Recommendations as of January 23rd, 2009

Continuing with the updates...

IMPORTANT NOTES! 

I tend to recommend toward the cheap side.  Cut corners where you can.  There is NO WAY to buy a faster computer now to get an extra year or two added onto the computer's life.  In a couple years a CPU that costs $1000 now will be a complete piece of crap.  In a year a similarly performing CPU will sell for next to nothing.  Cut corners where you can, spend where you have to.  Most people screw up and pay for crazy fast CPUs and then get a cheaper graphics card.  If you're going to play PC games on the system an extra $50 on the graphics card will get you WAY MORE PERFORMANCE than hundreds more on a better CPU

I should have put this up earlier but...I've been playing games a lot (like Team Fortress 2...see below) and going back to test various things.  Anyway, for a slightly early birthday present I picked up a Chaintech 9600GT OC. WOW, I thought it would be nearly twice as fast as my ATI X1950 Pro by some benchmarks that I saw but, it doesn't QUITE work like that.  I mean sure, if you don't have on any anti-aliasing and such, it's twice as fast.  But this card seems to handle anti-aliasing a HELL of a lot better.  Like it went from...Oblivion being playable at 1024x768 and 4xAA with everything on to the same except...at 1600x1200.  In Crysis (thing of beauty that it is) it went from being tolerable at 1024x768 at medium settings with maybe 2xAA to playable at the same resolution, high settings and 8X...or 1600x1200 high settings and 2xAA.  WOW!  I don't know, maybe something's not set right or something but it seems to scale oddly, like the more you throw at it the more efficient it gets.

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 a bit lately and thought it would be amusing to do a couple of announcements.  These are just "Thank you for calling Team Fortress support" sound clips...as if it was from some help line for the soldiers in the field.

All our operators

Press or scream one now

Newbie engineer 

About the heavy and bullets 

Well, I got most of my back pay.  Retirement and tax took a little more than I'd expected but it's still enough to REALLY help get our finances stabilized.  Hopefully this will be a good year.  Before taxes and retirement it was $1111.80.  This next (regular) paycheck is going to be about $100 higher as well...and I think I've still got a minor issue worth another $50.

Due to unrelated factors I might actually splurge a little early and get a new video card now instead of waiting until next month.  The card's not TOO expensive at $150ish although most people for some reason think video cards...these days the part with the most powerful processor in a computer...should be cheaper.  Should be able to play Crysis with some antialiasing and basically any game at reasonable speeds for the next year :D

I probably should have mentioned this earlier...although what the heck, I don't owe you guys anything and hey, I'm lazy!  But seriously, I've been waiting with anticipation to find out exactly how much in my favor a little mistake in my pay will be.  Well, to be honest it's not "in my favor" that I've been short by a little bit of money for the last TWO YEARS, but it'll sure as heck be in my favor to get it all back in a lump sum.

I noticed because there was a little mistake on my vacation, which...ironically...probably hasn't been resolved.  Anyway, when I was looking over THAT check, I checked out my night shift pay (a 10% bonus) and found that I was probably short by a fair amount.  I dropped by payroll and...well it turns out that there's ANOTHER problem.  Since early 2006 the formula used to calculate my pay has been screwed up.  It's an odd problem that only happens because of the odd way it dealt with paying people that worked for two departments.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, I'm not entirely sure how much it's off by but I think it probably averages AT LEAST $20/month, possibly as high as $60/month...for the past two years.  *fingers crossed* hopefully the latter.   They're supposed to let me know before (or on) my next paycheck at the end of the month.

A friend of mine got some people together and did a cloverfield spoof

He also did this very funny antipiracy ad... *ahem* that I did a little voice work in ;)

I just thought I'd share a few simple tips on getting the best prescription on your next eye exam.

(1) The doctor will usually isolate a single line of letters for you to read.  Make sure that line is somewhat difficult to read.  It's much harder to tell the difference when you can easily make out each letter.  As the testing continues you may need to switch to a more difficult line.  Search for particular parts of letters that are more difficult to see than others and use those to tell subtle differences.

(2) Take your time!  As they try to figure out your prescription they'll break it down into simple choices "This one or this one".  If it takes you five or six tries, take five or six tries.  You'll only be in the chair a few minutes extra but you'll probably be wearing those glasses for years.

Apparently a lot (most?) SATA drives are actually configured so that you can't use more than one in a system...even though the motherboard may have LOTS of connectors for them.  The problem is that once you plug in a couple of SATA devices, they interfere with each other.  This leads to TERRIBLE corruption of any new data (like say...copies from one drive to another).  I'd suggest anyone with more than one SATA drive first test by copying a fairly large file from one drive to the other and then compare the two files (you can just open a command prompt and type COMP and tell it the location/name of each file).  If it's corrupt you probably need to enable SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking).  I had been trying to figure out what the hell was causing this issue on my machines and finally noticed an inadequately documented jumper ("SSC enable").  I did a little digging and it turned out that's what the jumper is there to fix.

Was just talking to Ron, a friend of mine and showed him a little trailor I had done a voice-over for (literally my ONLY real voice-over ever) and he got a kick out of it...and reminded me that I really should post it so, here it is.

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been "busy"...and by busy I mean wasting time with a vengeance.  This past holiday season went just great...with the minor exception being the $1200 we had to pay to fix the car.  I won't go into the details other than to say it was a bit of a stupid mistake and it wasn't me.

So WTF have I been up to aside from the standard holiday festivities?  Well...basically just games.  Several games.  Might as well do a blurb of a review of what I've played so far.

Neverwinter Nights 2:  Nice game if you like D&D stuff.  At times it's interface or the way it thrusts you into situations that you would NEVER let your character into are quite annoying, but all and all it's pretty good.  While the view is a fairly standard over-the-shoulder type of view, you can tilt, rotate and zoom.  Just so you know it uses WAY MORE CPU/GPU power than any game of this type should.  Generally speaking the gameplay is rather linear...or I guess it would be better to describe it as good/evil path linear.  Occasionally you can pick between being a bastard or a saint.  I'd recommend being nice...you get allies (not unlike real life) later on.  Later gameplay takes a bit of a twist and you get to run your own keep.  The game starts you out with a budget but never bothers to tell you that you can spend your own money (nor is there any indication that you can...guess it's just the game's way of keeping you from spending Keep funds on a new set of armor for yourself).  Oh, one annoying thing is that occasionally the game seems to slip up and not notice that you've finished a goal..failing to auto-initiate the character dialogs.  You can fix this by manually talking to them, but it's hard to KNOW that you have to sometimes.