March 23, 2009

  • well, the time has come.

    this will be my last entry.

    as of late, i feel like i have outgrown this place.  i don’t write in here as much as i used to, and i don’t feel as if writing in here is a necessity as i once did.  while i do still enjoy writing about what i do and what i think, i don’t feel this is the best outlet to do so anymore.  i’ve been here for six and a half years, and it’s time for a change.

    Xanga has almost felt like a giant community i’ve never really been a part of.  everyone seems to be vying for Featured status and True status, and aren’t content unless they have both.  i’ve been content to sit on the outside, looking in on all of this.  and once i started attracting the attention of a few high profile Xanga blogs, it only highlighted this feeling all the more clearly.

    i’m not going to stop writing, i’m going to move my writing to place more fitting to someone who prefers to sit out of the hustle and bustle of these attempts to climb the internet ladders.

    you can follow my twitter, or you can subscribe to my wordpress blog, which as of this writing hasn’t been installed.

    http://twitter.com/AriaCompany – http://blog.i-am-boss.org

    let’s end this thing…with yuno.

    it’s been fun.  see you around.

March 22, 2009

  • so yeah, haven’t posted here in a while.

    things have changed around the house since i last posted.

    firstly, my iPod broke.  i started getting some nasty feedback from the hard drive motor through my headphones.  so…i bought a new one.

    and on thursday, i scattered these things all over the house.  they give the TVs a bunch more channels with digital picture and sound.  pretty nice considering my bill has only gone up two bucks.

    and today i went out to fry’s and picked up one of these.  i am now living in HD heaven on my computer.  my only complaint: vc-1 hardware acceleration doesn’t work on my graphics card ;_;

    short and to the point.  twitter is getting to me.

February 23, 2009

  • yeah, so last weekend i recopied my Kumatanchi save onto my cycloDS.  i booted up and got the lecture about kumatan running away and all that, and then i was dropped back at the house.  kumatan was very hungry, had no energy and hated me.  over the next few days i spent a lot of time with her and got her mood and feelings back up.  last night i hit the end of the game, and kept on going afterwards for the fun of it.

    well, apparently in my efforts to bring her mood back up i have spoiled her rotten.  all it takes is one meal and one pet on the head and she gets that look on her face and her mood changes.  when that happens she doesn’t take her shows seriously and it’s overall a big buzzkill.

    i might keep going for a bit longer, but the game is loosing appeal with me at a rather steady clip, and at this rate it won’t make it to march.

February 21, 2009

  • today was a rather productive and somewhat sad day!

    i went out to Fry’s to buy a new cooler for my graphics card.  i bought it, i brought it home, and i installed it.  turns out the directions could not have been more wrong for my card: the holes it told me to use were too spread out, and the screws i was told to use were too tall, so it wouldn’t install correctly.

    after fixing that and raging over the VRAM heatsinks continually falling off, i finally get everything set up and working.  my temps didn’t fall as dramatically as they did with the cooler i installed on my old x1950 pro, but they dropped a fair amount when idle and dropped somewhat when in use.  my idle temps are around 43 C, and under max load (F@H) it sits at 74 C.  not TOO shabby, considering i used to idle at ~60 C and would hit 78 C under load, with the fan cranking away at more than 60% duty cycle.

    i also am going to vacuum my car later and put in new floormats.

    the sadness?  after booting up i heard a very rhythmic CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK.  i started unplugging things, and found out it was my anime drive.  i did some tests on it, and from what i can hear the motor is dying, along with the control circuitry. 

    so my anime is all gone.  ;_;

February 10, 2009

  • i’ve been playing a fair amount of fallout 3 lately.  i had to work through some crashing issues, and after finding a decent workaround i started putting in some major hours.  as i encounter more of what the game has to offer, i enjoy it more and more.  it seems to run smoother and prettier on Vista as well.  there was one point, though, that the immersion was completely lost.

    i was near the end of a quest chain, and was watching a scripted scene between some NPCs.  the events in the scene were rather pivotal to the game’s plot, as well as to your character.  but since i was watching the scene from third person, i saw my character just stand there looking uninterested as the scene unfolded.  and like a brick through a window, the immersion in that scene was completely shattered.

    i can imagine how ridiculous it would have been for bethesda to put in a decision at that point – “Look shocked” “Look amused” “Look disinterested”.  but in other games where events like this transpire, control is usually taken away from you somehow, either through some action in the game world or just because it’s a cinematic.

    i suppose bethesda wanted to maintain consistency with the rest of the game world, and how it all hinges on personal choices.  but regardless, i still think that scene would have had more impact if the game had transitioned to first person, letting you imagine how your character is reacting to it.

January 27, 2009

  • last night made every penny i spent on my UPS worth it.

    i was sitting here minding my own business when the cable suddenly goes out.  i do some digging and call comcast, turns out it’s a service outage (hurr) and i just have to wait it out.  so i’m doing some reading on my computer before hitting the sack and boom power outage.

    it was perhaps the weirdest computer usage scenario i’ve ever been in: i’m sitting in pitch darkness, with only my main monitor and my computer running.  my UPS never skipped a beat.  it clicked once, and the amber light started to blink to indicate mains power had failed and it had switched over to the battery.  after gawking at my setup for a second or two, i hit shut down and turn everything off.  it was like clockwork.

    had i not been here, the UPS would have done its job for maybe another fifteen minutes before shutting the computer down.  i was always a little curious how the scenario would play out – now that i know, i’m a lot more comfortable with it.

January 17, 2009

  • and vista seems even zippier now that i’ve turned off system restore and the indexing service.  seems kind of backwards doesn’t it?

    after reading a few articles on gizmodo about it, i also jumped into the windows 7 beta.  i cordoned off about 50 gigs of my anime drive and installed it last night.  i was having a good time with it, but this morning windows update downloaded a pre-release version of the nvidia drivers, which don’t seem to function after a reboot.  i uninstalled them and everything worked okay, so i sent in my feedback to microsoft and booted back into vista.

    it was a fun few hours, and i’m hoping a new version of the drivers will come out so i can switch back to win 7.

January 11, 2009

  • i may have mentioned this a while back when i was showing off my fancy new UPS (which works great, by the way.  we haven’t had a single power outage since i bought it.  glad i spent the money.), but i had to reformat and reinstall Windows a few months ago.  what i probably didn’t mention was that i had exceeded the number of times i was allowed to activate XP with the license i bought.  i managed to coax the authentication servers into letting me activate it one more time, but considering Vista is in full swing and the open beta for windows 7 is now going on, i’m not sure how much longer i’d be able to ride the XP train.

    so i bit the bullet, threw two more gigs of ram in my system, and installed vista ultimate x64.

    so far…i’m not all that turned off.  it will take me a while to find everything, since i’m still very used to the XP interface, but that will come in time.  everything seems just a bit zippier, even simple tasks.  that is probably vista’s ram caching system, but hey it works.  UAC doesn’t annoy me as much as it used to, thankfully.  it’s overall a good switch and i’m kind of happy i made it when i did, now i won’t have to worry about being stranded without an OS for a good long while.

January 8, 2009

  • Worth a thousand words

    cameras of all kinds have always held a certain fascination for me.  i’ve always loved how they can reduce the myriad of stimuli we perceive and freeze it in place, forever capturing that single instant.  but besides that romantic observation, they have a mechanical precision that just resonates with me.  i’ve had a lot of them over the years.

    the first camera i can remember was a small, blue, Donald Duck 110 camera.  it didn’t have a flash, so if i wanted to use one i had to have my mom buy these attachment things – they looked like a small candy bar with pins sticking out both ends, and it inserted into a small hole in the top of the camera.  when i’d snap a picture, one of the many bulbs on the front would overvolt, acting as a flash.  i had to actually turn the thing over after four shots, and it only worked eight times.  but still, i took more pictures than i can remember.  buying those film canisters was a real treat for me.

    later, i found a small 35mm manual camera in the forest.  it was broken and didn’t take pictures, but staring at it intently made my mom finally buy me a real camera.  it was battery-powered, had a built-in flash, had a motor for the film (no more manual winding!), and even red-eye reduction via a small red LED that lit up when i pushed the button down a bit.  i loved that thing.  sometimes, my mom would bring home a huge value pack of 35mm rolls (120 exposures) and i’d burn through it in two or three days.

    a few years later, my uncle and i are on a canoe trip.  we end up capsizing the canoe.  my uncle had brought along my grandfather’s expensive film camera, and it ended up in the river.  on our way back home, my uncle ended up stopping at a camera shop and dropping a few hundred on a very nice Pentax camera to replace the one he dunked in the river.  it turns out, after some time in front of a huge fan the old camera still worked.  i still have it.  it doesn’t take good pictures anymore, but it’s still a keepsake.  the Pentax is still alive and well, and we use it often.

    a few years later, i jump into the digital age.  my uncle ended up buying me a JamCam, an inexpensive sub-megapixel digital camera.  faced with the prospect of near-unlimited picture capacity, i went wild.  the camera only held 8 pictures in high-res mode (640×480), but later we bought a 16MB MMC card that shot the capacity all the way up to more than 40 pictures.  i still have essentially every picture i ever took with the thing, although some of them are scarcely recognizable.

    after i outgrew the JamCam, i upgraded to an Olympus D-380.  at 2.0 MP, the quality blew me away.  it had a digital zoom, timer, macro shooting mode, and it accepted SM cards up to 128 MB.  at the highest resolution, that meant nearly 100 pictures.  what’s more, it could plug into the TV and used Lithium batteries (the JamCam used AAs, and chewed through them faster than anything in the house).  that camera was my bread-and-butter for years.  i took hundreds of pictures with it.  but eventually, after my first trip to Las Vegas, i noticed there were two very noticable stuck pixels on the CCD.  i used it for a while afterwards, but i knew it was time to upgrade.  the camera was, at that time, almost four years old.

    that very christmas, my aunt surprised me with an Olympus SP-350.  8.0 MP, an actual-factual optical zoom, more compact and energy-efficient, a better flash, and overall superior quality to my D-380.  with my 1GB xD card, i can take nearly 200 pictures in high-res JPEG mode and almost 100 in RAW mode.  couple this with a full manual mode, and i could take some great pictures.  this camera has been the backbone of my picture-taking world for two years now, and for good reason.  for a P&S, it takes some outstanding photos.  but it has a few deficiencies, and while i was never unsatisfied with it, i felt there was something lacking, and i almost felt restrained by it.

    so i’m crunching the numbers on my tax return for 2008.  starting in october had its benefits: the amount of tax i pay is far outshadowed by the deductions from my paychecks.  so i anticipate a huge fat refund.  i’m wondering what i’m going to spend all that money on, when i spy an outrageous deal on Costco.com.  after about a microsecond of deliberation, and some chatting with the family, i place my order.

    in case the buildup wasn’t obvious enough, i bought myself a new camera.  a Canon Digital Rebel XSi.

    i would talk more about it, but…i am busy taking pictures of things.