Random Opinions
Got an email today saying one of my good friends from work (who’s blog I have linked as Digital Meh) was in a car accident this morning, and is in the emergency ward at his local hospital. Hard to feel sorry for myself when I’m worried about a friend. Guess I’ll have to thank him when he comes to for getting me through my own mourning, but he really didn’t have to be quite so dramatic!
Our cat died today of kidney failure (no, nothing to do with the Menu Foods thing). He was the most loving cat I’ve ever known and will be missed terribly by everyone who knew him. RIP Rampageous Rafiki. Dec 4 2000 – May 1 2007. 
Been a while since I updated the blog so I thought I’d recap on games I’ve been playing recently. Time’s been a little less plentiful with all the house moving going on but there’s still a bit of it left over.
As I mentioned in my previous post, my video card died so I had to go out and get a new 8800GTX so I’ve tried to sample as many of my old games as possible to see how they work with the new card, and on Vista x64. While it’s a shame that I’m still using my 2 year old CPU with a brand new card, most games still come up beautifully.
Working just fine on my machine, and loves the 8800GTX. I don’t notice any real compatibility differences beyond what I previously had in 64 bit XP, but am still waiting on good drivers from Saitek for my gamepad and joystick. Overall the OS does seem very smooth and I stand by pretty much everything I said in my earlier review.
With Bane moving to Vanguard, I spent some time with friends there levelling up my toon (called Ddrak, of course), but the real rush has died off a lot now with many of the core people in the guild leaving or reducing their playtime significantly for a number of mostly different reasons. I still find the game very enjoyable and am rather confused by the plethora of negative press and buzz it seems to be getting – sure there’s bugs and incomplete sections but nothing of the magnitude that warrants the negativity surrounding it.
I definitely don’t have the energy or time to start over in a new MMOG now, and see no point giving up a game that’s still fun, so Bane is definitely continuing and I’m trying to recruit new folks when I get time online.
TES Oblivion: The Shivering Isles
The Shivering Isles was an excellent expansion to an already excellent game. Building on something that was already very fun is always difficult, but Bethesda managed to do it very handily in this expansion, creating something that had a refreshingly different storyline but kept the core fun elements of the original game. Despite having a fairly powerful toon from the original game that I brought through into Oblivion, the combat was still a challenge in places and with my recent upgrade in video cards the world really did come up beautifully. Will definitely recommend this expansion to anyone who enjoyed the original game.
Excellent completion of the Dawn of War series to bring seven major races to the Warhammer 40k game. Lots of good replay value as you can play the different races, and conquer your opponents in different orders, which lets you face them as more or less powerful versions depending on your progress through the game. Only thing truly missing are Tyranids… maybe there is one more expansion after all…
Loved this game. In fact, I played the main campaign all the way through twice following the “good” and “evil” storylines. The whole game engine is definitely an improvement over NWN1, and the storyline was interesting enough to keep me playing. I haven’t explored any user-made additions yet but when I get time it will be something worth looking into.
Finally got back to this after giving it up for a while from my previous disgust of their copy protection antics. Thanks to the fine folks at Reloaded, it’s working just fine on Vista x64 and I might even finish it sometime soon! Definitely a fun game, pity about the copy protection idiocy that prevents paying customers from enjoying it while pirates get the full game.
Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar
A solid expansion from the original game, but haven’t had time to play the campaign through fully. They’ve made a bunch of good changes to the research tree from the original game (most notable being the collapsing of the 1/2/3/4… versions of technologies into a single item which incrementally fills), and added a few new minor techs to mix things up. Still a good game, and worth supporting for their rejection of the copy protection racket.
Definitely the best looking flight simulator I’ve seen on the market, and lots of fun to just play around with. Will be even better when the DirectX 10 patch comes out later in the year! A must-have for any flight simmer.
Still on the shelf
I still have a bunch of stuff on the shelf that I’ve yet to complete. I do want to get back to X3: Reunion and finish up the story line (once I figure out how to make decent cash in the game). I have a few flight sims I have to work on (IL2, Wings over Vietnam, Combat FS3) when I get bored of everything else, and I’ve yet to finish Half Life 2 Episode 1 – which I really should do before Episode 2 comes out.
Lots of stuff there, and lots to do on the house as well. Guess I’ll wrap it all up sometime late 2010 or something!
It all started with my PC making a strange beeping noise while I was playing Vanguard last night. After taking some time to actually figure out it was really the PC making the noise and not one of the other dozen pieces of equipment shoved into the corner, I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong. Digging out a torch, it was soon apparent that the coolant was no longer swishing around the reservoir the way it should have been, so it looked like the pump had failed.
This wasn’t a huge problem – I turned off the PC (noting the screen had blanked by this time) and took it out of the corner into some real light to bang a few times at the water pump to no avail, so proceeded to pull all the water cooling apparatus out of the PC’s case and replace it with the fans and heatsinks I’d taken out when I installed the system last year in San Jose.
About an hour later, the PC was all assembled again, but still wouldn’t boot. A quick overview indicated the CPU fan wasn’t spinning now, so stranger things were going on. Connecting one of the case fans to the CPU fan plug on the motherboard showed the case fan not spinning when power was applied, so it looks like what had actually happened was the motherboard had for some reason decided not to power the CPU fan plug, which caused the water pump to stop pumping, and the CPU fan to not work after I replaced everything. Fishing around in my computer parts soon gave up a cable to connect the fan directly to the power supply inside the case, bypassing the motherboard, so now the fan works again.
This time, booting showed no signal on the DVI output of the video card, and a garbled output on the VGA. Messing with the card didn’t seem to help much, and plugging the card into another machine showed the fault followed the card – guess it’s dead. Oh well – I needed an upgrade anyway.
The downside of all this is I’d really wanted to wait until ATI brought out their DX10 card before upgrading, but looks like I’m going with the 8800GTX now. In either case, it’s a very big step up from my two year old middle-of-the-road card that I have now.
Been busy, hence the lack of updates (at least that’s the excuse I’ll make).
Moving was entertaining. The day we decided to move was the day that the weather decided to put a nice sheet of ice all over everything for use to cope with. Spent some time chipping the ice from the steps before actually moving anything so we didn’t kill ourselves trying to load stuff in the truck.
It was definitely a long day. Given that it was just Tahnia and I moving stuff, she did an amazing job keeping up with the heavier stuff like couches and beds as we carted them all down to the truck to shift. The other end was a bit easier – no steep/narrow stairwells to deal with. I think we even managed to move it all without scratching up the wood floor, which is even more amazing (had to attach felt pads to the bottom of everything before putting it down).
So now we’ve moved and are slowly settling into our new place. The pile of boxes downstairs is diminishing as we find places to put things and Tahnia’s gone nuts with home repairs and has taken to camping out at Home Depot to find new useful power tools. Seriously though, she’s doing a great job fixing up “her house” the way she wants it and I’m just an engineer so there’s no way I’m getting between a graphic designer and home decorating.
I’ll post more when I have interesting stuff to write about.