Had the flu for the last solid week. Ugh. It started with a night of aweful cold chills and sweating, then 2 days of body aches, then it moved to my head for conjestion, coughing, and ears plugged up by fluid. After 7 days, it’s finally broken. I’ve heard of two other people who have now gotten this same progression of misery – so be on your lookout and know it’ll knock you out for a whole week.
I’m not much of a zealot about most grass-roots stuff, but the Copyright Royalty Board has raised rates for internet radio stations by hundreds of percent to play songs online. I, for one, listen to lots of internet radio at work – and this stinks because it will put some good stations out of business.
These guys (http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/home/) have a great system that allows you to enter your name/address and it will find your reps – then allow you to automatically fax or email them. You can also print and snail mail them. Takes about 30 seconds total unless you want to customize the message. This is the way petitions should work.
I didn’t notice it last season; but the BBC revived Dr. Who. Not the old, shabby ones done on a $10 budget per episode, but now with (only) slightly more believable computer generated effects. It’s not the effects that makes me want to see more, however, its the fact they have comprehensible plots and fun action that are actually interesting. It’s still got a bit of a handy-cam feel, but the actors are much more interesting and fun to watch. Someone mentioned it’s on SciFi, but I don’t have cable. The one episode I saw with them traveling back to the time of Shakespeare was fun and entertaining – I hope they do well.
Here’s the link to the new series: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/
Well, put the latest performance review’s positive outcome to some new hardware this weekend.
First off, bought a new case since my old one wasn’t cutting it with the RAID drives and keeping everything cool. These were on smoking sale at Fry’s so I bought a limited edition Antec P182 – which comes in a wicked-cool gun-metal color.
I can’t say enough about the great fan layout which is super-silent and keeps everything very cool inside (each fan is 3 speed 120mm with external speed control and external removable lint traps for easy cleaning). The style, silent operation, excellent airflow, and functionality (the front audio jacks actually work on this case – finally!) are complimented by the ability to mount any board and its ample drive bays (each drive mounting point has rubber shock mounts and the drive bays have a silky smooth slide operation) which accommodate my 1.2 terabyte RAID just nicely. I have a feeling I’ll be using this case for years to come.
Next up was to finally replace my old laptop. I finally sold my old Dell Inspiron 8000 (P3, 1gig ram, XP, etc). It was a great laptop – the first model to have a 3D accelrator in it (gforce 2) – but weighed a ton and was just too bulky with its old 15″ rectangular screen (they didn’t have widescreen back then). I actually got $450 for the whole setup – about $100 more than I thought. However, compare that to when I found the paperwork and discovered I paid $2700 for it when it came out in 2001 – ouch.
Swallowing that lesson on technologies’ steep capital depreciation curve and vowing not to spend over $1000 ever again, I used the cash towards a new HP dv2000t. It’s a 14″ widescreen Core 2 Duo, 1gig ram, 120gig hd, 128meg nvidia gforce 7200 graphics card, dvd-dl burner, built-in webcam, vista home premium, 802.11/b/g, works, and usual bundleware. I found a $200 off coupon (thanks NotebookForums) and got it all for $800. I really fell in love with the glossy finish and style of this laptop after looking at many 14″ notebooks. Outside of a Mac, I think it’s one of the nicest looking laptops around. I settled on the 14″ because 15″ simply got too big for me anymore. This one was super-nice sized – fits in carrying satchel’s pockets very easily, was very light (tiniest power supplies I’ve seen), was more than powerful enough to play simple 3d games, ran Photoshop CS2, Visual Studio, Office apps, Dreamweaver, etc. On top of that, you don’t even need to boot it to watch dvd’s, just use the touch buttons on the surface. Can’t wait till it arrives in 2 weeks.
An interesting side note is that I got much more for my old Dell laptop on craigslist than what it was selling for on ebay. Similar laptops sold for $275-$325 on ebay, but I had bidding wars all the way to $450 on craigslist. Probably because you meet face-to-face with craigslist (ebay is full of laptop scams), but also people seem to really *REALLY* want used laptops on craigslist. Got a number of starving arts/student types. Interesting.
GREAT little conceptual/visual 3D building blocks game. Find out it you’re right brained. Quite fun – beat it in about 30 minutes, and on puzzle 8 – even figured out how to do it in 12 blocks instead of the 16 they think it took. 😉
The Woodburn tulip festival is just kicking into high gear!
I went last weekend and there were only a few rows up. This weekend, they blooming is up to about 65% of the fields. It should be an amazing week with good weather returning about Wed/Thurs.
If you get a chance, bring your camera and go. Admission is $5 on weekends, but free during week. It can also be exceptionally crowded on the weekends – but it’s shaping up to be one of the best years I’ve seen in the 5 years.
Here’s a picture I took last trip to inspire you:
This is one of the better flash games I’ve played in a while – quite fun and really great graphics. http://www.gettheglass.com/
Continuing my laptop performance review. I have a HP dv2000 laptop with a geForce 6150 and AMD Turino 2x I’m evaluating. It will play Quake 3 with a resolution of 1024×768 at a surprisingly great framerate, but not Half-life 2.
Half-life 2 stutters (or should say flat stops) for whole 2-5 seconds at a time even with almost everything turned off at 800×600 – definitely not playable in the outdoor scenes. However, you can turn things back up and get 30fps inside the buildings. It does play flash games very nicely at full-screen (Deanimator, Madness Interactive), has snappy UI in Vista, runs Photoshop CS2 without much effort, and (outside of Half-Life 2) would have been my laptop choice. However, there is a Core 2 Duo with a geForce 7100 for about $75 more, so I think I might go for that since graphics performance is theoretically x2 and the cpu’s are Intel. 🙂
So, I’m in the market for a nice low-end laptop but there are about a hundred different kinds of graphics cards in those laptops. Even from the same vendor there are very cryptic model, performance, and feature specifications.
Question is: Which ones are actually good? It’s useful to know specs, but that doesn’t actually tell you how fast are they really (i.e benchmarks). Turns out, there is a great website that collected all this info in an easy to compare table. This has been needed for a long time:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
I attended GDC (Game Developers Conference) this last week, so I’ve been down in sunny San Francisco. Interesting city overall. For all it’s hippie goings on during the 60’s and 70’s it sure has turned into a very expensive and upscale place to hang out. It’s certainly not for poor hippies now.
I’ll be putting more info up later about GDC but I went down a weekend early and got a chance to catch up with an old roommate and go to Comicon. I met the guy that played the sith lord in the new Star Wars movies, Elvira Mistress of the Dark, the actress that played Kira in Deep Space 9 series, the original Apollo and Boomer from Battlestar Galactica, saw the cast and director from the new movie 300, got a drawing and autograph from the animator that designed Kim Possible, and attended the Chinese New Year festival in the Chinatown district.
Whew. Lots of adventures!