I finished Neversoft's GUN last night. This game is a western third- and first-person shooter sort of in the vein of Grand Theft Auto, but with a much more shallow world. It probably would have taken longer if I had focused more on the side quests (marshal missions, wanted posters, pony express). As it was, the side quests just weren't all that interesting. I was honestly surprised at how decent the main storyline was. Mature, without being too over the top, mostly reasonable reactions from the characters involved.

The gameplay on the other hand was only okay; controls just felt wrong. Too much mouse acceleration made quick turns uncontrollably fast. The general game interface was, in my opinion, a prime example of how concurrent development on PC and console negatively affects the PC version. Menu fonts were jarringly large, as if designed for the lower resolution of a television. Too many sub-menus for what should be straight foward tasks.

Graphics were mostly good. I did notice some issues with models at farther distances, such as feet and accessories not synced with the animations. Plus, distant character and animal models had overly simplified animation sequences which just plain looked bad, sometimes moving without animating at all. I'm not sure if this had anything to do with my graphics settings.

A decent game, not quite the western GTA-style sandbox some hoped it would be.

Some photos I took of the lake when I was out on my last solo ride:

While reorganizing the shelving unit next to my computer, I came across my old Castlewood ORB Drive. For those of you not familiar with the name, it was an interesting magnetic data storage system that came out in 1999, the era of the ever-growing Zip and Jaz drives. It's a SCSI external drive, though my particualar model came with a USB adapater.

It used disks somewhat thicker and larger than a standard 3.5" floppy and inside they held a fairly sturdy shiny metal disc, rather than the thin flimsy material of a floppy drive. Each disk could hold 2.2 GB, which was a lot of storage in a portable drive back before DVD burners (or even CD burners) were so cheap and widespread. I got it mainly for data backups, naturally.

One downside were that the drive wasn't particularly fast; probably faster than a floppy but of course slower than a hard drive. The big problem I encountered was reliability. Too often the drive would get stuck in busy mode after writing and it would not recover. It was never clear if it had successfully finished writing all of the data or not and after resetting manually by toggling the power switch, you'd usually have to rewrite the files all over again to make sure they took. I think they came out with a firmware update which I never got around to applying.

After finding this legacy piece of tech, I decided to clear off the disks (I had two) and put the whole kit aside for selling at a later date. So I put in the driver disk and hooked in the USB cable. At this time, I discovered that the drivers will not install on Windows XP. A brief search around the internet revealed that no XP drivers were ever released by the company before they went out of business. A dead technology with no modern support means basically zero market, so I tossed the drive and disks after opening them to physically destroy any data that might be on them; the disks themselves are very cool thick metal polished to a flawless mirror-like surface. It's a shame, really. I'm very rarely an early adopter and this tech seemed so promising. Now it's dead and my money went to waste.

Taste loss is an insidious beastie. You see, the general sensation of flavor is actually an amalgalm of different senses: taste, smell, and texture (touch). And the devious nature of this problem is that even if your sense of taste were to vanish, your subconscious mind can fill the blank based on smell and texture alone. The result is, you may not even notice that your sense of taste is gone unless you're really paying attention to your food.

Over 5 years ago I realized I lost my sense of taste. It was never entirely clear how. My best guess is very hot oils (temperature-wise, not spicy) from a General Tso's chicken recipe I was following burned out my taste buds because I tasted the chicken almost directly from the skillet. For the life of me, I can't remember how long it lasted or if I did anything to contribute to my recovery. It did come back eventually, that much I know.

Well, it's happened again. Sometime within the past several weeks my sense of tasted elusively slipped away once more, leaving me one sense down. Have my other senses sharpened to super-human levels to compensate? Sadly, no. My wife thinks that it may have been some overcooked teriyaki meatballs at the new year's eve party we attended. I admit, I was a bit tipsy and could very well have sampled some meatballs that were hotter than would be prudent to eat. And my tongue does seem completely numb to temperature (though not to touch). Locking down an exact date for my taste loss is difficult for the reason I explain above: it's easy to overlook if you're distracted by other things and the truth is that I rarely ever eat and do nothing else. I'm either watching television, playing a game, programming, reading, or some other activity. So it was easy for me to overlook the evil leprechaun in my brain filling in taste sensations by extrapolating from smell, texture, and memory.

Funny that my wife remembers my doctor recommending gargling with salt water and yet I do not. Funny but not surprising, as my memory for general things that happened in my life is quite poor. I do know that at some point my sense of taste did recover, I just don't have a clue how long it took. And again, that's thanks to the insidious nature of taste loss: it's easy to overlook when it comes on and thus it's just as sneaky when it departs. In the meantime, I'll eat all those vile-tasting "healthy" foods that I generally avoid. There's always a silver lining, I suppose.