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I might SMITE…

I’ve just been spending a lot of my limited free time lately (what’s not spent with my family), playing Planetside 2 and Smite.  Both are competitive play games, and being involved with a competitive team, you can imagine the level of  dedication exceeds that of the normal nerd level of play.

Which let me plug my refer-a-friend link in smite while I’m at it.  If you are interested in playing it with me, you can use this link to setup your account.  Just click play for free, and create an account.  If you already played tribes and global agenda you should already have a Hi-rez account and can leverage that.

I know about planetside 2 because you’ve talked about it before, but what is smite?

I’m glad you asked:

Smite is a third-person MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), a style of action strategy games popularized by DotA (Defense of the Ancients) in the late 90’s early 00’s as a mod for warcraft 3.

The general concept and game mode circles around 2 bases, connected by 3 lanes, that are defended by turrets with a continual line of attackers spawned per lane lovingly referred to as minions.  The minions job is to be countless, and to dive continually to their deaths in the assault on the enemies base.  The job of the player (you) is to insure these minions deaths serve the greater purpose of gaining you experience and gold and to aid in the destruction of turrets and bases by being your fodder.

Sounds easy right?  Yea, it would be if you weren’t facing 5 other players who want to do the same thing, oh, and they want to KILL YOU.  So 5 v 5 action/strategy combat is born.

What separates Smite from other MOBA’s aside from the character concepts is the third person perspective in play and that all abilities and attacks are considered skill shots (meaning you have to aim them).  The games are faster paced than traditional MOBA’s as well which makes it a blast for someone like me to play.

Much like other games in it’s genre there are multiple play types: Arena, Domination, Conquest (traditional mode), Assault (random hero single lane conquest), Joust (1v1), Joust (3v3), and a random game mode referred to as Mode of the Day.  Mode of the day is usually pretty interesting because of some of the silly combinations they come up with forcing some unique character perspectives in play.

If you end up playing, let me know, you can friend me as lot3k (think low tech).

So watching Star Wars….

So I’m watching Mace Windu in action, then something occurred to me.

 

jedimindtrick

Anyway, I laughed pretty hard at this realization.

Mind = blown

The console wars of 2013…

I’m going to make this a very short post, but in a nut shell, sum up my thoughts and primary concern with the chief issue in this upcoming generation right now.

DRM

This isn’t a new issue with gaming.  This has been an issue that the PC gaming scene has largely dealt with, going back as far as requiring the CD in drive to play a game.  However I’m not here for a history lesson, but to address a very serious concern I have with Sony not playing ball on this restrictive model.

Publishers (a.k.a. Satan) view any and all content resale as a direct impact on sales revenue.  With this in mind, the Xbox ONE would appear to be a more preferable platform for developers/publishers.  So my concern is the loss of certain publisher support for the Playstation platform as a whole.

However, my 2 cents.  I don’t care because most of my gaming is done on a PC where I’m already happily a slave (in large part) to this no resale business model (THANKS STEAM FOR MAKING IT SO EASY! <3) .  I (speaking out of the other side of my mouth now) can’t support this business model and will not be contributing money towards it, eventhough 9/10 of my video game purchases are retail.  Perhaps Microsoft will work things out in similar fashion as valve so the consumers see a return through game price drops and crazy summer sales, but from what I’m reading, that doesn’t seem likely.

Planetside 2 and MLG…

So I’ve been playing Planetside 2 lately.  I’ve been playing as New Conglomerate with an outfit called The Iron Wolves [TIW] on Waterson.  Coincidentally Planetside 2 is heading towards MLG and in the war report interview this past Sunday Higby in an interview with Alex “Jax” Conroy has revealed a lot of what that will entail (finally!).

Anyway, I’ve not made a post since mother’s day so I thought I’d link the youtube replay of our match from this past Friday against VREV and TRAF.  The second objective battle is by far one of the best (in around 10 minutes), with the third base capture having some entertaining points.

Happy Mothers Day…

On the very early morning of December 27th 2007, my wife became more than herself.  She became a mother.

She worked, and toiled to do everything she could to ensure that this new life dependent on her had everything he needed.  Her self interest and importance became a secondary drive towards that of the new calling she found in Will.  Even leaving her job to become a stay at home mom to care for this new addition to our family.

Then again, on a very early morning of Sept 7th 2010, my wife moved forward to become a mother to yet another child.  Our sweet little baby girl Maggie.  Our daughter however had special needs; and my wife, the mother, heeded the heightened call and began working continually with her to try and better her.  Reaching to a place in her heart, and physical being to produce an endurance that surpasses my understanding.  To show interest to our son, to let him know that he too is loved, and that his little sister was a joy, not a burden to take his mommy from him.

When we thought we could take no more, that our line was running short; this beautiful woman found she was pregnant with our next child.  Born Sept 17th 2012 was Jake, and she again found a level of endurance and ability that makes me feel as if I’m hopelessly left behind as she runs this marathon.  Catching but a glimpse of her dust as she carries on in this race.  Carrying the burdens of bottles, therapies, dinners, diapers, discipline, she shows a compassion and a heart that could only be found in a mother.

Amanda, you are amazing.  I’m thankful to God that I have a wife like you, and am ever impressed with you, the mother.

I love you.

Create Boundary Script for CM 2012…

As some of you know, I’ve been working on CM 2012 for a while now, and establishing a hierarchy.  One of the unfortunate tasks with this job has been boundary creation.  Finally after a longer period than it should have taken I went to build a tool to create site boundaries for me out of a csv, similar to tools with SCCM 2007.

I found the sms_boundary class hadn’t changed (outside of an obsolete boundaryflag property) so I decided to test it out with powershell as a one liner, and it worked great.  I did a bit more research and stumbled across something already written by MVP Kaido Järvemets from Estonia, and enjoyed his minimalistic script for it so I followed his methodology (mostly) and ended up with this script that reads from a boundaries.csv file

boundary

 

$sitecode = "ABC"
$siteserver = "mysiteserver"
$boundarylist = Import-Csv '.\boundaries.csv'

foreach($Item in $boundarylist)
{Switch($item.'type')
	{"Subnet" 	{$Type = 0}    
	 "AD" 		{$Type = 1}
     "IPv6" 	{$Type = 2}
     "Range" 	{$Type = 3}}
$arrValues = @{DisplayName = $Item.description; BoundaryType = $Type; `
Value = $Item.boundary}
Set-WmiInstance -Namespace "Root\SMS\Site_$sitecode" -Class SMS_Boundary `
-Arguments $arrValues -ComputerName $siteserver}

Not to take credit for other peoples work, especially since this is a hacked up version of his original which can be found here.

Sad day…

image

All that remains.

Farewell friend…

So last week we lost our second dog to cancer. My corgi Keenan who’s been with us for 9 years has left us. I’ve not really been able to talk or write about it but my wife has done a good job with it here: http://thebelcherfamily4.blogspot.com/2013/03/farewell-friend.html?m=0

I loved that dog, and am thankful for the time we had with him. He’s been with us a relatively long time.

There is definitely something missing in our home now.

Query Reboot Suppression CM2012…

Laziness is the true mother of necessity I think in IT, and the tedious act of viewing multiple properties pages brought about this one liner.  If you too are setting up diverse deployment sets and need to quickly verify multiple deployments for reboot supression state. Here’s a way to do it in powershell:

gwmi -namespace "root\sms\site_<sitecode>" 
-query "select assignmentname from sms_updategroupassignment 
where assignmentname like '%<NAME SEARCH VALUE>%' and suppressreboot = '3'"
 -ComputerName <SITESERVERNAME> |Select -Property assignmentname

<chopped up for readability sake>

Suppressreboot values:
0 = No Suppression
1 = Workstation Suppression
2 = Server Suppression
3 = Server & Workstation Suppression

replace <> values with your relevant search criteria.

More class information.

Yes. This…

Just a link, but well done.

http://martinvalasek.com/blog/pictures-from-a-developers-life

Animated gifs to describe the day to day of a developer; or most personnel in an engineering level role of IT.