Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition (Mac version): Initial Impressions

Posted on December 9, 2013 by keithyw

Since my gaming rig died and the time to fix it is an unknown quantity at this time, I decided to continue my distraction with Baldur’s Gate 2 by getting the Enhanced Edition for my Macbook Pro. I’m actually quite happy that they had a Mac version since I’m at the point in my life where I feel that the PC has lost almost all its value. That said, I wanted to go into my experience thus far with the Enhanced Edition.

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PHP: References, Scoping, Arrays and Function Design

Posted on December 8, 2013 by keithyw

Surprisingly, a lot of PHP code that I see in the industry rarely makes use of the ideas of references. However, references are an exceptionally powerful tool in the programming world because it can mean the difference in terms of memory management and performance. Quite a few people might not grasp some of the basic ideas behind references and it’s something I want to go into in this blog.

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Why You Should Never Buy from Alienware nor Dell

Posted on December 8, 2013 by keithyw

In the past, I had some pretty terrible experiences with Dell computers. On two separate occasions, I lost my drives just close to when the warranties were up. Part of me does not believe this was a coincidence. Fortunately, laptop drives are pretty easy to replace so I didn’t bother trying to replace them through Dell. However, I did lose some data which wasn’t entirely backed up to one of my spare drives. I did lose my Windows partition because they started to not ship Windows CDs any longer and required you to restore from a special sector on the original disc. Why they didn’t include a spare disc with the system, I have no idea.

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jQuery: Autocomplete Issue with Select

Posted on December 6, 2013 by keithyw

I found an interesting undocumented consequence when you override the _renderItem function with one of your own. Most people might attempt to follow the format from the code example which shows a line that appends an “<a>” tag to the string (specifically as follows):

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Baldur’s Gate 2: Best Route Quest Route?

Posted on December 5, 2013 by keithyw

When you play Baldur’s Gate 2 a few times, you eventually learn what works for you in terms of the game progression. Shadows of Amn is pretty flexible in giving you a fairly non-linear setup so you’re essentially open to do the various quests in almost any order you want (outside of certain key story areas). The real question becomes, “Which is the best questing path to take?”

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Baldur’s Gate 2: Perfect Combo Party? 3 Custom and 3 NPCs?

Posted on December 4, 2013 by keithyw

Before getting into something I’ve started up recently, let me just rant about how my Alienware just bit the big one today. I am having a repair guy come down to replace the motherboard, which I think has been going after a while (I thought it was the video card or memory), so hopefully I can get setup in a few days again on my gaming rig. Before that happened though, I decided to reroll my party once again and want to talk a little about some ideas I had been experimenting with in Baldur’s Gate 2.

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World of Warcraft: Ghostcrawler Is Gone But Will That Change Anything?

Posted on December 1, 2013 by keithyw

Of course, one of the biggest inside stories over at Blizzard and for World of Warcraft is the imminent departure of lead developer Ghostcrawler. It’s hard to say the exact reasons why he’s leaving but for some it might be a major victory as his departure might symbolize for certain people in the community the downward slope for World of Warcraft. Yet in all honesty, you have to question whether or not him leaving will set the course of the game in the direction that the fans want.

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World of Warcraft: Enchants, Statistics and Gemming Discussion for Warlords of Draenor

Posted on November 30, 2013 by keithyw

In the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion, one of the major features is actually a removal: enchants, statistics and gemming will not be the same. Part of this will stem from removing the reforging aspect and eliminating statistics which some feel probably do not really belong in the game anymore. I want to discuss some of the ideas of the pro’s and con’s in this direction that Blizzard is moving towards.

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Movie Review: Wolverine 2013

Posted on November 30, 2013 by keithyw

Since I don’t have anyone to hang out with for seeing movies, I tend to be a little late to the game when it comes to the blockbusters and such. As a result, I end up waiting until they come out on iTunes so I can pick them up. Unfortunately, that tends to bulk up my list as I’m so behind when it comes to movies, not to mention having zero idea of what’s good or not. That said, my choices for last night was between Wolverine and Star Trek: Into the Darkness. Rather than flipping a coin, I asked a few friends which was the better of the two and I got this little token.

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YouTube: Google Why Do You Keep Sucking?

Posted on November 19, 2013 by keithyw

I just checked into one of my YouTube accounts and noticed that the layout for the homepage as a logged in user has changed yet again. About a week ago, I had issues with users’ channel pages where the top menu bar disappeared under the banner. I managed to get around that limitation through adding the /videos aspect to the URL. Still, this entire episode with Google/YouTube is making me increasingly frustrated with their services.

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