All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Well, I gave in and ordered Resistance: Fall of Man. I read some fairly good reviews of it, and it’s really the only game out so far that’s geared specifically towards the PS3 entirely. I feel obligated to give it a chance.

So far, I’d have to say the best-looking game in my collection is Fight Night: Round 3. It comes damn close to photo-realism. It’s also fun to play, but like all boxing games, it gets a little bit boring after a while. NBA 2K7 is also a damn fine looking game, I have to say, and the gameplay is definitely simulation-oriented. If you want some arcade-style game that lets you dunk every time down the floor, look elsewhere. If you want a more cerebral simulation of basketball, go for 2K7.

Now, Call of Duty 3 doesn’t seem like a huge leap forward in graphics — until you take into account the smooth framerate maintained during huge firefights, the scale of the fights that take place, the number of individual animated things on the screen, the little touches like very nice “results” from grenade explosions. A solid game. Taking over where Medal of Honor left off.

As I said in an earlier post, I didn’t get Madden 2007 for the Playstation 3; I figured my copy for the PS2 was good enough. Turns out, it may be BETTER than the PS3 version. Apparently in the PS3 version, Madden and Al Michaels have been replaced as the voices in the game by some generic sportscaster who seems to annoy people. Additionally, it’s not supposed to be that much better graphically, and people who’ve bought it seem to be genuinely upset with it. I guess we’ll have to wait until Madden 2008 to see a Madden game that’s worthy of a next-gen console.

Anyway, I await Resistance: Fall of Man eagerly. Since Call of Duty 3 has been so enjoyable despite my general apathy towards first-person shooters, I’m hoping this one will also give me some good playtime.

After that, folks, the only thing to really look forward to that’s in the pipeline is the port of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to the Playstation 3. That’s supposed to be, according to my Xbox 360 friends, a really fun role-playing game. Although I’ll be the judge of that — it’s hard to beat Final Fantasy. Which reminds me, I still have a lot of time left on the PS2 to beat Final Fantasy XII, which is a great game.

And that’s all for now.

There. I put it up. I had to. I typed a name of a post as “kip lange berkeley”. I’ll type it again. Kip Lange Berkeley.

Why?

Someone is searching for “kip lange berkeley” and making it to this page. Chances are they are looking for me, since I am the Kip Lange who went to Berkeley. But if you type in “kip lange berkeley”, you do not get my website. Apparently because I have been remiss in saying that I, Kip Lange, attended Berkeley.

Spider that, you fucking search engines, and get that phrased linked right, damn you!

Yes, you heard me. Boring post, I know, but good reason to make sure you have your ethernet cable hooked into your PS3 the next time you turn it on. Latest firmware is, again, version 1.5. Doesn’t take too long to download and update.

What it does, I dunno. Last one fixed some resolution issues.

Okay, I spent EIGHT hours last night wrestling with this problem and I believe I have a solution.

Please allow me to note that, first, up until a few days ago, I was able to hot-swap network connections with my PS2 — now the PS2 also has trouble connecting. I suspect a firmware upgrade from Comcast may have caused this.

Now, if you were like me, you were banging your head against the wall trying everything — manual, auto, etc. — to get your PS3 to connect online. And it probably didn’t work.

If you call Sony or Comcast, they will tell you to “power cycle” your modem. Which is a fancy way of saying, pull the power plug on the thing, let it sit for thirty seconds, and plug it back in.

NOW: Please note, everything I’m about to tell you — I take no responsibility if you screw up your cable modem or your phone service or whatever by you following my advice.

Here’s the problem with the newer Comcast modems which also allow VoIP phone service (voice over IP, they wire your phone into your modem, a la Vonage). The battery.

Now, remember, I don’t use a router. I just swap what’s plugged into the modem.

And here’s the rub, again, with the new Comcast modems, the VoIP ones — they have a battery backup inside the modem which makes it impossible to fully power cycle the modem. Without, of course, taking the battery out. They do this so that if your power fails, you will still be able to use the phone (for a while).

Taking that battery out is exactly what you have to do. Here goes. Unplug your PC from the cable modem. Pull the power plug from the back of the modem. Turn the modem upside down, and on the bottom, you should see a little plastic piece clipped in where the battery is (it’s pretty obvious). Take it off, and inside is the battery. Looks like a biggish lithium-type battery, matte black, usually with a strap to help you get it out. Make sure you keep that strap in position for now and when you put the battery back in, or you’re going to have problems getting it back out again.

Now, as soon as you take that battery out, your phones are going to go dead. So try not to do this while somebody is on the phone or if you’re expecting an important phone call in the next five minutes.

Remove the battery. Now, give it about thirty seconds (they say ten minutes to power cycle the modem properly, but that’s bullshit, I think even ten seconds is okay). Next step is up to you. You can put the battery back in, or you can keep it out if you just want to save yourself trouble the next time you do this. If you do take it out and keep it out, though, remember that you will have no battery backup for your phones, and if that cable modem loses power, you lose phone service.

Or you can put the battery back in. Your choice. Either way, next, make sure your Playstation 3 (although this works for PS2s as well, by the way) is plugged into the modem via an ethernet cable. Now, put that power cord back into the plug. You should see the lights on the modem flash briefly, then you should see a couple on top light up, and then you will see the other ones further down light up bit by bit (takes maybe a minute) as the modem comes back online and resets itself. Again, during this period, your phones are NOT working.

Now, wait until it seems like the modem has stabilized and almost all of the lights are on. If you want, check your phone. If your phone is working, the modem is almost certainly cycled back on.

And now you can fire up the Playstation 3 (or 2, as I said). After this — it should work. I hope. I had to go through, on the Playstation 3 side, a number of configurations, enter the DNS servers manually, give it the DHCP name (which you can find by going to the start menu on your PC, hitting “Run”, typing “cmd” to bring up a command window, and then typing “ipconfig /all”, which will show you all relevant data on your IP address — the DHCP server will be numerical and you will have to “tracert” that number to get the name resolved). I may have been able to just have done an auto-configure had I figured out the problem with the modem earlier, but I don’t know. So if you’re still having problems, tweak the network connection settings on the PS3.

This really should resolve a lot of these problems floating around out there, especially people with Comcast who can’t get their PS3s to connect and get the dreaded “Error 80710102”.

Now, please note that if you have a regular cable modem, NOT one that the phone is plugged into, you don’t have to worry about the battery or the phones and you can just unplug it and power cycle it normally. There’s no battery in those.

I really hope this helps. It took me eight hours of messing around to get this done, but you really need that PS3 to be online, or you’ll miss important things like getting the latest firmware update (which is 1.3, by the way).

Good luck. I hope this helps some people.

You know what I have?

A 60 gig Playstation 3, that’s what I have.

The thing is sleek. The thing is beautiful. The thing is amazing. The thing baffled me for eight hours as to how to hook it up online (but oh, I got the bitch online).

You think your Wii is dope? Hah. I laugh at your Wii. I raise my eyebrows in scorn at your Wii. Your Wii will last a year, maybe two, before you get tired of the gimmicks.

The PS3 is boss. You gotta see this thing in action on a hi-def plasma set. I had to wipe up after myself.

Only have three games so far, but they’re a good choice. NBA 2k7 (awesome), Call of Duty 3 (awesome), and Fight Night 3 (also awesome). Yes, these are all available on the XBox 360, but man…the PS3 could crunch the 360 in about two seconds.

I held off on the big launch title, “Resistance: Fall of Man”, because I’m not the world’s biggest fan of first-person shooters. But I will be getting one more game. It’s between that and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

And I’m not bothering to get the jazzed-up Madden ’07. My PS2 Madden will work just fine, and I’m actually more comfortable with it.

On the brightest side, people can start giving me videogames as presents again when holidays and birthdays roll around — the last two PS2 holdovers I’m playing are Madden and Final Fantasy XII (I shudder to think what Square will unleash on the PS3 with FF XIII next year).

Yes, yes, yes, all in all, today was a good day.

Well, I haven’t posted a hell of a lot lately, I mean, there’s certainly stuff to post, but I just haven’t had the time or the inclination. I have a large amount of crap swirling around in a tornado-like fashion in my life right now, crap you don’t need to know about and mosty likely wouldn’t care about and which I’m not going to tell you about anyway.

But it’s getting resolved. 🙂

I have fixed — hell, I didn’t know it was broken — the All Your Base Are Belong To Us page.

You have no chance to survive make your time.

Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas.

That’s all.

Ah yes, here I go, I’m like the last man standing around here without a wife, children, a serious girlfriend, a semi-serious girlfriend, or, say, even a really high-priced hooker.

However, there is good news, from the Old Friend front. L.S. has had a baby, the baby pictures are available over here. My best to her and the happy father, Vincent.

It actually scares me because this is the first time I’ve seen a child who looks like the mother at birth.

Now, in other Old Friends news, I am glad to report that Mr. K-Rhyme is alive and kicking, I just had lunch with him yesterday, he still looks like he styles his hair in a laundry machine, and he’s definitely still silly, despite his professorial aspirations at USC and his decision that all Westerns (except every one I mention to him) are “homo-social”.

Shane is not homo-social. That’s one of the ones I mentioned. Just for the record.

That’s all for now…

When I graduated from high school, one of the most significant and important gifts I received was a tiny little book, published in 1954, called How to Lie with Statistics.

The book was simply indispensable in college, and is engrained in my mind. I don’t know where my copy currently is — I’m betting it’s in one of the stacks of books I have stored carefully in bins — but I’ve virtually memorized the thing.

How to Lie with Statistics should be required reading for any college-bound student. Today’s universities and colleges do nothing but bombard a student with frankly, blatantly false statistics that the students eat right up because they have no idea how easy it is to screw with statistics and make them do exactly what you want them to do.

But everyone should have a copy of it. Like I said, How to Lie with Statistics (the link goes straight to Amazon.com — I want you buying this thing if you don’t have it) is a slim little red book that will quickly and efficiently teach you how little faith you should place in a given statistic tossed out by anyone.

And, just for a dose of evil — it teaches you how to bend and warp statistics towards your own ends.

In today’s warped reality, this book is like a survival kit for the mind. Buy it. Buy it now.