First and biggest news: on Saturday I hit General Nanosystems and picked up a Zalman ZF700-Cu VGA cooler. Their price is, as far as I can tell, ~15-20 bucks above SRP for that item, and I wouldn't have paid it if I'd known anywhere in town to buy it for less, but I don't. And it needed to be in town because I couldn't wait for shipping. While I was there I also snagged a PS/2 optical mouse for my old Pentium 100. No more mouse-swapping from computer to computer just to luxuriate in the nonsuckitude of optical mice.
Today my friend Eddy dropped by long enough to remove the original manufacturer cooler from my card and install the new one. As I write this, my VGA card has been hovering around 45 degrees Celsius idle, 55-60 in heavy use. So problem solved. This one, anyway. There will be others, there always are.
Saw Thank You For Smoking, which was quite funny and contained several excellent performances (really, everyone except Katie Holmes, who was miscast.). I think I just plain like charming amoral bullshitter characters.
Been watching some of the first series of the British original "The Office". Quite funny, although I cringe quite often, which damps my enjoyment...(I'm not really, inherently, one to laugh at the misery of others. Unless I'm playing a videogame and unleashing horrific fates upon my foes...and bystanders.).
Been playing Destroy All Humans! which is intermittently hilarious and generally exciting, particularly as missions grow more complex. I'm quite fond of the jetpack, a feature which more games ought to include. And it's occasionally amusing to wreak random havoc, although it's less diverting and more costly to do so than in some other "free roam" style games. My biggest complaint is simply that while the missions are fun, the free roam portion of the game offers little of consequence and has several design issues that interfere with the fun potential. In particular, it's too easy to get attention levels (which can have horrifically negative consequences on your survival), and far too hard to get rid of them in most cases. Also, the only way to free roam in the location you're currently receiving missions for is to stick around after you've completed (or failed) one.
Also on my plate: Onimusha Warlords (the first Onimusha), which is easier than I remembered and full of creepy locales, nasty demons, and a simple but elegant sword-fighting system. I've just recently defeated the first boss.
Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner. Beautiful Gundam-style mech combat with plenty of homing lasers and swordplay and such, even level ups. Some very polished gameplay, honestly, right down to the interface of the pause screen. Unfortunately it suffers from absolutely dreadful dialogue translation.
And playing Tales of Symphonia with my friend Eddy. The real-time battles got much easier with a friend, especially once healing entered the mix. The rest of the game's essentially singleplayer, but I used to sit and watch him play games like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil (which were more trouble to learn to play than I wanted to deal with.), so that's nothing especially new for us.
Today my friend Eddy dropped by long enough to remove the original manufacturer cooler from my card and install the new one. As I write this, my VGA card has been hovering around 45 degrees Celsius idle, 55-60 in heavy use. So problem solved. This one, anyway. There will be others, there always are.
Saw Thank You For Smoking, which was quite funny and contained several excellent performances (really, everyone except Katie Holmes, who was miscast.). I think I just plain like charming amoral bullshitter characters.
Been watching some of the first series of the British original "The Office". Quite funny, although I cringe quite often, which damps my enjoyment...(I'm not really, inherently, one to laugh at the misery of others. Unless I'm playing a videogame and unleashing horrific fates upon my foes...and bystanders.).
Been playing Destroy All Humans! which is intermittently hilarious and generally exciting, particularly as missions grow more complex. I'm quite fond of the jetpack, a feature which more games ought to include. And it's occasionally amusing to wreak random havoc, although it's less diverting and more costly to do so than in some other "free roam" style games. My biggest complaint is simply that while the missions are fun, the free roam portion of the game offers little of consequence and has several design issues that interfere with the fun potential. In particular, it's too easy to get attention levels (which can have horrifically negative consequences on your survival), and far too hard to get rid of them in most cases. Also, the only way to free roam in the location you're currently receiving missions for is to stick around after you've completed (or failed) one.
Also on my plate: Onimusha Warlords (the first Onimusha), which is easier than I remembered and full of creepy locales, nasty demons, and a simple but elegant sword-fighting system. I've just recently defeated the first boss.
Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner. Beautiful Gundam-style mech combat with plenty of homing lasers and swordplay and such, even level ups. Some very polished gameplay, honestly, right down to the interface of the pause screen. Unfortunately it suffers from absolutely dreadful dialogue translation.
And playing Tales of Symphonia with my friend Eddy. The real-time battles got much easier with a friend, especially once healing entered the mix. The rest of the game's essentially singleplayer, but I used to sit and watch him play games like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil (which were more trouble to learn to play than I wanted to deal with.), so that's nothing especially new for us.
xrinti:
I work with hardware for a living (PC/Mac/laserprinters), so my vision on it may be a bit skewed. That said, hardware work in machines is *easy*. You should really take a chance next time something goes wrong to take a crack at fixing it yourself. There are a couple hundred thousand websites that'll walk you through it step by step, and it's pretty hard to damage the material, so screwups are rarely fatal. It can't hurt to learn a bit more about your system...