August 13, 2007

  • Summertime in Louisiana sucks!

    It is so freakin' hot outside!  It wouldn't be so bad if it was a dry heat, but the humidity in the air makes it nearly unbearable!  And it's not doing good things to my house's AC system.  My room is hot day and night, and I've got three fans going full blast in there!  When I sat down to eat dinner, I realized just how thirsty I was when I downed a whole glass of iced tea without stopping for a breath.  I had gotten dehydrated and didn't even notice it.  Gah!  I hate it when it gets so hot like this!  On the bright side, I work in the server room at the office, and it's a very pleasant and dehumidified 68 degrees F in here.  The server room has it's own AC system which means I have my own private AC.


    Anyway, on to other things.


    You've probably noticed that the list of webcomics has grown and changed around.  If not, you should check out my list.  It grows whenever I find something new.  So you should be checking back often.  Yes, even you people who get my updates in a subscription.


    Some time ago we moved my roommate back to Hammond so he can go back to Southeastern.  I'm very happy for that.  Now I don't have him bugging me all the time.  Hell, even the cats are less stressed out, and my parents aren't bitching about him anymore.


    LilBigBlue has been put on hiatus for the time being.  The reason being, it wouldn't take any Windows server version at all.  In fact, I found that the only OS it would take is Debian Linux.  I know that Ubuntu is based on Debian, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a PowerPC port.  Anyway, it's having problems booting now, which probably means the first drive in the array is bad... or something.  I don't know.  I'm not going to deal with it for now.  What I am going to do though, once I figure out how to do drive concatenation in Ubuntu, is consolidate all the larger drives I have into my old Dell XPS box and make a big Ubuntu box out of that as a backup for BlueMonster, and whenever I get LilBigBlue running, I'll have that one running as an offline library for me to store all the crap I download and then never use.  No packrat jokes please.


    Also, I got a new laptop.  It's an Acer Aspire 3100.  I bought it from my friend's computer store.  It's a rather nice laptop, but it has a few drawbacks.  One, it's running an AMD Sempron.  And if you know me by now, I prefer Intel over anything else.  But at the time, I needed a new laptop, and this was the best deal for a new machine that I could find without jumping on eBay.  The second problem is that it has 512mb of RAM.  The reason that's a problem is that it came with Windows Vista Home Basic edition on it.  I wiped it and put Windows XP Media Center Edition on it.  There is no way that Windows Vista would have survived for very long on this thing.  See, Acer has all of these extra, but very useful and necessary programs that help keep this thing running at optimal performance, and to help maximize battery life.  The problem is that they suck up memory faster than anything I've ever seen.  After starting up, I have maybe 32mb left over and I have to use Acer's memory manager to get it back up to 128mb.  Think of how bad it would have been if I'd have kept Vista.  Yeah.  I'm solving that problem.  I've ordered another gig of RAM off the internet.  It should be showing up any day now.  The third problem with this laptop is that it's got an ATI Radeon XPress 1100 graphics card in it.  And you all know how much I really dislike ATI's.  But other than that, it's got a built in Broadcom wireless card which runs really great.  It picked my wireless without any problems whatsoever.  It has a built in wired NIC which is pretty standard.  And it has a DVD-RW and a CD-RW drive in it, which is fantastic for me.  But even with these little problems, it's running good enough for me, and that's what counts... for now.


    On the gaming edge of my universe, I went and pre-ordered and pre-payed Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.  It comes out at the end of this month.  Any Wii owners out there should have gotten a message from Nintendo announcing Corruption's arrival.  In fact, if you did the latest update, you'll notice some changes in the Shop Channel.  The most significant change is the News section!  And I was really happy to see one significant article in the news section.  In preparation for the upcoming event that is Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, they're putting up Metroid for the NES and Super Metroid for the SNES on the Virtual Console!  And if you know anything about me by now (and if my cursor trail is any indictation) then you'd know that I f'ing love Metroid.  I really do wish that they'd start putting up GameBoy games on the Virtual Console.  I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard for them to put up a version of the GameBoy Player.
    "But Rai, don't you already own every Metroid game already?" I hear you asking.
    It's true.  I have all the physical games (well, except for that incredibly rare arcade version).  I have Metroid for my NES, I have Metroid II for my GameBoy, I have Super Metroid for my SNES, I have Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission for my SP, I have Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2 for my GameCube, and I have Metroid Prime Hunters and Metroid Prime Pinball for my DS.
    "Then why do you care about these two games on the Virtual Console?" I hear you asking.
    Because they're on the Virtual Console!  That, and my SNES controller is crapping out on me.  It's easier to play SNES games with the Wii Classic Controller than it is with my actual SNES controller.  And while there's nothing wrong with my NES and it's controller, I still really enjoy the convenience that the Wii affords me.


    So, that's it for now.