Being a huge fan of the series, I decided I had to have Black Ops as part of my collection. I went to the midnight release and got the game after a huge build up from Modern Warfare 2. I admit, I enjoyed the Black Ops campaign and the multiplayer at first. They introduced some cool new features like diving, tomahawks, ballistic knives, etc. The leveling system of multiplayer was a change from the Modern Warfare 2 system, so it kept things enjoy able. At first I was in love, I played the game as much as I could. As they released patches, the little things that annoyed me, started to annoy me more and more. First off, Treyarch tried to fix the spawn trapping, which they did... but it created more problems than it fixed. Now instead of spawning where you had no exit... you could potentially spawn in the middle of the enemy. Take two steps and boom, you're dead. My favorite is when I would spawn and immediately die from a grenade launcher that was obviously already in flight before I spawned. So, after playing long enough, I decided that Black Ops was not better than Modern Warfare 2 when it came to gameplay, however the advancements in other areas made it better as a whole. Still, the problems I found with the game made me quit playing it completely.

Now, just recently, Activision has come out with Modern Warfare 3. They brought back Infinity Ward to produce the game. While I haven't played very much at all yet, I have to say, I am not impressed in the least. So far Modern Warfare 3 seems like the same game as Modern Warfare 2 with different maps. Therefore it seems like a regression from Black Ops to me. The graphics are back to the Modern Warfare 2 graphics with minor improvements, they did not carry over diving from Black Ops either. The UI (User Interface) looks nearly identical to Modern Warfare 2 with some color changes. The spawning seems to be greatly improved from both Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, which is a plus for me. I really want to give this game a good chance to be fair, but I cannot stand the fact that they didn't feel the need to improve on their previous engine at all. I almost feel cheated by Activision and a series that I have loved since the beginning.

To sum it up, I'm not convinced that Modern Warfare 3 lives up to its hype at all. Its really like playing a game I've already played at the core. While there are a few new features, and lots of different maps, its nothing that I haven't already seen. I feel like I wasted $60 in hopes for something new. I still have yet to put some serious hours in to Modern Warfare 3, so I will more than likely follow up this post.. but here's to hoping I don't stay disappointed.

Hopefully this helps some of you out there from getting totally frustrated with netbeans. For those of you who don't want to click the link... the fix is to add this flag to your shortcut for netbeans.

-J-Dnetbeans.indexing.recursiveListeners=false

So, really this blog post isn't because I want you to feel sorry for me, its because I need to voice how I feel, and because I want to make a promise to everyone. I promise I'm going to start again, and I'm going to stick with it, no matter how much I hate it or don't want to do it. What I really need is accountability. I suck at holding myself accountable, and I know it. I need people to push me, and hold me totally accountable for what I'm promising right now. I've already started tonight and I feel great. I'm working on this post between weight lifting and running. I'm going to at least do it every other day until my body gets used to it again.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent my frustration with myself and to be able to hold myself accountable by looking at this post. All I have to say to myself is... JUST DO IT!

I haven't gotten very far yet with code, but the theory of it is to create a base class with a __call() method. That's basically all the base class will consist of. When a plugin is loaded, the class read from the plugin file will be created to extend this base class. From there, all methods found within the class will be stored as lambda functions inside a special class variable. This then makes it easy to reload code, by recreating the lambda function when the code is reloaded. Therefore, the class itself never needs to be redefined, it just needs all the functions reloaded. So, in theory this is entirely possible with PHP 5 and the use of the magic __call() method for classes.

Some of you may wonder why I don't use runkit from PECL. While it would make things a ton easier, I wanted more of a code solution that might work for everyone without extra requirements. I might look into creating it to work both ways though. I can imagine runkit would be a lot cleaner method of doing such voodoo, but I'm also unsure if runkit will even compile with 5.3.  I'll have to do some research into that and find out for sure. Of course, there will be more to come as I make progress even if its good or bad progress.

On the other hand, my jogging is going well. I'm not keeping up with it as good as I would like, but I have managed to go as far as 3 miles in one time. I also went this past Sunday and jogged with my friend, we both ran to see how fast we could do a mile and half. I managed to run it in 12 minutes and 51 seconds! I just hope I can keep doing it and keep running further. I would like to participate in a marathon sometime soon as well. I'm also, starting this week, lifting weights with the weight set I just got moved in. I'm hoping between that and running, I can make up for the last few years of my life that I just haven't tried anything to get into shape. Hopefully I'm making up for lost time at this point

On another note, with the lack of work I've had lately, its given me time to work on php-oop.net again. I've actually been working with the dev site to get things going. I started with a total rewrite because I wanted to take a totally different approach to the back end of the site. I didn't want to use a framework, but I wanted the same structure. I wound up using my own SiTech library for the back end to make it more MVC like. I think the approach is working wonderfully. I've learned new things and made tweaks to SiTech to improve functionality and how it all ties together. If anyone is interested in participating with either SiTech or the development of php-oop.net, please let me know. I could always use some extra help.

A couple of other things I'm trying to do more/better is writing in my blog, and jogging each day. This is the first post after a while, so we'll see how that part goes, but the jogging is already going great! I started Monday (the 19th) by jogging almost 3/4th of a mile. I can say that Tuesday, my legs were so sore that it killed me! Wednesday I went jogging again, but I'm not really sure how far I made it. Thankfully after that my legs weren't as sore, but still hurt Thursday. Yesterday (Friday) I went jogging again and actually made it a full mile! Since we ran on a track, I also did a lap of sprint/jog where I sprinted the straight parts, and jogged through the corners. It was really great, and I'm happy to say today my legs don't hurt at all. Hopefully next week I'll be able to push it up to where I can go every day instead of every other day.

Well, here's to hoping things go as planned... I'll update again later this week.

Now running the updated 1.1.25 version of wine, Digsby installed without a problem. I started it up, logged in and now its running just fine. The only issue I've noticed at all with Digsby under Wine is the fact that the text input box in chats seems to wrap text after a few words. Its annoying when writing a long reply to someone, but nothing more than just annoying. It doesn't cause any problems or crash anything, so its just an annoyance at this point.

Hopefully this helps someone with Digsby under Linux. I love using it as my IM client, but I can't wait until they get their Linux version going.