|
|
From time to time I feel compelled to preface a posting here by a reminder of what sort of person I am. I’ve been playing computer and console games for over a quarter of a century, heavily biased towards the computer “role playing” game, fantasy, and first person shooter genres. I’m more prone to like something like Deus Ex or Oblivion than Doom 3, although I enjoy both types of games. And Mario Kart or Katamari Damacy are right out.
In a nutshell, I like games with a strong narrative: something that could make a decent fantasy or science fiction book. Although I enjoy some twitch/combat games, that isn’t my forte. “Childlike” games with bubblegum graphics and mostly mindless plots do not amuse me very much.
Now I’ve set the stage for my rant, the basic thesis of which is: Checkpoint saves and their cousins, single copy saves, are evil. They suck. They drain all of the joy out of otherwise good games.
This requires a bit of explaining if you aren’t a computer gamer…
Continue reading Checkpoint saves suck
I went back to my dentist today for a follow up regarding the pain I’m experiencing with the tooth that was prepped for a crown. I’ve now been booked in to see a specialist on Tuesday: an endodontist. I find it curious that an endodontist is a specialist (according to the Wikipedia link) in the “inside [of] the tooth”. So, all that drilling, grinding and scraping a normal dentist does, that’s on the outside? News to me: seems odd that it hurts like it does. Apparently, endodontists are the guys who do root canals- I was really sort of hoping to avoid that, but the pain trumps my desire to minimize time in the dentists chair, I guess.
Continue reading May cause mood swings…
My nephew sent me a bunch of Youtube links relating to a folk duo from New Zealand called “Flight of the Conchords“ Their music, at least from the samples I looked at, seems to be heavily slanted towards somewhat off-colour humour. In my opinion, it’s first rate stuff- I spent a good half hour laughing.
Continue reading Business Time
I mentioned previously that I had some long-overdue dental work done last week on Thursday. Post-dentist, it was relatively pain free. Until Monday afternoon, that is, when it was as if some hitherto somnolent nerve suddenly awakened from its deep slumber.
Continue reading Aching jaw, and LOLCats…
Time is relative. When I started my vacation, two weeks seemed like forever. Now that I’m on my last day of vacation, two weeks seems to have been hardly enough to get started.
Continue reading Vacation over…
I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives. The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine. The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely. There is a story behind their banishment from my computer. It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.
I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine. First I built a RAID 1 array. Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista. I was wrong.
Continue reading Asus M2R32 motherboard: defective RAID/AHCI?
I just got back from the dentist. Nearly two hours in the chair: in itself, that’s tiring. But the part that is bugging me at the moment is that the freezing is still fully active. My mouth feels like its stuffed with cotton or something. And of course you have to answer a bunch of questions while you are standing at the dentist. The best part was when my credit card was “declined”: Citibank likes to refuse approval on “unusual” charges periodically.  Trying to talk through that situation is great fun when half your mouth is frozen.
Continue reading Can’t tawk, my mouf is fwozen
I bought 1.75 terabytes of potential disk capacity today.  That storage comes in the form of three 3.5″ Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 model hard drives. For a few moments I was holding all of that storage in one hand.
Continue reading A terabyte a day
Chris, Kalen and I went boating yesterday. This is sort of a “traditional” thing, as in we’ve rented a boat and risked drowning three times in the last decade or so. This time we rented our boat from Sewell’s marina in Horseshoe Bay and went up to Anvil Island.
Continue reading Boating…
My friend Chris and I had a great day at the Abbotsford Airshow today. As per usual, I’m mildly sunburnt (despite sunscreen) and tired. I also have several hundred photos to sort through. I was thinking I might get to uploading them tonight, but I think that will wait for another day.
Continue reading Airshow 2007
|
Recent Comments