Archived News starting from 12-17-2008 and earlier
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After a long night of
Left 4 Dead in 8 player vs mode, I woke up this morning charged for a zombie fight. Instead, I fired up my snow blower and managed to clear both my driveway and my neighbors in
under 10 minutes. I'm not sure if it's the zombie vision or urge to get to the safe room, but apparently fighting zombie hordes is good preparation for snow removal.
So you paid the $399 for an overpriced blu-ray player and as movie rentals move farther from physical media and closer to streaming/downloadable you're wondering "Can I do anything with this other than play 'Little Big Planet'"? Well your answer is here as Sony finally
launches PlayStation Home tomorrow. While us Xbox 360 fanboys know we get
better graphics,
easier development,
more exclusives,
streaming movies,
built-in extenderand a
better online network, that last point could be in contention as Sony launches their cheap knockoff of
Second Life. PS3 fanboys, all kidding aside, tell me your thoughts after playing around with it. I'll be reviewing it as well at my boyfriend/neighbors house on launch day. For those disappointed in the recent lack of posts, this should provide more than enough fuel for rage and banter.
Try as I might to hide it, my birthday continues to occur year after year. Having wrote the application that reminds managers of anniversaries and birthdays at work, I curse myself annually for not including an exception for my name. This year, however, was an exception to the cursing as it yielded an awesome
Q*BERT Birthday Cake. My friend Tim from work asked me what my favorite video game character was a few days ago out of the blue and now I know why. His wife spent 6 hours making the cake from scratch (thankfully also for her portfolio and not just my birthday) and as you can see it turned out awesome (tastes just like you'd expect Q*BERT to as well).
This morning I woke up to cries of "the internet is gone!" from Lisa. Thinking quickly, I decided the three most likely events that could bring down the internet was a colossal solar flare, multi-targeted thermonuclear attack, or a router worm of untold evil that jams every switch in the world with garbage. Since my alarm clock was still working I ruled out the solar flare, and the lack of zombies ruled out the thermonuclear attack, which left the worm to end all worms as the likely culprit. I sprang into action and retrieved my emergency cash, gold ingots and platinum bars along with my
bucket of food and generator, then threw all of it along with Lisa into my truck. Before I could embark on my planned escape route from certain financial meltdown and social chaos my phone buzzed and my heart skipped a beat. Taking it from the holster I was amazed to see my google alert for the
HDPC-20 flash across my screen. Daring to hope, I loaded up my mobile browser and was greeted with Google. A few more websites later and I was convinced the internet was alive and well. Running downstairs I discovered that in fact my internet
connection was down, not the entire internet. I explained to Lisa that our internet connection is not the entire internet, and asked that in future outages she be more specific about what exactly is gone. Crisis averted, I went back to bed.
Excited as a 12 year old on Christmas, I ran downstairs this morning to get the new
Xbox Experience on my primary machine. My
illegal load was lacking the new
Miis Avatars, so I quickly set about creating one after my new "legal" update finished. A few minutes later, I was hotter than ever, but apparently nobody on my friends list was as excited as me and I was alone in Avatar world. Lucky for me, Lisa is obsessed with making virtual characters and by the time she was done creating hers,
Keith had one done for a kinky Xbox fanboy three way. Now I just need to get my new avatar into
Mirrors Edge so I can make out with Faith when Lisa isn't home, so long as
she doesn't catch me.
After an
intense night of Rock Band, complete with lights and smoke machine courtesy
Senator Kelley, the November LAN kicked off after 3 hours of setup and configuration. The record setup time was thanks to Call of Duty 5, a 30 minute install that refused to cooperate until we setup a dedicated server. After the setup hurdle, things went fairly well with the addition of FarCry 2 and Zombie Panic to round out the game list.
Excelcier took a hit for the team by volunteering his computer to experience the technical difficulties this LAN, and
Stavos lost his crown as first to arrive when Marco not only showed up first but left last after helping me gain even more gamerpoints on Xbox with Mirrors Edge. Now that all the setup kinks have been worked out, the Jan LAN should be a snap.
Timelapse and
webcam are all I got from this LAN thanks to my frantic attempts to get COD5 to work.
An auction at work netted me a
Dell PowerEdge 6600 server which I promptly
loaded up for the upcoming LAN party. I learned the Xeon processors aren't 64 bit, which made the 8GB of memory less exciting, but still addressable. It replaces my
PowerEdge 2400 which was cutting edge around 2000 (the new one is cutting edge around 2006) being twice as heavy and almost twice as large. It's also 4200 better. What do I plan on doing with this beast when I'm not serving files for LAN parties? Absolutely nothing, it sucks too much power and nothing I do needs this much hardware. I just like having it close to me, in case I need to start a virtual server farm or local weather modeling. Below is my upgrade path to awesomeness.
| System | CPU | Memory | RAID |
REAKTOR
New Server |
Xeon MP @ 3.00 GHz
4 Physical, 8 Logical |
8.00 GB DDR |
Dual Dell PERC 4/DC |
REACTOR
Old Server |
Pentium III @ 861 Mhz
1 Physical, 1 Logical |
1.50 GB SDRAM |
Single Dell PERC 2/Si |
After deciding $60 for a new Xbox game could instead buy me 4 months of a 1-game-out
GameFly rental subscription, I decided to take the plunge and signed up for an account yesterday. After
setting up my queue with
Mirrors Edge at the top I restrained myself from hoping I'd get it any time soon, instead expecting to get the first "Available Now" title (Assasins Creed) as my first game. An
email today, however, had me tickled pink as I learned the 'just released' game is on it's way. And while I wait for it, I can
learn the controls and
download the manual. If it arrives before the weekend I may just have to do a happy dance.
Even my
cat can't get a wire to my Xbox 360 in an inconspicuous way, so I've been stuck with the
Xbox wireless adapter which only supports 802.11G. Too often have my HD video streams stuttered into unwatchability and caused Lisa to cry, so today I decided to end her suffering. Microsoft has no official 802.11N support, so a
wireless bridge was my only option, and I remember Whineyho having success with his. This being one of the many draft N versions, I wasn't 100% certain it would inter operate with my routers flavor of Draft N, but surprisingly they both got along extremely well and so far no more tears from Lisa. If you're stuck with a wireless Xbox 360 I'd recommend this option over the official adapter any day. I also took the opportunity to switch my wireless security layer from my lowly 64-bit WEP to WPA2-PSK(AES) since WPA-PSK(TKIP) was
hacked, and my house has long been a prime target for drive-by hacking on account of my immensely popular blog.
As a manual transmission fanatic, I'm always entertained by people with shift-tronic, tiptronic, or steptronic transmissions who are convinced they drive a manual transmission vehicle. There's no talking them out of it, so I don't even bother telling them the presence of a
torque converter disqualifies it from the definition. Driving a manual seems to have become more important as a status symbol than an actual performance advantage, so marketing has successfully convinced a great majority they are one and the same. Enter the
hill start assist introduced by Dodge for the 2009 Challenger (thanks
Enorym). It looks like a sufficient number of people didn't swallow the automatic-as-manual pill, and now instead of glorifying a power-sucking torque converter into a manual, a genuine manual transmission has an assist to help novices get over the fear of starting off from an incline. I just hope there are enough people who know what a torque converter is opt for the manual on this model, and the demise of the manual transmission is delayed long enough for my
2011 Focus ST.
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