Quick Rants

We'd finally downloaded Picasa for a little run-through - and fell in love with it as it brought out the organizing freak in us (it reminded us how we felt when we first used iTunes to organize our MP3 collection). We were rather impressed with the things one could do with it (and it's freeware some more), and without looking like some cheap software.

Then disaster struck - some of my photos look as if they're corrupted - there's a couple that looked as if half of the picture has some colour filter on it, and some other have glaringly obvious this-is-not-right look to them. And viewing the thumbnails and via Windows Image and Fax Viewer we're going, "F- the birthday pictures of 2007! They haven't been backed up yet!" Even if we're low on hard disk space we don't think Picasa should be screwing up our pictures like so.

Not good.

Reading Hunters of Dune we can't help but think that they should have just left the series hanging. We've enjoyed House Atreides and House Harkonnen, not so much on House Corrino. The Legends of Dune Trilogy failed to make the Butlerian Jihad impactful, and once again featured the Bene Gesserit to be more magically powerful then ever mentioned in the Classic Dune series, plus their leaders are overly egotistic.

With Hunters of Dune, things are once again simplified and dramatized. No fun to read, nothing creative and pacing slow with lots of references to previous books (especially from Prelude/Legends of Dune series) although it's easier to understand. Classic Dune may be better even though it'll take some rereadings to comprehend what's fully going on. The new writing style doesn't appeal.

So why are we still reading it or bought it in the first place? Well, we still want to see how it ends mah...

Finally, we've gotten Command & Conquer 3, Tiberium Wars. The product specs discouraged us at first, citing high-end requirements. Then ayheng metioned that it works on his PC. Since his PC is older than ours, we knew the game would work on ours. Only problem we encountered is the FMV lag - sound finishes before cutscenes (oh, the cheesy but fun cutscenes!).

Love the new contextual tab, finally everything under one sidebar with the ability to have multiple production buildings churning out units at one shot. It also looks and plays better than C&C2: Tiberium Sun. Only need to learn everything again, from tech tree to unit recognition etc. Gonna go back for more!