My view of the world

A friend just bought this game and highly recommends it.
His first comment was about the shadows, he says everything has a shadow map of some kind. He also says, that, unlike Oblivion, if it’s raining and you’re under a roof, you don’t get rained on.
He did comment that the American weapons in the game tend to jam, while the Russian weapons don’t. Aside from the weapons debate, I find the concept of weapons jamming to be an indication of the attention to detail that should make the whole thing more believable.

One of his complaints is that a lot of the overheard conversation is in Russian or Ukrainian. –probably Russian.
Good. That means that it will be a much longer period of time before I have an uncontrollable urge to kill any NPC that mentions this game’s equivalent of mud crabs.

This is a first person shooter with a certain amount of interaction with the NPCs. I’m told it also offers a number of choices that can lead to the failure of a given mission. Save often and remember that the cheat codes are out there.
The reviewers say that it still needs patches, especially under Vista, but the company says that these details will be worked out in the next couple of months.
According to the website, the sequel, -Stalker: Clear Sky, will allow you to join and lead factions.

Back in ‘79 there was a Russian film titled Stalker, about three men traveling through a post-apocalyptic wilderness called the Zone.
The film is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. In Roadside Picnic, the Zone is full of strange artifacts and phenomena that defy known science. A vestige of this idea carries over to the film, in the form of Stalker’s habit of throwing metal nuts down a path before walking along it. The characters in Roadside Picnic do something similar when they suspect they are near gravitational anomalies that could crush them.

I found some screen shots on gamespot:

At a friends place of work they have a T1 that is supposed to be down for no more than 4 hours absolute max.
They are in a new building in an older neighborhood, so the 3m and switch are old.

Regardless of who they buy service from, Embarq is supposed to maintain the connection, but they have so few properly trained techs that the new construction in the area has created chaos in the phone system.

There is no dial tone on a T1 so every new person who goes into the switch seems to try to use it for the latest new install.
And God forbid that you should see the same people twice on any trouble ticket, much less that they should label the lines.
The trouble tickets are invariably wrong, and only a couple of people have the keys to the switch.
Embarq outsources everything they can, so they don’t have to worry about social security, unemployment or benefits.
This leads to their people trying to blame the customer and a lot of band aids.
Now they are trying to re-punch the connections in the building, when they’ve been told where the trace from the outside ends. –Back in their switch.

I know good help is hard to find, but when you’re used to your own people creating most of your problems, by playing beat the clock, how are you supposed to know what’s broken.
If you have a set amount of time to fix things, and something requires more time to be made right, but you get written up, or lectured, if you take the time, how long would it be before you just gave up and did it their way?

All together now.. M-I-C.. K-E-Y.. M-O-U-S-E