Distractions: UTClassicPack]l[

The other day, as I was investigating my Google Alert hit at Unreal Admin, I ran across this link.

Here's the straight poop:

After months of hard work, and 3 years after the release of the second Classic Pack, the UT Classic Pack ]I[ is now complete! Some fans of the Unreal 1 classics might tell you, "They just don't make them like they used to". The old mapping styles of the first Unreal simply don't exist anymore. This hefty map pack contains thirty-four handpicked classic maps from the original Unreal, converted over to Unreal Tournament manually. Among the conversions are three maps from the GW Press Add-On Level pack - made by official Epic mappers back in the day. This add-on has since been lost and is very hard to come by. Other conversions include earlier works from authors who work for Epic today, along with other popular mappers in the Unreal community. Many people will recognize the names in this list of chosen maps!

I suppose I missed the Second UT Classic Pack, but last year a ran a little side server called "BOT House Old Skewl" consisting of maps from UT 1, which came bundled with my (1999 vintage) Voodoo 3000 video card. I also converted them (poorly) to UT99. Had to because they wouldn't run otherwise.

I loved Unreal 1 back in the day, but truthfully the reason "they just don't make them like they used to" is that the maps sucked ass. For the most part, with exceptions, they're "Battle Boxes" connected by tunnels, teleports, and doors. Ho-hum.

Regardless, or in spite of, all that, I downloaded it anyway and threw together a server called UTClassicPack]I[ Online.

Absolutely zero points for originality on that one. Maybe I should have called it "WARNING: UTClassicPack]I[". Maybe I will but I'll keep it like it is for now.

It's extremely minimalist. 6 players, 10 frags, 5 minutes per game.

Five minutes seems a little austere, but you will understand it when you play these maps. Five minutes is about all you'll be able to take.

And oh yeah... I threw Relics in there. I love Relics. And as always it's LOW GRAVITY.

No Robo-Hinky on this one, though.

I don't expect a lot of traffic on this server but things have been slow so what the Hell. I've only used 80M out of my 5G of disk space and 0.01% of my bandwidth allotment on the GoDaddy server, and I've still got two more years left on the contract. Might as well use it.

If you're a dialup user, the game will be over before you download the files, so I put the Classic Pack here if you want to download it before playing.

Booboo Jeebies, Revisited

Oh my, that didn't take long at all...

Like Someone's Walking Over Your Grave

As I have mentioned before, I use (abuse?) Google News Alerts extensively. One of the first was "Gartner says". This particular alert has been very rewarding at work, since upper management has a serious hard-on for whatever comes out of Gartner's corporate pie-hole.

There's the occasional basketball coach or county sheriff coincidentally named "Gartner", but they sponsor so many corporate powwows and dog-and-pony shows that barely a day goes by without a Gartner hit or two.

The latest... and strangest... of the "Gartner says" alerts advise businesses how to leverage a presence in Second Life.

Excuse me? Sounds like there's a Gartner analyst with too much free time on his hands.

Early this year I added an alert for "hinkydink". Shortly thereafter I was deluged with news-ish stories about Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, an old time Chicago political boss. So I changed the alert to "mrhinkydink". Now I mostly get alerts for that fellow on Daily Kos ( hey, Hink, wanna buy mrhinkydink.com? Make me an offer! ).

But every now and then I get a hit. Today I found this one in my mailbox:



Creepy. Somebody fingered me at Unreal Admin.

In fact at this moment (8:19AM EST 09/10/07) that same link is the Number 2 hit for "mrhinkydink" on Google (first being, of course, our buddy at Daily Kos).

Oddly, my horoscope for today advised me that someone had "more information than I suspected" and that I should "listen to the omens".

This shit gives me the booboo jeebies.