moving parts of the kasper clan

Here’s an interesting e-mail exchange between me and the Ubisoft folks in regards to their amazing new game, Splinter Cell, Chaos Theory…

Customer (Jason Kasper) - 06/06/2005 01:04 PM
Hi there.  I would very much like to buy Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, but I don’t want my children to have to listen to all of the swearing.  Is there a code or patch or preference that I can use to turn off the swearing or talking?

Thank you!

Response (GREG) - 06/06/2005 04:16 PM
Jason, unfortunately there is no profanity filter in this game.  This is not a childrens game.  Even if you remove the language, you are still shooting people…

LOL. I don’t know why I find this funny, but I do. I suppose that I’d made an unconscious decision at some point that there’s a line of acceptability for games for my children to be able to enjoy with me, and that games which involve fighting (Street Fighter, Star Wars ROTS), shooting, hunting, and stealth (Mech Assault, Splinter Cell, Halo, Star Wars Republic Commando) are okay, but games which have swearing/vulgarity/profanity are not. Now, this might seem like a contradiction but I’m not sure it is.

Case in point: I have played for hours and hours with my kids, working through Splinter Cell, and we have a blast together. So I bought Splinter Cell, Chaos Theory expecting to have fun with my kids again as we play through the game. The game itself is absolutely amazing (you can finally play split-screen co-op mode!), but apparently Ubisoft felt that they needed to add more realism to the game by having more realistic cursing and vulgarity. I REALLY wish they hadn’t.

I guess it comes down to this…. I am fully able to explain to my children that there are amazing, brave, real-life people in our country that are specially trained to protect us and they have to do some of the things that are in the game (stealth, killing, break/enter). But I cannot stand letting them hear the kind of vulgarity, swearing, and threatening language that Ubisoft has put into this last Splinter Cell game. I protect them from being exposed to that from movies, and I will continue to protect them from being exposed to that from games as well. Will they ever be exposed to it? Yeah, unfortunately, they will. But that’s far different than ushering it into my living room and helping to feed it into their minds now.

So, Ubisoft, I have returned your $45 game, and you won’t be making that money back from me as long as you insist on adding this kind of language to your games.

I have now joined the Borg Collective officially, I can say, and have moved all of my photos off of my personal website and onto my Flickr account. Time will tell the wisdom of this move, I suppose. I can say that the features that Flickr offers are WAY cooler than anything else I’ve seen in this space. I had previously been using Singapore, but became quickly disenchanted by the lack of good themes/templates and the lack of integration into WordPress.

On the other hand, Flickr offers a VERY good service, gives tons of storage space (far more than I need, methinks), allows for a variety of ways to upload your pictures, provides a really cool interface (the slideshow thing is really neat!!), uses cross-platform solutions like Flash, and has followed Google’s example of not being evil. Nice job, Flickr!

My only point of contention is that I was silly enough to rush out and spend $24.95 for their pro account, since their free account only allows you to have 3 sets (albums). But other than that, I’m pretty happy. Of course, there is that little niggling thought that I have lost some element of control, being that I’m relying on Flickr to not do bad things, but I’m trying to suppress that…. =:)

I don’t know why I didn’t think of looking sooner, but after struggling with the official Flickr Uploadr in Linux with Wine (the tool itself works great, but the windows file selector doesn’t allow you to preview images, and I can’t find a windows tool that works in wine that does show previews/thumbnails and works with drag-and-drop to the Flickr Uploadr), I decided to search for a Flickr Uploadr solution for Linux.

I found this sweet little jewel of a tool that allows uploading images to my flickr account, and it works perfectly well with drag-and-drop from konqueror. Nice job Michele!! =:)

Yay! =:) Drag-and-drop doesn’t work, but the program installs and runs fine in Linux with wine!! The versions I’m running (I’m using Mandrake LE 2005 (10.2) these days):

$ rpm -qa | grep -i wine
wine-20040505-10.mdk10.2.thac
libwine1-20040505-10.mdk10.2.thac

SKB2103044

Originally uploaded by vanRijn.

I am so proud of my brother! He is an amazing athlete. Our Dad would be proud. =:)

I’ve posted all of my Josh Kasper pictures to my Flickr account, so you can go check them out if you want. Or better yet, check them out from my site (awesome Flickr plugin!!)

So, I’ve been using Singapore for the last few years to manage my photos, and it’s alright–not too horrible, it’s free, it does a pretty good job, has a couple of template options, etc. However, I really would like something that would let me tie into WordPress better. To Singapore’s credit, they do allow for this by providing an easy way to do this with the external template. And I’ve used this method to fit it into my site, and it looks moderately good.

The one thing I’d REALLY like to be able to do is for the Wordpress search to also search my photos–so that a search on my site would be all-encompassing, not just just a search of my blog. This doesn’t happen with this Singapore integration. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that this won’t happen with any photo/gallery plugin, etc., which means that I’m going to have to try to get htdig running on my site and use it instead of the built-in search. Ick and dangit. Anyone have a better way around this? Or does anyone have any experience in replacing the built-in Wordpress search with htdig?

But there’s always something cool about trying new stuff out. And in this case, that new stuff is Flickr.

I’ve heard about it and seen other people using it, but never looked that much at it, but lately I’ve been looking closer at it, and I’m pretty impressed!! Their free service allows you to upload 20 megs of photos per month, and they have some really nice features, like their Flash-based photo organizer, tags, communities, etc. And the fact that you can upload your pictures via e-mail is way cool, being that I refuse to run Windows, and can’t afford to run Mac. (They do provide a Windows-based upload tool that I downloaded and I’m going to see if I can get it to run in Wine).

But the 2 uber-cool features that finally got me motivated enough to play with Flickr are:

1. Automatic creation of blog entries on one or more of your selection of blogs, and they work with all the popular ones too, including WordPress, which is what I use.
2. A really cool Flickr plugin for WordPress!! I’ve gotten it installed and working, thanks to some help by several sources in getting it to work specifically with WordPress 1.5 (by the way, WordPress 1.5.1.2 is out, surprise!).

So anyway, I think I’ll start uploading all of my old photos to my Flickr account (might take me a little while, since I have 34 megs in Singapore currently, and I can only upload 20 megs per month). Also, I have more than 200 photos in Singapore currently, and I’m not sure if I want to pay $24.95 per year just so that all of my photos will be visible on Flickr. Maybe I’ll just not upload all of my photos, though that kind of sucks. So, if anyone is wondering what to get me for *checking calendar*… an early birthday or Christmas present, a Flickr pro upgrade would fit the bill nicely. =;)

I guess I was thinking that it would be neat to have a different /index.php than my WordPress blog. But… well, I never have and never will and there’s no point in it begin there. So I’m moving everything back to http://movingparts.net/ from http://movingparts.net/b/. Sorry for the chaos. =:/

My Teen Bible Quiz Team!!! =:)

Originally uploaded by vanRijn.
Forgot to mention this previously, but since I’m playing with Flickr, I figured I’d give it a shot. Here’s a quick shot of my team outside of the church we spent 2 days at in REALLY tough competition. Check out my Flickr pages for more pictures….

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.