Diary
of a Geek
by Ben "Ator" Rota
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
Playing Neverwinter Nights has really sucked up my life lately. It's
sooooooooo much nicer with my faster machine. I mean, I knew it would be,
but it's still a marvel to actually see it in action. I went ahead and
cranked up some of the graphic and sound settings. I didn't go all the
way, but I made things a good deal more respectable. My system only seems
to get taxed when I have multiple members of my party in a large populated area
and have one or more effects currently running. For example, a protection
spell, or just the particle trail that follows my pixie familiar. And even
in that case, it's only an occasional hiccup.
I've been spending some time lately thinking about the whole DVD authoring
thing. I found this
page that has a massive feature comparison for various DVD authoring
packages. Unfortunately, the packages that had the features I wanted seem
to be the $599 packages, which seems to be an awful lot to spend on something
I'm mainly just interested in fooling around with. I will say that the
Sonic MyDVD product that shipped with my drive is almost a waste of space for
all the features it lacks, so I really do want to upgrade, but I'm running into
a bit of a price barrier. I just can't seem to find that magic package of
all of the features I think are cool in one of the $200 or less products.
My computer still hasn't really come out of the upgrade process. Yeah,
everything is put together and working, but there's still some stuff to
do. I need to make sure everything is screwed in securely, I need to add a
few more motherboard posts to the case and attach the motherboard a bit more
securely, and I need to put the doors back on the case. Unfortunately,
every time I step into my study intent on doing that stuff, I end up playing
games instead. What can I say, I'm weak...
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Hooray! I finally got around to upgrading my main machine this
weekend. I am now proud to say that I'm running an Athlon XP 2000+ on an
ABIT KR7A-RAID with 512 MB of DDR. As longtime readers know, I've actually
had most of this equipment for a while. I got two out of the three back in
the beginning of the year, but then proceeded to lose my original XP 2000+ to a
faulty heatsink fan when I installed all the stuff in March.
So, in late July, I purchased a replacement Athlon.
I hooked it up for testing, but left my machine itself alone. Well, this
weekend, I finally had the time and inclination to bite the bullet and make the
swap. With one exception, it went without a hitch. Whew.
So, what was the hitch? The sound card. It wasn't getting
detected. Knowing that SoundBlasters are notorious for resource conflicts,
I didn't panic. I swapped it to a different PCI slot, and it came up like
a charm. My assumption was that there was a conflict with the (as yet
unused) on-board RAID. I must say that it annoys me that these sorts of
conflicts still pop up. I've been dealing with resource conflicts since
the days where my serial mouse would occasionally decide it didn't want to play
nice with my ISA modem, and it's kind of annoying to realize that these things
still crop up.
A couple of you wrote in to try and help me out with my current
disillusionment with my MP3 player. Anthony Hogbin suggested I check out
one of the MiniDisk players, and Wesly suggested the Archos
Multimedia Jukebox. Now, I'll admit that the Multimedia Jukebox looks
pretty damn swank. But I'm really after something that fits in my
pocket. No, I'm afraid that I'm currently pretty lustful after the iPod,
and not just because of its massive capacity. I also have definitely
enjoyed my time spent fooling around with the interface on my wife's 5 GB
one. In fact, my only real problems with it are the fact that it lacks a
standard belt clip and that it's almost a bit too large.
Friday, September 20, 2002
Hey everybody, check out the new design! Okay, I just added a table and
three pages, but that introductory blurb that used to be there was pretty
outdated...
So, I'm getting the "new laptop itch." I won't be able to
scratch it any time soon, but my Dell Inspiron 8000 just feels so damn big.
It's my fault, of course. It was my first laptop purchase ever. I
knew I had high standards when it came to computing power, so I decided to
sacrifice portability for power and screen size. It was a very deliberate
choice, it's not like I was taken by surprise when it turned out to be
heavy. I just didn't realize how inconvenient it is to have a heavy and
slightly oversized laptop. Oh well. I don't think that my financial
situation will lend itself to a new laptop for a while, but I can dream.
Heck, maybe I'll just go over to Dell's web site and drool a little bit.
Speaking of itching for new products, my MP3 player is starting to bug me
with its pathetic 64 MB of storage. Sure, I could buy larger Multimedia
Cards and quadruple that, but what's the point of spending money on that when I
could buy a Windows iPod and get that most excellent interface as well?
What really brought this all to a head was when I decided I wanted to put the Lord
of the Rings soundtrack on my MP3 player. I had trouble squeezing the
entire album on there. One freakin' album. If my Discman wasn't one
of the old ones that skip when you sneeze on them, I'd just go back to using
that thing. Sure, I can still mix and match songs, which I like, but
considering I could fit my entire CD collection on one of the larger two
iPods, I'm getting just a bit antsy...
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Lucky me, I got to spend last weekend holed up in the server room at
work. I was swapping web servers, and managed to screw up the
process. So, I had to abort, restore the old web server, and then come
back into work to start the transfer process over again. What should've
been a quick swap of IP addresses ended up being around 10 hours of weekend
work. Bah. I thought I had checked and verified everything before
making the swap, but the one thing I forgot to check ended up screwing up the
whole thing. The Front Page Server Extensions can bite me.
I did manage to get a lot of reading in for the two weeks since I last
posted. I finished A Game of Thrones. I then switched gears
and picked up Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The credit for that
purchase goes to Amazon's recommendation system. I hadn't really heard
anything about it before it showed up on my recommendation list. I enjoyed
it, and had a fun time trying to figure out all of the mythological
references. Plus, at one point, the main character drives through Southern
Illinois and passes through the town where my mailing address was when I was
growing up. In fact, had he really made that trip, he probably would've
passed right by the rock road the end of which held my parents' house. American
Gods was a quick read, and I grabbed Orson Scott Card's Children of the
Mind afterwards. Another quick read. I've enjoyed that series,
but Ender's Game was far and away the best book of the series. I
now need to order the two Shadow books in the series, which I understand
are closer in tone to the original book. But first, I'm reading A Clash
of Kings, the sequel to A Game of Thrones. Whew!
Tuesday, September 3, 2002
Ah, the three-day weekend. Is there anything better (excepting, of
course, the weekend >3 days)? I did a search of the Ars site to see if
I ever told you folks about my three-day weekend theory, and I couldn't find
it. So, if you've heard this before, don't blame me, blame the
search. Anywho, the theory: all weekends should be three-day
weekends. See, the way I look at it, there are three things one needs to
do in a weekend: spend time with friends and/or family, run errands and
generally get stuff accomplished, and just relax and recharge by oneself or with
one's significant other. In any given two-day weekend, one of those things
doesn't get done, at least not to my satisfaction. I've found that
to do any of those activities adequately, a full day needs to be spent on
each. Therefore, in order to remain happy and healthy, all weekends should
be three-day weekends. I think that's pretty reasonable. Don't know
if my employer would agree. :-)
As much as I sing the praises of Remote Desktop, I haven't yet figured out
one aspect of it: what to do if it fails. On Friday, I connected to my
home machine, only to see a Security
Update waiting for my installation. Being the good little user I am, I
install it. I flip away from Remote Desktop to do some more work, and
return to Remote Desktop...to find it totally crapped out. It stayed
crapped out for the whole day. I got home, tried to log in at the console,
and found myself in an endless loop of being repeatedly presented with the login
prompt. Annoyed, I restarted the computer...and found myself getting no
login prompt whatsoever! "Oh crap," I thought, "I killed
Windows." Visions of reinstallation danced in my head, and I shed a
single, manly tear. Then, I got ahold of myself and rebooted the machine
again. And it all worked just fine. Hooray.
In case you're wondering, I'm finally getting into A Game of Thrones.
It took me a while. There's lots of characters, and I was getting a bit
tired of keeping track of who was on which side, but just in time, the shit hit
the fan, and characters either got killed or picked a side! Hooray, just
in time! ;-)
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