A Few IRL Updates

I'm still experimenting with what I want to put on this blog with regard to content. I thought I might want to just list some things that have been going on in my life.

I have been reading Plato's Republic in my philosophy class and have had some interesting discussions in class. I'm going to start reading Hobbes' Leviathan and writing a paper on something interesting I noticed in the Republic. I don't know exactly what I will write, but hopefully I'll have more insight on this later.

I've been going over different sorting algorithms in my CS class using Java. Cool stuff.

A group of three White male (Pomona?) college students tried to pull a prank on me early Tuesday morning by opening my dorm room door and causing a ruckus, ostensibly to wake me up. I'm fairly confident this was just a random act of stupidity by some drunk students but I still thought it was a dumb thing to do, not to mention that I was awake and reading in my room at the time of the incident. I proceeded to put some shoes on and follow these fellows in an attempt to confront them, but the cowards had fled (I'm making an educated guess here) down the dorm stairs on the southwest side of the building and out into the courtyard. I then walked around for about ten minutes and, having found no trace of the offenders, went back to my room and fell asleep shortly thereafter.

I've been playing a fair amount of Call of Duty: MW2. I am of the opinion that the functionality of the Multiplayer part of the game is woefully inadequate, because one cannot access a list of servers and then determine which one to play based on relevant information (ping, number of players in the room, type of game). Instead, there's just a message that asks what game type one would like to play (DM, domination, CTF, FFA, etc) and then one is automatically matched. There are three main problems with this setup:

1. You can't know if you're playing on a server that has been illegally modified and contains hackers that will level you up to level 70 when you shoot them. This happened to me around 2/1/10 and Infinity Ward/Steam failed to detect this. I have heard that some hacks allow an opponent to reduce one's level back to 1 if one kills that opponent.

2. You can't play on a favorite server. That means that no clans can have public servers.

3. You can't browse a list of servers and choose one to play. This cripples the functionality of the Multiplayer aspect of the game. What if I want to play Rust on TDM? I can't select which map I want to play, only game type. It doesn't help that many of their maps suck and you have no choice in the matter when the program automatically chooses a server for you.

I would like to see this game more integrated with Steam so that it uses their implementation of the server list.