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Luckless

I’ve just finished my second run through Hordes of the Underdark. It was much easier playing as a Sorcerer and I easily breezed through combat encounters which were extremely challenging for my Druid build.

I did, however, have considerable difficulty battling the Ultimate Bad Guy. Much to my chagrin, I discovered the folly of neglecting Persuade and Intimidate, and my decision to use only two savegame slots didn’t help matters either. Still, I did manage to (eventually) complete the game thanks to a lucky break.

Speaking of luck (specifically, the bad kind), here’s an amusing screenshot from HotU:

Luckless

If you think that was unlucky, try waiting several months for the English Premier League to start, getting all excited about having one of the matches of the season right at the beginning and then discovering the satellite decoder has decided to go on the fritz on the day of that match. That’s unlucky.

Anyway, Chelsea edged it thanks to a goal by Gudjohnsen — we’ll have to wait a little longer to see Ferguson and his men wipe that smug look off Mourinho’s mug — but it sounds as if United had trouble converting their superior possession into goals. Ferguson’s side had the same trouble last season against teams like Portsmouth and Wolves and I do hope this isn’t going to be a recurring theme this season as well.

Posted in Football, Games.

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By Gobi – Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Neo Sapien

Alpha Ranger

A digi-doodle of a Xevoz Alpha Ranger.

Posted in Doodles, Pix, Toys, Xevoz.

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By Gobi – Sunday, August 15, 2004

A boring non-event

Franklin Foer characterises Iraq’s surprising victory over Portugal as a meaningless victory because Olympics football is “a boring non-event.”

Foer is right in pointing out there isn’t much interest in Olympic football matches and he’s also right in acribing this to the limitations imposed on the Olympics football tournament e.g. each squad may only have three players over 23.

But I think he’s wrong about the reasons for those limitations. According to Foer:

With the calendar so jammed, the soccer world simply has no need for another major tournament. And the game’s elite can’t afford the physical toll of another long event.

I think the more pertinent point is FIFA doesn’t want the Olympics tournament to overshadow their own little soiree and FIFA should be worried because contrary to Foer’s claim that the Olympics gold medal has no appeal to footballers, Ronaldo insisted on playing in the Olympics despite the protestations of his manager.

Posted in Football.

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By Gobi – Sunday, August 15, 2004

WordPress: Switching directories

I was a little disconcerted to find my WordPress login page had been cached by Googlebot and I was particularly alarmed when Googlebot later spidered its way to the lost password screen. Now that might not have been a genuine security threat but I didn’t want to take any chances. Nobody wants to be a Googledork, right?

The simple fix is to simply tell Googlebot and other search engine spiders to steer clear of my WordPress administration files. This can be accomplished by the use of a robots.txt file in the root directory.

But I now had a new problem. My blog entries were in the same directory as those admin files and the robots.txt file was also preventing search engines from indexing my entries. I’m not big-headed enough to believe that this site would be tremendously useful to most folks but there might be an entry or two in here with useful links for others if they could only find it. The trick was to allow the search engines to index my blog entries without indexing the admin files.

So I moved my blog entries to the root directory. The WordPress site has instructions for doing this and the process is straightforward. I did lose the ability to edit the blog entries directly but it’s a relatively minor inconvenience and I’m willing to accept the trade-off for the added peace of mind.

Posted in Blogging, Software, WordPress.

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By Gobi – Saturday, August 14, 2004

Time to split

I’ve been trying to clear up space on my hard disk by moving files to CD-Rs and ran into a slight problem. I had a couple of large video files which wouldn’t fit on a single CD-R.

Here’s where HJSplit enters the picture. It’s a tiny (174KB!) freeware utility that splits a large file (up to 10GB) into smaller chunks. There are more elegant solutions for splitting video files but I love HJSplit’s simplicity. There’s an online manual but this really is an idiot-friendly program. Cons? The only thing I can think of is that you need HJSplit when rejoining the split files but the program is so tiny you can store it with the split files.

Posted in Software.

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By Gobi – Friday, August 13, 2004