starcraft II with Low Graphics Settings

Even at the lowest graphics settings, the games was easily playable. In some ways, the lower settings were easier use because everything was very basic and it was easier to see many of the units against the background. At times, I have found myself distracted by all of the extra details and colors in both the background and the units of Starcraft II. I plan to play with my settings until I find those which give me the best gameplay.

A friend has been successful in playing Starcraft II on Windows XP with just a 2GHz AMD Athlon processor. His computer does meet the bare minimum for video card and RAM. I do not know his exact graphics settings, but they were a mixture of low and medium. According to him, the gameplay was smooth and he had no issues. So, if you have a computer that is close to, but not quite, the stated “minimum requirements,” you may be surprised at just how playable the game is without having to shell out $100s for a new computer right now!

As a final note, to those that look at the difference between high settings and low settings and think, “the low settings look horrible,” how many times did you play (and possible recently played) using the graphics settings shown below?

Screenshot from Original Starcraft

Blizzard, you almost had your Downloader for Starcraft II correct. Fortunately, you are one of the companies smart enough to use bittorrent to distribute your installers and patches. This is a fact that I love as it typically leads to faster downloads and I am more than happy to contribute most of my upload bandwidth towards allowing others to download from me, which eases to burden on your servers and allows more people to gain access at one time. Please note, though, that I said SOME of my upload bandwidth. For a reason that I cannot fathom, other than laziness on your part, you have failed to include explicit upload/download rate controls in your Starcraft II Downloader. After 3 hours of downloading and having issues with websurfing (due to your program saturating my upload bandwidth), I finally had to disable peer-to-peer downloading and instead burden your server with the full download of Starcraft II. I may decide to turn on peer-to -peer connections when I go to bed in a few hours, but seeing as my download is progressing at the exact same speed either way, I really don’t care. Please, for the love of god and all that is holy, IMPLEMENT throttling in your downloaders from now on! Every bittorrent client I have ever used has this ability, except for yours!

As a sidenote while I am at it, Apple, IMPLEMENT TORRENTING SUPPORT AND THROTTLING IN ITUNES!!! I am sick of large podcast downloads making my internet unusable for half an hour or more at a time!

If there is one thing I cannot stand, it is the inability to do a simple job correctly; wether it is correctly making my sandwich at Subway or correctly erecting a city road sign. This post has to do with the latter. I first ask this simple question, “If you were erecting a road-sign, would you you be able to tell if it was facing the incorrect direction?” In the case of workers hired by my city, this is apparently a difficult feat. Pictured below is a speed limit sign that is on the left-hand side of the road and around 40 feet from a T-intersection. It is clearly facing the wrong direction, but at least a month after erection, it is still incorrect. It very clearly should be facing such that traffic turning onto the road sees that it is a 45mph zone (notice the text and orientation of the markings on the actual road), but it has yet to be corrected.

Anyways, I am simply annoyed that the city cannot hire workers who are capable of correctly erecting a road sign. I am also annoyed that months after this sign was placed, the city has yet corrected the very obvious error. This is not a sign placed on a random side-road, it is on one of the semi-major roads in this town!

Ok, so Apple likes to use the tagline “There’s an app for that” in it’s commercials, but this is somewhat ridiculous. Steve Jobs announced last week that people who bought “iPhone 4″s will receive a free bumper to fix the reception issues. In order to receive these bumpers, Apple created an iPhone App instead of simply putting the free bumper program on their website. It seems a bit excessive to me, but oh well.

I tried a McGangBang for dinner today. If you didn’t read my last post, the McGangBang is made by combining a McDonald’s double cheeseburger and a McDonald’s McChicken sandwich. The only modification I made was to not get lettuce on my McChicken. While McDonald’s burgers are not my favorite, the McGangBang was overall a pretty good sandwich. I did have a bit of an issue opening my mouth wide enough to take a bite of the sandwich, but a bit of smashing helped out.

The McGangBang used to be made by combining two items off of McDonald’s “Dollar Menu.” The double cheeseburger, however, has been moved off of the “Dollar Menu” and is now $1.29 (at least at this McDonald’s). If you don’t mind having one slice of cheese instead of two on you McGangBang though, you can make one by combining a McDouble and a McChicken, both on the “Dollar Menu”.

While I won’t push people over in an attempt to get to another McGangBang (mmmm, Ribwich), I will probably eat it again next time I end up at a McDonald’s. It is a lot of food for not a lot of money (with tax, mine was about $2.50). What this made me really want to try is combining an In-N-Out Double Double with a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Unfortunately, neither of these restaurants are in my town.

I hope to try the Mc10:35 soon which is a combination of an Egg McMuffin and a McDouble. I think that I will like it much more than the McGangBang.

I was reading through a thread on Reddit when a user asked someone from College Station, TX, “Please tell me it’s true you can order a McGangbang and they know what you’re talking about.” This definitely intrigued me so I had to find out what in the heck a McGangBang was.

A short visit to Google.com later, I found out that a McGangBang is a McDonald’s double cheeseburger with a McDonald’s McChicken sandwich placed in the middle. Minus the lettuce on the McChicken sandwich, I have to try one of these!

A McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger is 440 Calories and a McChicken is 360 Calories. This is a total of only 800 Calories. Granted, when I try it, it will be with a soda and fries, so that’s another 380 Calories for the fries and 250 Calories for the soda. Not the most healthy meal at a total of 1430 Calories, but I figure for something I might eat only every few months, it is fine. I’ll be sure to post so pictures and another blog when I finally get a chance to try this sandwich.

I also still need to try the “Mc10:35,” but that’s a whole other blog post.

EDIT: What I would really like to find is a Wendy’s and In-N-Out close together so that I can try a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich in the middle of an In-N-Out Double Double with sautéed onions.

My mom emailed me today to say that she never had morning sickness when she was pregnant with me. As I feared though, she thought that I was asking about the pregnancy in regards to the conditions I had at birth. Now, here’s the reason I asked her.

A couple of years ago I watched an episode of Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV where he talked about “supertasters.” These are people who have super-sensitive taste buds and dislike a lot of foods because of it. One of the key things supertasters hate is bitter flavor, and they are able to taste it in foods that other people can’t. Some of the signs of being a supertaster is an extreme dislike for coffee, heavy use of salt on food (as salt tends to mask bitter flavors and make them edible), an aversion to overly sweet things, and your mother having extreme morning sickness during pregnancy with you.

Now, I have never really disliked sweet things, so that is one against me, I guess. However, I hate coffee with a passion because it is somewhat bitter to start off with and then has an extremely bitter aftertaste, and I heavily use salt to make food palatable to me. When I was a kid, I also used to get strange looks from my parents when I disliked iced tea that was only a few hours old. I told them that after a few hours it developed a bitter taste that I could not stand. Also, neither of my parents drink coffee. I really don’t know why, but I assumed it was because they don’t like the taste either (which could indicate that they strongly tasted bitter flavors too).

What prompted me to finally ask my mother about her morning sickness a couple of years after first hearing about all of this? Last night, I tried a plant extract called stevia. It is supposed to be a sugar replacement that is 30 times sweeter than sugar and has an extremely low glycemic index, unlike sugar. When I tried it, it was sweet at first, but then had an extreme bitter aftertaste. This prompted me to look up more information about stevia being bitter. What I found was that a lot of people find stevia just fine, but some (especially supertasters) find it to have a very bitter aftertaste. This finally made me send an email to my mother.

Unfortunately (although she probably thinks different of it), she never had morning sickness. This doesn’t mean that I am not a supertaster, but supposedly it was one of the big markers. There is a test substance that those studying supertasters use to evaluate them called PROP which regular people find bitte, but tolerable, and supertasters find horrible.

Overall I am going to assume that I do not have this trait as my mother didn’t have any morning sickness and I don’t have an extreme aversion to sweetness.

I just emailed my mother to ask if she had an unusual amount of morning sickness while pregnant with me. I told her that I could not tell her why I was asking this question until after she answered it. Now, I had a handful of correctable birth defects so I am worried that she might think I am asking this in relation to them. Unfortunately, even though none of those is the reason I am asking, I don’t want to contaminate her answer to the question. I will post why after she answers. On the other hand, I am afraid she will be wondering if I am asking because I read something linking unusual morning sickness to birth defects, which is not the case. Anyways, I will post another blog once I get a response from my mother and I will give the full story about why I asked.

Surprisingly, this post has nothing to do with Pahrump being the nearest point from my house where prostitution is legal. This has 100% to do with the politics of Pahrump.

First, what happens in most of the United States when an election ends in a tie? There’s a special election to resolve the tie. In Pahrump, however, the tie is resolved via the casting of lots. Granted, this is true for any tied election in Nevada as Nevada Revised Statute 293.400 states “the county clerk shall summon the candidates who have received the tie votes to appear before the county clerk at a time and place designated by the county clerk and determine the tie by lot.” Here’s a link to more information about this story.

Second, there is currently a dispute between the Nye county sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office. A sheriff deputy arrested the district attorney in May for misuse of public funds. The problem is that the district attorney refuses to prosecute himself on the charges. More information can be found here.

I found both of these stories amusing and I figured you might also.

Here is a sample video using the rear facing hi-definition camera of my iPhone 4. Make sure to set the video’s playback resolution to 720p and watch it in fullscreen mode. The non-fullscreen video only has a width of 480pixels.

Here is a sample video of the same location using the forward facing camera of the iPhone 4. Make sure to set the video’s playback resolution to 480p. The non-fullscreen video should be wide enough to show full detail at the camera’s resolution, but watching it fullscreen will give a better appreciation of the differences in the two videos.