Checksum Arcanius

Last night, I decided to set up the new wireless router I aquired, a process which included me accidently tripping power to sf2 twice, which, needless to say, wasn’t exactly what I intended. The result is that Silverfir experienced a bit of completely unneccesary downtime. Combined with the fact that I forgot to start up MySQL again, it was a bad day for the server. Oh well, all is well again.

Today, I played frisbee, a process which saw my team get owned again, but I had a great time. Also, the TRC had a hack session which involved generally uninterested kids and a very cool demosration by Jim Wright.

Today, after work and dinner, I picked up a SMC Wireless Router at CompUSA, based on Dan’s suggestion, a solder station at Fry’s, along with 100 CD-R’s for $9, and some Cat 6 ethernet patch cables. I took a picture of the loot, but right now I’m feeling just a little too lazy to get it from my camera and upload it. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get lucky. As for right now, its about 100 degrees in my roo because of all the computer equipment thats on in here.

One of my resolutions this year was to be “early to bed, early to rize.” Yes, I spelled it with a ‘z’, I don’t really know why. I haven’t really kept that resolution, but today it actually happened. The boss is doing a demo, and I wanted to make sure everything was together before he left – so I came in at 6:00 to meet him as he picked up the material thatI prepared yesterday. It seems like everything is hunky-dory, and I’m fulfilling a resolution to boot.

In other news, Gmail seems to only update every 10 or 15 minutes , which is plenty fast unless you are expecting something. So IM it ain’t. And speaking of Gmail, why haven’t I seen any invitations in, like, 10 years? I mean, comeon, I have a faithful public to service.

Otherwise, things are going well. FlicConf rocks my socks, and now it has a contact form too (thus the 10-15 minute delay in Gmail was discovered).

“I don’t really trust the drivers on Windows Update.” Just moments after hearing from Dan these fateful words, I installed new audio drivers from windows update, and my laptop’s audio went away. I finally decided to fix it – it didn’t take too long, but it serves me right, not listening to the man who is Base 10 Computers. By the way, I highly reccomend his services if you have any sort of Windows related computer issues. He is the authoritative source of fixing all sorts of issues, from the perverse to the mundane.

Today, for the first time in a long time (I think over two months!), I rebooted sf2, the server behind silverfir.net. I figured it was time when I tried to restart apache and it gave me a long list of error messages. Nothing apparent was going wrong, but yes, even Linux succumbs to entropy, albeit at a seemingly much slower rate than Windows.

Work was pretty slow today, so I came home early and vacuumed out my truck, a task which was sorely overdue. After this, I went to eat with – and say goodbye to – Maneesh. He’s leaving for New York on Thursday and will be missed. Ben and Jon also came – we ate at Cuccina Cuccina in Issaquah. After this my brother and I went to an FHE titled “Spin The Bottle/Bare Buns Fun Run” that ended up being not nearly as racy as it sounded – we spun bottles to form groups who then “ran” bare fresh home-baked buns to various people in the church. A redeeming factor was that the girl my group delivered to was very nice on the eyes.

I just discovered that HTML tables are about 9 million times cooler than I had previously known.

In other news, I saw the Bourne Supremecy last night with Maneesh, Amy, and Donna, a friend of Amy’s. It was a well done action movie that veered ever futher from the book’s plot.

Political discussions before and after abounded, which was much fun, especially the “living wage” issue. I’m going to miss Maneesh a lot when he leave for New York. We’ll have to hang out a lot before then. As for now, its off to my house to host the TRC for final preperations for their Microvision presentation tomorrow.

After work today, I picked up Shai, bought Doom 3 at Best Buy, went home, made and ate tacos (yummy), then installed and played Doom3, intermixed with writing some microcontroller code. The game is well done, very taxing on the computer hardware, and phenominally… dark. id still hasn’t figured out that there is more to a game than scary demons and cutting edge graphics. But the engine is pretty cool – the real time lighting effects and hot air distortion are the “coolest” effects. Unfortunately, the lighting doesn’t reflect off of mirrors (although there are mirrors), and the corpses dissolve away completely unneccesarily. The game tries hard to keep the tension turned up, but it should try harder to stop me from getting lost in its maze of rooms, or else I will get bored and stop playing (as I just did). id needs to learn how to lead the player on while still making them work, as in Half Life. I don’t see the game winning any awards outside of techincal merit.

Furthermore, for a game that has the nearly the exact same storyline as the original Doom, I was somewhat disappointed to find that the first mission wasn’t at all reminiscent of the original game. Sure, the rest of the game could be different, but everyone remembers (or at least I remember) the precise layout of e1m1 in doom. How cool would it be to have it start out that way. Instead, we got Quake 4 with more advanced lighting and more advanced scripting. As nice as these things are to ooh and aah over the first time you see thim, they don’t hold an audience for long.

Oh yeah, multiplayer sucks trash too, as does pretty much every multiplayer game outside of counterstrike. Oh well. Hopefully some more play time with surround sound enabled will help my opinion of this one some, because I did pay a pretty penny. Of course, I probaly would not have purchased it had HL2 come out, but that looks like its never going to happen, so I had to try a stop-gap. Maybe CS:CZ would have been a better purchase? Hmmm.