broom's blog

Gears of War 3

Defeated Gears of War 3 last weekend at normal difficulty. As always, not a very long shooting game. Walkthrough length was about 15 hours. This one put an end to the trilogy story. Frankly, I can hardly remember the story now. This is just a game to shoot monsters, saw them, and watch blood on screen.

The big difference this time, for me, is I finally can fight online… Played versus mode a few times and found I’m not a big fan of CS style games. My kill/death ratio is between 1/5 to 1/10. This is not fun. Then I moved to the Horde mode and really enjoyed it. That’s a mode that players cooperate to survive waves of enemies. Though my best score was only about 20 waves (there are 50 waves in total), it’s much more fun to kill monsters together with ppl.

The best part of GeoW2 in my mind was playing as a sniper. It was super enjoyable to watch monster head blast in the scope sight and hear the crack sound. In GeoW3 enemies are a little bit more clever, so it’s not that easy to snipe them anymore. Assault rifles became obviously strong and I had to use them a lot, which is kinda boring.

Another weird part of GeoW3 is most enemies in ACT 1 are locust. Their blood is golden! For a long time I thought there was some violence setting and googled how to disable it. Until I finally saw some red blood from beast enemies…

忆内蒙实践

今天半梦半醒之间，突然想起大一的时候去内蒙实践的好多事情，现在还历历在目。那时候每天上课下课，吃饭睡觉的琐事，早已忘得干净。这类脱出正常生活的经历，却是记得十分清楚。

那会儿去的是一个很穷的小村，叫五十家子好像，从赤峰还要在坐几小时的车才到。在那儿待了四五天的样子。头一两天去草原上挖坑打木桩，然后后面是支教，但那会儿小学已经放暑假了，于是就在村里跟一帮当地小孩儿玩。去挖坑好像还挺累的，记得有张一帮人光膀子拍的照片，也不知道现在还在哪儿。

有一天小孩说去沙漠玩，从村子走两里路就到。走到那儿一看还真是沙漠，就跟电影里似的，都是光秃秃的沙丘，我们就站在一个沙丘顶上。这时候几个小孩发一声喊就一起从坡上往下滚，我想也没想，一跳就跟他们一起滚下去了。骨碌骨碌感觉好像滚了半分钟才到底下，一点儿也不疼，我跟小孩儿们笑得都喘不上气来。回头一看我们班几个女生很矜持的站在沙丘上面看，然后她们从边上绕路下来。现在想起来，那快乐还真难得。

还记得在那儿喝奶茶，一开始都喝不惯，后来就都喜欢喝了。早晨吃很扎实的肉，喝啤酒。在小学喝好多酒，一次就要喝两碗，男生每人都喝六七瓶。晚上吃完饭回住处的路上黑灯瞎火的，满草原都是狗叫，或者狼叫，背后还有只流浪狗跟着我们。草原上地平线附近有满地的羊，低低的云，我还看到一朵云超像雷锋然后叫所有人来看。在小学里我还发表过一通不知所云的讲话。后来回来之后内蒙小孩儿写信给我们，我一直没回信，不知道为什么，好像回到了这个生活，就不知道怎么跟他们说话了。

说起来也挺佩服那会儿的小辅导员GoldenBull的，不知道他怎么能联系到这个路子，把二十几号人弄过去实践。

Xw bought a Ukulele

It’s like a tiny guitar, has a beautiful sound.

Her first practiced song is “dragonborn” from Skyrim… The 2nd one is 天空之城.

Why I Moved Away from Tweetbot

I bought Tweebot and used it for a week. Then I switched back to official twitter app. Here is why.

Tweetbot does have some “personalized” features. It has a dark theme and fancy sound effects, but I don’t really care about these stuff. It has left/right slide gesture, but I found them not intuitive and hard to memorize. The double/triple click is not always detected, so sometimes I have to click lots of times of a tweet and feel myself silly. The customizable tab looks useful, but not for me. What I want is to use a list as a tab, like what I do with Echofon for Mac. But Tweetbot doesn’t support that.

Besides these specious features, Tweetbot has some shortcomings compared to official app. “Discover” is an important part in official app. I check it at times and find it interesting. Another crucial advantage of official app is speed! When view conversations or tweet detail, official app is obviously faster than Tweetbot.

Tweetbot does have a few delicate features that worth noting, such as the “unread counter”, and “select the last photo from library”. However after all, official app is a much better choice for now.

—–After a year——

Using Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad. Maybe just tired of the look and feel of the official app.

Twitter Open House

Went to an open house event at twitter NYC office. There were 2 short speaks: one was a twitter semi technical introduction and the other was about real time search. Not very in-depth actually. Some Q&A were quite deep though. I guess most audiences were engineers and some of them do search-related works.

An interesting thing is I met @nk, who I saw once 2 years ago in Beijing QCon. He gave a presentation about real time search at that time, a really great one. It’s very nice to see him again and have some talk.

In twitter office there are some photos on the wall, with tweets. The most impressing one is a photo of the airplane on Hudson river. That was probably the first photo of that accident online. And a funny video to tell u tweet is faster than earthquake.

I have always been respecting twitter as a company. They are doing something

Changing the world.
Helping ppl’s daily life.
Open. Compared to close system like FB and Apple.
Elegant. From a product perspective.

The more I respect twitter, the more I feel sick of sina weibo…