If you haven’t played Company of Heroes yet, get on Steam and pick up the gold pack. It’s not only an amazing and well balanced RTS, it’s WWII. So you know…3picz0r!

Only once you have acquired the glory that is Company of Heroes can you be a true cohcaine addict.

There is a patch coming out soon that has quite a few changes. Here is a review of a change being made to one of our favorite units. I didn’t edit this convo to make it easier to follow, as many people do. This is 2008, if you can’t follow an IM convo by now please proceed out your door and do some cartwheels on the nearest 6 lane street or freeway.

Crispy Lettuce: why did they boost the calliopes, seriously, goddamn
Cookie Monster: maybe the calliope will be a cost-free unit and comes standard with the base
Cookie Monster: next
Crispy Lettuce: haha
Crispy Lettuce: i think the only balance to make that fair would be to make the rockets propelled by an armored bicycle
Cookie Monster: and gets a 50 foot wide spinning saw blade attachment that spins around the unit chopping all infantry in half
Crispy Lettuce: and infantry can take it out
Crispy Lettuce: lol
Cookie Monster: haha, like a dude carryiong a rocket into the base on a bike?
Crispy Lettuce: then it can proclaim, over a loud speaker, “im the juggernaut, bitch!” as it spams enemy bases with rockets
Cookie Monster: lol
Cookie Monster: bitch, get off me, dont you know im the juggernaut baby
Crispy Lettuce: no like 6 guys pedaling a giant armored bycicle
Crispy Lettuce: all u have to do is roll a grenade underneath it and its down
Crispy Lettuce: 30% chance to tip over when turning as well
Crispy Lettuce: i think that would balance it out
Cookie Monster: and if destroyed, all rockets immediatly return to home base and do 500% damage
Crispy Lettuce: lmfao
Cookie Monster: man, sounds like a nice unit to me, I dont know about you
Crispy Lettuce: sounds like a secret SS unit to me, lol
Cookie Monster: taht tipping bonus is awesome, 70% chance that it WONT flip
Crispy Lettuce: haha
Cookie Monster: we should do a Mod
Cookie Monster: Company of Bikes
Cookie Monster: just an entire army of rediculous bike combat
Cookie Monster: and maybe some explosive farm animals
Cookie Monster: the KCH have heroic level weapon and critical stats
Cookie Monster: its like a 3 man squad of brit officers
Crispy Lettuce: lmfao
Crispy Lettuce: oh god, here comes a tandem! run!
Cookie Monster: haha
Cookie Monster: I’d like to see a 5 man Grenadier squad on a bike, maybe one dude pedaling while all the others are in some kind of acrobatic loop
Crispy Lettuce: yes
Crispy Lettuce: all the while tossing grenades about
Cookie Monster: forming a “machine gun ring”

Ok, so it took me awhile to get around to posting about ETech again. I’m at the Phoenix Film Festival this weekend and a film Friday night prompted a major theme from ETech that I wanted to talk about: Activism.

ETech 08 was still very Web 2.0 centric. This time, instead of cheerleading for new companies joining the 2.0 bandwagon in an innovative way, it was about focusing 2.0 technologies on real subjects and impacting change. Sure we can share music listening habits, photos, create our own entertainment communities and generate maps with data that is uniquely meaningful to each visitor but can any of that same technology be used to tackle real issues?

The answer at ETech 08 was not only “yes” it was “check out what we have already done”. The two main areas where change was being demonstrated through Web 2.0 technologies were Governmental Reform and Global Warming.

Social Web methods are being employed to collect massive amounts of carbon emissions data in order to promote and gauge change. Screen scraping and API technologies are being leveraged to generate websites that are positively affecting Copyright Law. And now, a new political reform movement has been born by the author of the Creative Commons project.

What does that have to do with the film I mentioned? Well, it was all about activism.

The Orange Chronicles documented the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2004. Ukrainians saw a chance to overthrow leaders with heavy Russian influences and went for it. Fear tactics and numerous instances of voter fraud were perpetrated by the Russian backed candidate to “win” the majority vote. When the results were announced a revolution erupted in the capital and spread through the country.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians peacefully demonstrated for something like three months…in the heart of winter. Fucking crazy. People from both sides of the line filled the streets and through all of the frustration and passion there were no riots, looting, police brutality, etc. It was inspiring to see a nation’s people band together and force positive change.

I realized I had heard very little about this at the time. I remember the Dioxin assassination attempt on the Ukrainian favored candidate, but that’s about it. Nothing about the scale of this movement. At one point there were millions of demonstrators in the capital city. It didn’t surprise me though, our country had endured a flaky election just a few years before and the same genius was up for reelection. Unicorn forbid the US population sees that a successful, peaceful revolution is still possible in today’s riot shield and rubber bullet world.

It got me wondering if all of this technological activism that was displayed at ETech 08 will lead to a revolution in its own right. It’s kinda awesome to think about. Geeks leading the way

This is day two of the O’rielly Emerging Technology Conference. Maybe I’ll spew my general thoughts about the conference at some point but right now I want to mention a couple nifty things I have seen so far.

I was just down in the exhibition hall talking to some guys at the Sun booth. I’ve always thought Sun was going to disappear into the ether. I know what they did in the past but not now and they’ve never really had a foothold in any particular area. I still don’t think they do but at least they have a couple of interesting things going on. I’ll gab about one of them -

Project Blackbox
This is easily the most interesting Sun project I’ve seen. It’s basically a portable server room that lives inside a freight container. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure your mind is spiraling with all kinds ways to utilize that. If you want details and installation examples, check out the site (I’m not going to repeat their info).

The guy at the booth was the dude that designed the cooling system for the containers. He was pretty fun to chat with, not being a salesman and all. Fucking salesmen. The one use that I thought was interesting (that I will repeat) was an implementation involving data transfer. Apparently, it’s faster to load up the servers in a container with 3 Petrabytes of data and ship it across the ocean than it is to transfer that amount over the wire.

Stamen and visualizations
This company has presented a couple times this week. They are here showing off their fancy data visualizations and they are pretty fuckin’ neat. Their work is plainly listed on the home page of their site so go check them out. My two favorites are both from Digg Labs. I like seeing how things are connected, so I find Arc and Swarm the most compelling.

Food Hacking
This was pretty out of character for ETech but it was definitely entertaining. Almost like watching street performers. It was an excellent reprieve for my brain which was already overloaded by noon on the first day

These guys simply want to understand the science of food, taste, etc and then manipulate it for fun. Making something eatable is sort of a secondary concern. “Avocado oil? Well let’s turn that into powder because we know how.” It didn’t taste very good. “Nitro glycerin? I know, let’s spoon crème in to it and then put it in our mouths! Because we can! Neeeaaaatooooo!”

Being programmers as well, they have spread their passion to the interwebz. I got an excellent shot of this while they were demoing the site.

There you go. That’s a little taste of ETech 2008. More to come