03.30.06

A mixed bag of junk

Posted in General at 2:59 pm by jw

I’d like to say I’ve been too busy to post, but it would only be about half the truth.  In fact, I’ve been mostly busy messing with the new EQ2 expansion and since last week, playing Oblivion, both of which have been a lot of fun.  Other minor games I’ve been messing with have been X3: Reunion (which I’d only recommend to people who absolutely loved X2 because it really is much of the same), finishing F.E.A.R. (which is a fantastic FPS/horror) and generally messing around with various other things that I pick up when I get bored.

In other news, it looks like I’ll be heading out to San Jose (CA) for 6 months to help out with my work’s new office out there.  Hopefully that won’t mean too much offline time (I’d get severe withdrawal) but it should be an excellent experience moving over to the west coast so we can see a different part of the US for a while.  I have several friends from EQ and EQ2 over there and am definitely looking forward to meeting them.

DRM has been continuing to annoy me lately as I try to get Windows Media stuff to work with iTunes and my wife’s iPod.  Finally figured out how to burn CDs and rip them back to AAC for her (and mp3 for me).  I know I shouldn’t buy DRM junk and for the most part I don’t, but in the rare cases it really does make me want to write a virtual sound card that will happily rip anything I send at it.  On the bright side of DRM though, Alcohol 120% let me rip my Oblivion DVD to a working image so I can keep the DVD safe and sound on the shelf while playing the game now.  Thanks for not using Star-Force, Bethesda, unlike Ubi-Soft which pisses me off by preventing me from playing half their collection because they simply don’t work on XP-x64 because if the junky “copy protection” that stops me from even playing games I legally own.

Also, I think my home PC is about due for a reinstall.  Things have been going kinda flaky lately and I can’t get Windows to recognize my CDRW and DVDRW as recordable discs any more.  Problem is, can I avoid playing Oblivion for the 2 hours it takes to get it up and running again!

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