General mind-dump of Jonas Wæver
I’ve been running Linux and Windows as a dual-boot setup on my laptop since I bought it used a few weeks ago. The laptop is mainly for taking notes during classes, but being a geek, I am exceedingly happy with all the power it’s packing; just knowing it thinks faster than I do is necessary to my enjoyment of working on it.
I should’ve updated my journal before, but first I was busy, and now that I have a break, so much has happened since my last entry that the thought of putting it all down in words scares my pants off. Regardless, I will try to write a decently entertaining update now, trusting my memory (and particularly lack of same) to sort out the most worthless stuff.
I had a few interesting topics prepared for my next blog entry, but as my PC would have it, this will be yet another post about tech problems. I opened my computer at 1400 hours (2 pm), anticipating my weekly NWN game at 3. Immediately upon loading Windows, I noticed a disturbing lack of icons for half the shortcuts on my desktop. After 5 minutes with neither MSN nor my antivirus program opening, I opened My Computer and was faced with a far, far more disturbing lack of drives. Two drives were missing: The ones on my 200 GB SATA disc.
For the second time in recent history, my SATA controller had comitted harakiri for no apparent reason.
Time to panic? I think not. For I am the God of fucking Computers. First on the agenda was praising my luck that my system disc is PATA mounted. I wouldn’t have gotten far without my Windows drive. I opened Firefox (wisely installed on my system drive) and found the necessary RAID drivers on Gigabyte’s Knossos of a website (ie. ancient and labyrinthine). Then I spent almost an hour uninstalling and reinstalling those goddamn drivers in 20 different ways and sequences, during which I could at no point make my original driver install CD recognize that no RAID controller was installed:
Installer: “VIA 8237 Serial ATA Driver ——-> installed”
Me: “WTF!? I JUST UNINSTALLED IT MANUALLY YOU STUPID SETUP PROGRAM!”
Installer: “No no, you don’t understand. It’s installed! It works perfectly.”
Me: “Then why are none of my SATA drives showing up!?”
Installer: “I don’t know what you’re raving about, everything works… perfectly.”
Anyway, in the end, I opened up my PC, removed the SATA cable from the non-existent drive, reconnected the cable and started up the computer again. Then I reinstalled the SATA controller, rebooted the machine, and everything was working. Why? No idea, but I managed to fix it 7 minutes before my game was scheduled.
Then it turned out the game was postponed until next week, but I’m so damn pleased with myself right now that nothing short of a nuclear explosion in my back yard will bring me down today.
So yeah… I’m tech support. I don’t just work with tech support, I fucking am tech support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because when I don’t get paid for it, I have to do it for myself on my own bloody computer.
Time for an upgrade, I reckon.
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Suddenly, the pile of games I need to play seems so small.
As I wrote previously, I’ve been having some problems with Half-Life 2: Episode One. Attempting to update my graphics drivers resulted in problematicness which spread to Oblivion. Now it seems whatever texture quality I have selected in Oblivion, the textures will default to low quality. That means the normal maps are small too. Combine that with the insanely accurate light calculation in Oblivion, and suddenly everything looks smooth and slightly rubbery. A bit like Lego.
So I bought Half-Life 2: Episode One last night. Ruben ranted on about how awesome it was, and the whole concept of working with Alyx throughout the episode appealed to me. Once he showed me the trailer, I was sold. I stayed up late to finish the download, but I ended up shutting down when it was about 90% done; yay for resumable downloads.
Anyway, today I kinda got out on the wrong side of the bed, as I slept in till half past 11 and was awoken by my mother expressing her annoyance with my lack of initiative. So I knew it was gonna be an interesting day. I was supposed to have gone and got my picture taken for my university card, but… well, as mentioned I was lacking the necessary initiative, so I skipped it. A bit stupid really.
It’s better than a joystick
And better than a pen.
It sure beats a gamepad:
The mouse is your friend!
You’ll hit where you aim
And you will win your fights.
Precision is key
With those marvellous mice!
Joysticks can be nice
If you’re planning to fly,
And a mouse cannot write,
I’m not gonna lie.
And gamepads are cool
If all that you do,
Is stick to your couch
And your TV like glue.
And yes, if you race,
It’s a matter of feel:
You may drive better
By using a wheel.
But when it comes down,
To what games are about
- shooting some people -
Then please have no doubt!
You will aim better
And you WILL rock the house
If you do what I tell you:
You must use a mouse!
I have now obtained my own cell phone. Until yesterday, I must’ve been the only person in this country under the age of 50 without my own cell phone. I suspect they hand them out to new born babies in the maternal ward these days. As I wrote previously, this hopeless lack of cellular technology was almost entirely isolating me from the existing social circles of my friends.
I got a Samsung E330, so now I will hopefully soon be back in the loop. Well, I’ll be in the loop at least. I don’t think I was ever there to begin with. I’m still slightly apprehensive about joining these circles anyway, in my experience, they are full of drunk people and techno or pop music. Sometimes even mind-altering substances. Well, besides alcohol I mean. I’ve also been told they contain girls though, so I guess I’ll just focus on that part and do what I can to avoid the rest.
I still outright refuse to speak with this thing in trains and restaurants though. I always make a point of removing myself from strangers when speaking on the phone, so as to not force my personal matters on their consciousness. And now I have nothing more to write about, so I don’t see the point of making this post any longer. Ta.
My GPU has been fixx0red! Thanks to Pointman, who advised me to decrease my AGP speed from 8x to 4x. I still think it’s stupid that my brand new video card must run on half the speed it was built for in order to work, but now I can actually play Deus Ex, which makes me very happy indeed!
Speaking of computers, I’ve been working on no less than 2 computers this week. I’ve more or less got my dad’s machine to work, all that’s left now is to get him a new IP address so he can go online and download Windows Service Pack 2, and then I gotta install an antivirus program and a firewall on it, then my work is done. The other computer belongs to one of his colleagues. She heard I was putting a PC together for my dad, and so she asked if I could fix hers. She had some problems with excessively long load times etc. while just working in Windows. I’ve formatted the whole thing and reinstalled WinXP. Now I gotta install Service Pack 2, Office 2003, Works, a little package of maintenance utilities I’ve put together, and put the backups I took of all her stuff back on it. I even went out and bought her a new RAM block and a USB pen drive that she asked me about. Her machine had 128 MB of RAM before, which is not really enough for a WinXP system, now she has 512 megs, which should give her a considerable difference.
Another thing of little relevance to anybody but myself is that I discovered Netradio today! Right now I’m listening to a channel called Modern Rock and wondering why the Hell I didn’t do this long ago. By the way, I do think it’s about time for the last chapter of TOOL. You know… I’m really not kidding when I say I’d like to get some feedback. Any feedback will do, really. I would go so far as to accept a simple “nice”. And if you feel like flaming me for wasting your time with my untalented blabbering, go ahead! I promise I won’t be mad. Please?
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