07.03.06
Posted in General at 2:42 pm by Soabirw
My sister and her hubby came to visit for about a week. They decided they wanted to go to Lagoon Saturday since it’s been nearly a decade since we’ve been. Figured the younger siblings would really enjoy it. That morning I have a massive allergy attack thanks to the storm the night before. Not even Claritin D could phase it. But I figured I’d suck it up and try it anyway. I only did three rides and a family picture before I couldn’t take it anymore. Two out of three of those rides were fun at least.
Got home and rested a bit, then tried to hang out with Mike. But all of a sudden my voice cuts out completely. I don’t really raise my voice, even on roller coasters, so I’ve never “lost” it before. So I went upstairs to rest some more. Noticed the temperature was 76 on the way to my room. Crawled under some pretty hefty blankets and started shivering and convulsing like crazy. Starting thinking, “Shit, I have a fever”. But before I could think or do much else I became completely delirious for several hours. When I came to I tried getting in the tub to try and keep it under control, but that wasn’t helping much. After about 7 hours I finally had to text message my mom. “Bad fever. Delirious. Lost voice. Bad pain. Help” was the message. That’s actually I was was talking too. Could use one or two words at a time. Not that my lack of a voice was allowing any of that to come out. My back was in incredible pain as well.
Between extra strenght Tylenol, some funky health drinks of my dads, and lots of very cold baths we were able to keep my temperature from going over 103 and eventually got it down to 100. I could walk around a bit and even watch some T.V. to help with the boredom. Then I laid down for a nap and it spiked again. Even in the bath it wasn’t going down. Was eating ice to lower my internal body temp until I lost all feeling to my arms and legs. Couldn’t move my fingers at all and my arms and legs felt like a million needles jabbing them.
But my temperature eventually calmed down again and last night it didn’t spike again. Still hovering at 100 though. At least I can keep down solid foods now and walk around the house. But I missed the chance to get the paperwork in for our new place and they guy just left for the holidays. Not that I’ll be up for moving stuff anytime soon. I did talk to him though and he will still hold it for us until he gets back. He’s getting offers like crazy, so glad we jumped on it.
Worst weekend evar!
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Posted in Rant, Gaming at 2:52 pm by Soabirw
Was going to post about this earlier, but didn’t get the chance. I’ve been playing Diablo III of and on since Friday night. The name of the game is actually Titan Quest, but don’t let that fool you. It really is Diablo III. We’ve been dieing for something like this for a very long time. I could not be happier.
Well, I could be a little bit happier, but not because of any game flaw. They use SecureRom copy protection and it causes the game to crash a lot. And whenever the game crashes it corrupts your character. You have to delete your saved data, like quests, just to load your character up again. Your character is fine, game just puts you back to the beginning and forgets all the quests you did. I’ve found a few tricks (save every 2 minutes and ALT+F4 to quit instead of menus) that have let me play for a very long time without a single crash though. They are also looking into the problem, but they say it is hard to troubleshoot since some people are using a cracked game and some are using Deamon Tools because the idea of swapping game discs like crazy in this day and age is a joke to some (myself included). And others are doing everything legitimately and still having the issue. I think it’s a great anti-piracy strategy though. Nothing will prevent people from pirating your game more then making it unplayable for everybody.
When it is working, it is a most fantabulous game though. And plan on playing it a lot more and really enjoying myself.
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07.04.06
Posted in General at 5:59 pm by Melfyk
A while back Installed Suse 10.1 because of it’s new Xgl features it comes with. With Xgl you can change the transparency of windows, switch between desktops with a nice 3d animation, alt-tab has a pretty new look (like windows vista), and moving your mouse to the top right hand side of the screen will sort your windows all pretty like on the desktop so you can select which one you want. There are also a few effects that are pointless like making it rain on your desktop and mouse rippling effects.
Here are just a few Xgl screens:
xgl01.gif
xgl02.gif
xgl03.gif
Xgl is fun to play with but the big thing that pissed me off was it’s inability to play nice with other 3d apps. I can’t imagine using Xgl permently until they get it work work well with other applications that require opengl. I will also be switching back to fedora soon. I’m not very pleased with suse. They load it up with too much useless software on install (which is why I dumped ubuntu), also it doesn’t come preinstalled with a program like yum or apt. Yeah, there is YaST but it is not my favorite tool to use.
I do not know how long ago google put out a linux version of GoogleEarth but when I found out I installed it immediately. I have been waiting a while for google to port it. For months i have been trying to get the windows version to work in wineX but nothing but constant failure. So since this linux release of Google Earth I have been wasting my life away in it. The biggest difference between the linux version and the windows version is the navigation controls. The last win version of Earth that I played with the controls were inside of its own widget on the bottom part of the window. In this linux version the controls are hidden away in the top right hand corner, which seems more efficient. You get to have a bigger viewing window this way. Below are a few screens of Google Earth in Linux:
Google Earth screen 1
Google Earth screen 2
Google Earth screen 3
Google Earth screen 4
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07.05.06
Posted in General at 12:10 am by Soabirw
My sister didn’t want to pay for a re-print of the picture we had taken at Lagoon, so I just scanned it in and printed it out for her on fancy paper. Figured, since I scanned it in, might as well let everybody see what a stud I am and just how creepy Mike is.
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07.06.06
Posted in Toys at 10:56 am by Soabirw
Well, the projector finally came. Unfortunately my dad decided to go out of town again this morning, so I wont get any help with building a tripod thingy for it. We are renting, so not sure we can go punching holes in the ceiling or wall. Found some pictures of it in action in a forum though:
Think it will work out well if I can find a good stand for the projector and get the screen figured out. Might have to ninja some hooks into the walls and mud over them when we leave.
Edit: Here is a neat comparison of an older screen and mine.
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07.10.06
Posted in Toys at 9:02 am by Soabirw
Finally got to go back to work today. Can’t wait to find out what disasters I missed. And I’m sure the project we were a few weeks behind on enjoyed my absence as well. It is nice to not be in a bed half the day though. But I wouldn’t mind having a few more days to get the new pad in order. It’s a disaster right now.
The projector was a more complicated project then I thought. We have it setup and looking fantabulous, but the room placement is very odd. Projector has to be in the middle of the room, 8 feet or so away from the screen. And then we also need all the AV stuff with it. It puts out some serious heat too, so can’t have it stuffed in some hole. When Intendant gets up here maybe he can help me think of a better way to situate it. But for right now, it’s working and I am very happy with the projector. Played some games and watched some movies on it. Wide screen movies fit on it perfectly in LBX mode. Game Cube and PS2 fit great in 16:9 mode. In 4:3 they have a fair amount of room on either side, but that’s to be expected. It was frustrating at first, since every movie and game I put in seemed to run at a different resolution. But we managed to find the happy medium. Now we sit back and enjoy 92″ of goodness.
On the negative side, my receiver sucks nuts. One day, many months ago, it just stopped doing surround sound. Any digital input, DSP, Pro-Logic, etc was mute. Only way to get any sound out of it was plain old stereo. And LFE to sub woofer didn’t work either. So I had to do some tricky stuff to get that working. Sounds crappy though. The front panel says “DSP NG” all the time, which I assume means “DSP No Good”. Or maybe “No Ground”, but not sure I would fix that. So now I’m pissed that I have this glorious projector and about the lamest sound you can get.
I think I’m going to pick me up a new Yamaha receiver. I’ve been hearing good things about the Yamaha receivers and it was recommended to me a while ago when I was trying a Sony out. It has 5 AV inputs and 2 Audio only inputs, 3 component, 5 S-Video, 5 composite (like it matters), 5 RCA audio, 4 optical, 2 coaxial. You may think that sounds like a lot more then 5 inputs, but the inputs overlap. The actual video labels are DVD, DTV, DVR, VCR (s-video / composite only), then a S-Video / Composite on the front panel. It also supports an iPod docking station, which I might try out some day. We already have a component video switcher and planned to only use a receiver like this to handle the surround sound and up conversion. The projector doesn’t really support multiple sources very well. The component input is with an adapter on it’s VGA port. When using the adapter it covers up the S-Video input. So I really need everything to just go over component. It looks like this receiver will do that just fine and probably even remove the need for our current, remote-less component switcher. Right now I have exactly 3 component devices. If we do the MythTV box or satellite again, then that’s one S-Video. If I need another component input I can just start using the built in DVD player on the projector. It’s actually very nice, has optical audio out and everything, if I can just figure out how to disable the built in speakers.
Will be nice to be able to switch inputs with one click of a remote again. For a while you had to get up and manually switch the video, then switch the audio input on the JVC, then switch the video input on the TV. Then we got lucky and the JVC died, so everything was in crappy stereo. So that removed one step in that process.
Hopefully we’ll soon be sitting comfy, watching movies, and downing some tasty Asti.
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Posted in General at 1:27 pm by Soabirw
Just read a great review of Suse Enterprise Desktop 10 (Yes, it is very different from Suse Linux). It looks just fantastic. I agree with the article in saying it’s now at a point you could mass market it. Still not a Windows replacement for me until it fully supports 3D hardware and DirectX. But for workstations and basic home PCs, I think it would work grand. Ultimately I would like Mac OS X to be put on PCs legitimately. Still no gaming love there though. I really hope that changes soon. I don’t like have only one choice for PC gaming.
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07.12.06
Posted in General at 9:42 am by Soabirw
Only way I really keep up on movies is with the trailers at Apple. Used to manually nab them with either mplayer dumps or opening the stream files in an editor to find the real URL. A real hassle. Firefox now has an extension that will nab all those trailer files along with Google Video, YouTube, etc. I’ve used it a few times now and am very happy with it. I have no interest in streaming 80mb video files every time I want to see it. And with as expensive as bandwidth is, it’s surprising the companies think that is such a grand idea. I know it means people are having to come to your site all the time, but I think there are better ways to get yourself attention with your videos.
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Posted in Rant, Toys at 1:48 pm by Soabirw
Microsoft if coming out with it’s own MP3 player to compete with the iPod. Look familiar? Don’t care if they are making their own, just wish they would have tried a bit harder to come up with a design that was marginally different then the iPod. I still wouldn’t buy it, but I would have a sliver more respect for it.
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07.14.06
Posted in Toys at 11:01 am by Soabirw
My new Yamaha receiver came yesterday. Got it all setup and sounding fantastic. I am very impressed with that thing. Didn’t realize it was a 9.1 system until I started reading the audio setup part of the manual. Has the usual front L/R, surround L/R, center, sub. But then adds in a “presence” L/R that go above and in-between the front L/R and a “back surround” that goes in-between the surround L/R. So some day I might have to pick up 4 more speakers. The audio setup process was really impressive too. You put this crazy 360 degree mic about where people will be sitting. Then it blasts crazy noises from each speaker, determines if they are wired correctly, equalizes and levels them based on distance, etc.
Making our lives easier with source switching too. I mentioned the 3 step process we had before. It sure is nice to have one click to take care of it all again. And the up conversion to component made it so we have one cable to run to the projector. Which was the hardest part of this setup. Projectors are rough. We have it at the base of a table thingy, so about floor level. Gives people good leg room from couch and something to set their drinks on. Projector still gets good airflow too. Sure made it tricky to get the bastard lined up to work with DVD, Anime, and games. Everything has to be slightly different.
I think I am happy with it though. Watched Transporter on it last night and it looked and sounded fantabulous. While watching Excel Saga we even thought there was a bunch of teenage shitbags goofing off in front of our house. And having widescreen movies fill that 92″ 16:9 screen really makes me think, “fuck the theater”. I already thought that with the Wega, but I could occasionally be convinced otherwise. Don’t think that will be the case anymore.
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