Just another useless personal blog
Word around the office is that there was a shooting this morning at the convenience store I stop at on the way to work most days, just a block away from the office. And, a coworker saw the nearby train platform closed one day recently due to a stabbing.
Being on the edge of downtown, this isn’t exactly one of the best neighbourhoods, but it hadn’t seemed that bad before…
It took a bit of fiddling, but I finally have DVD menus working for the TV shows I’m capturing. There are tools available for putting together the menus interactively, but I wanted something a bit more automated, and it’s not like I’m going to spend a lot of time carefully painting beautiful pictures for each one.
Now I can finally start burning TV episodes, since I didn’t want to have them all as one big stream where you’d have to fast-forward or rewind to the right starting point…
Continue reading “Ordering Off The Menu”
Last night, for the first time, I had to tell a telephone survey that no, I could not participate in their survey because I’m *too old* for their range.
*sigh*
Well, throw one more onto the list: World of Warcraft. I actually started about a week ago, but didn’t really have much time to play or think about it recently.
Continue reading “Orcs Suck”
Forget the 8-buns-vs-10-hotdogs problem. What really needs to be solved is the 30-minute-washer-vs-45-minute-dryer problem…
Let’s see… Apparently there are 373 or so blog entries on this site, each one with a unique URL.
There’s also an RSS comments feed link for each entry, and although it’s not explicitly linked, some crawlers are following the trackback URL as well, for another 746 URLs.
Plus, entries can be referenced by date. I pretty much write only once per day, so that’s another 373 by-day links, plus 16 by-month links.
And, of course, various other miscellaneous links. 16 categories, two main page feeds, and the main page itself, for another 19.
That makes a total of at least 1527 different URLs just within the site itself.
It’s no wonder then that web crawlers make up the vast majority of server hits…
It looks like Steam is still generating a lot of controversy, and what would a gaming-heavy blog be without yet another uninformed opinion…
Even I forget what I have and what I’m working on, so collected here is a list of all of the games still on the pile: (Updated 05-29-2006)
Well it’s winter and it’s getting dry and colder out (-11C right now), so you know what that means…
Yup, it’s Static Electricity Season. I can’t walk anywhere without building up a charge, and when I went to turn on the bedroom light, I got a double dose from the screws above and below the switch.
I’d better not have to work on any of the computers’ internals anytime soon…
While I was picking up a new network card, I figured I’d finish converting all of my video cabling over to S-Video. I’m running everything through a switcher now, but all of the inputs have to be of the same type, so they were all still using composite/RCA for lack of enough cables. The PS2 was the real sticking point, since it only came with a composite cable and needs a special plug, and the official Sony S-Video adapter was $50 when I checked on it. Nuts to that. Fortunately, this time I found a third-party cable that was much cheaper.
And wow, what a difference it makes. I’d never really taken a close look before, since it’s sometimes hard to tell what the difference is, but GTA:SA makes it blatantly obvious. All of the fine print on the loading screen is clear and readable now instead of blurry, the little mini-map in the corner is sharp now, so it’s easier to tell where I am and what the markers are, I can finally clearly see the ammo numbers, and it just seems sharper and brighter overall.
Component inputs on an HDTV would be even better, but then I’d be spoiling myself…
I’ve been interested in checking out World of Warcraft for my next MMORPG fix, but apparently they’re having a few problems… If I do decide to give it a try, I’ll probably wait another week or two first.
If I can find the time. Damn this affluent Western burden of having too many leisure options… :-P
To give you an idea of just how out-of-touch I am, I didn’t even realize that yesterday was the day of the provincial election until it was too late…
Reviews of the Nintendo DS are starting to trickle in, and they’re pretty positive so far. Although the dual screens and touchpad seem a bit gimmicky, it’s at least as functional as a standard GBA if you strip all the gimmicks away. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with the WiFi and Internet capabilities, too.
I’d been thinking of upgrading my plain old GBA to a GBA SP for a while, but I’ll probably pick up a DS instead. There’s nothing terribly compelling right now, but it’ll still solve the backlight and battery problems with the original, and still let me use any nifty new DS-specific stuff that might come out…
A couple days ago I was bored, so I whipped up a Firefox extension that made it a bit easier to search the PoE forums using a search engine made by one of the other users.
And then a couple hours later someone else posted that he’d been working on something similar and was just about to release his version. And his does a much better job. And mine appears to be a bit buggy.
Damn. Oh well, at least now I can pretend to be a Javascript and XUL expert…
I am now waiting on the completion of the single biggest thing I have ever tried to download: Half-Life 2. It’ll probably be at least 3-4 gigs of data transferred, to meet the ~8 gig install size, but at this rate it should be done by morning.
Normally, given the option, I prefer to get copies of software on actual physical media instead of downloading them. In this case though, there is a difference: the CD version apparently still has the CD-in-drive check on startup. Even though the downloadable version obviously doesn’t. Don’t bother trying to reason it out; it’s apparently because of Orders From Above and nothing else… There’s also been the what-happens-if-I-lose-it concern, but they’ve actually included the ability to burn backup copies to DVD/CD.
The whole online activation requirement for HL2 has been a bit controversial, but at least it’s a one-time-only thing for the single-player game. (Multiplayer always has to do a key check, as is standard nowadays.) It has been effective, though: they avoided having any pre-release or zero-day leaks of pirated copies of the whole game, unlike nearly every other big title to come out recently.
Hopefully my system is even capable of running it well. I technically meet all of the specs, except that my FSB is stuck at 266MHz, which is a bit lacking compared to the effective 800MHz you can get on recent motherboards. It should be good enough with some options turned down, at least.
Wow. Superman, Lois, Lana, and Jimmy sure spent a lot of time being jerks to each other.