The story’s poor. What am I doing really? You find this guy, now this guy, oh here’s something different: find this place! Whilst you’re doing that random people will pop up like something out of Time Crisis 2 and try and kill you. Oh and to do all that you go through a million different checkpoints. That’s what MW2 did and it f-cking sucks. It feels really scripted to me and I hate it for that. The ‘level’ interaction seems unfinished. For instance when you run into the castle-esque areas on the desert map (de targo or something?) you affectively initiate a mission or new sub-story sequence that ends in a boss (i.e. a f-cking great big Apache helicopter). Once you’re done, the screen fades to black, you see a random cinematic sequence where Haggard says something odd or funny, and suddenly you’re outside with your vehicle and squad (which, by the way, are popping into view from top to bottom like something out of a tech demo). Christ.

Oh, and that annoying bug with the loading screen: you’re reading the tip text then it fades to black. You think “great, the level’s starting” and suddenly the text’s back and you’re loading again. Huh?

The action is outstanding, second to none. The gadgets, guns and vehicles are much better than before; they feel more realistic and reactive. The destructive environment is also an improvement on the first (which wasn’t bad in the first place!). The textures look amazing and the game looks ever-so realistic. The Brazilian jungle was actually beautiful.

It’s a good, fun game, but the thing that made the first Bad Company instalment so good was its open-ended gameplay and well-polished storytelling, both of which have taken a back seat in #2 to do what seems like its competitor does: all looks and no substance. Grr!

That said, I’ve yet to play multiplayer which is where Bad Company 1 really got going.

“Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence. Simplicity does.”
- Larry Bossidy, CEO Allied Signal

I docked myself at my Workstation and started downloading an ISO. Once finished, I burnt it and rebooted my Thinkpad. One of the great things about Ubuntu’s installation (which has existed for a while) is the Live CD – you get to boot into Ubuntu without having to install anything. It works well and is a great feature for new users who aren’t sure what they’re doing, or whether they want to risk installing Linux. What’s great is that the hardware issues of old are long gone: . Unforunately I found the boot-up process to be volatile: it was taking a long time and things didn’t look great. I eventually got into X and played around. Amazingly I had all my Thinkpad buttons working; suspend, hibernate (suspend-to-disk) and even the back & forward buttons for the browser. It worked flawlessly.

Naturally I decided to install as I was very impressed. So I fire up the installation procedure by clicking ‘Install’ on the Live CD’s desktop and go through the motions. Clicking ‘Forward’ after the username setup freezes, and my laptop performs a hard-shutdown…WTF?? I try again – the same thing happens. What’s going on? I decided to get an alternate ISO and try that. Thankfully it installed, but I was a little concerned that nothing was going to work…

After finally booting into X after my little ordeal, I decide to run `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` in a shell. To my surprise, as soon as it starts upgrading packages (a Kernel upgrade) my shell gets spammed with “The system is going down for a reboot NOW!” and Ubuntu shuts down. Ouch. This isn’t good.

I’ve had overheating issues in the past, but this is beginning to worry me. Anything even remotely CPU intensive (scrolling the wireless network list, apt-get upgrade, etc etc) causes Ubuntu to force shutdown, and I’m left looking very cross at my X31.

Some googling produces thread after thread on the Ubuntu forums about this, but things seem to be getting ignored. There’s no issues, and people are talking about the exact same problems in Gutsy and Feisty – that’s three or more major releases ago. I’ve tried these things:

• Adding the following to /etc/rc.local:

  echo -n “90:80:60:75:70:65″ > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points
  echo 2 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/polling_frequency

•  Appending these modules to /etc/modules:
  battery
  ac
  thermal
  processor
  acpi-cpufreq
  cpufreq-userspace

No luck. Furthermore, with each futile attempt, I get hard-rebooted or even worse: no init 0, just a hard shutdown. It’s frustrating and furthermore it is very likely that this is damaging my hardware. I’ve been monitoring `acpi -t` output, top and more but nothing’s helping. Even running /etc/init.d/gdm stop and trying the apt-get upgrade in a shell doesn’t help: same old hard shutdown.

I don’t know what to do. I’m a big fan of Ubuntu as it’s bringing Linux to the masses, but I can’t keep doing this to my poor old Thinkpad X31 – it won’t last much longer.

Anyone out there have any ideas?

Update: I’ve filed a bug report here

Kudos to jquery.com though, who listened to their critics and removed the image. Right now, the site’s looking cool but still a little out of place. This is a Javascript library, not a corporate website. Anyhow, I digress.

Another element of the homepage that thoroughly annoys me is the tooltips on the three links titled “Lightweight footprint”, “CSS 3 compliant” and “Cross-browser”. To me, Web-2.0 (I’m sorry for using that phrase) style UI elements are largely about usability and common sense. jQuery seems to be an embodiment of that, and allows developers to enhance their sites greatly with a small amount of effort.

Shocked and awed I was then, when I moved my mouse around the page while reading only to find these terribly intrusive ‘tooltips’ that show when you hover over the aforementioned links. Right out of how-not-to-do-widgets-school it seems. Those elements on the page go against the original intentions behind underlining text (denoting a hypertext link). Not only are the tooltips pointless, but as widgets they’re very annoying to use. Hovering over them can sometimes show another (unrelated), as well as them hiding text around them – forcing the user to have to move their mouse again, only to find that they’ve set off yet another tooltip. They’re too large, unnecessary and bad-practice.

Whilst I can see the usefulness of such a plugin, I think it’s a perfect example of how not to do it. I can’t sleep at night because it annoys me so much.

Seriously!