tekHedd – the blog

By dint of considerable sacrifice of time and bandwidth, I now have three (3) games on my computer (not including Minesweeper and friends). Of these three, only two are playable at this time, as I have not run the AoC updater yet. And anyway, I’m not in a hurry to get back into AoC, because it crashes and that’s boring.

In fact, TR still crashes too. And, sure, no game is perfect, but I think the culprit is XFire. It tends to crash if I use XFire while I am zoning, or if I use XFire at the menu screen. And XFire can mess up the mouse pointer, and cause the menus to get stuck and… you know there’s a point where it can’t just be coincidence that “doing things with XFire” and “cold booting the computer” go together so often.

None of this is helped by my computer’s strange behavior when rebooting. Ever since I rebuilt the system, it sits there for about 30 seconds doing nothing before it powers off, where it used to just shut down. Sometimes it never reboots, it just sits there. Maybe my computer has allergies too.

Oh well. Nothing is happening here. Now I have to write another depressing song, and I’m running out of depressing life experiences… NOT! I got a million of ’em. Damn, that’s kind of a sad thought isn’t it? I need coffee now.

Peace out.>

..unless you plan to fight for them online, and your RAID recently crashed.

Three days after rebuilding my system, the only games installed are Neverwinter Nights and Minesweeper. I want to get Tabula Rasa back in there, but the download is 2.4 gigabytes, which takes about 240 minutes to download. This is complicated by the fact that I won’t leave the computer running while I’m away or asleep. Listen up, children, this is yet another reason that you probably don’t want to mess with water cooling!

The more time I spend with NWN, the more I like it. The first chapter is simply depressing–there’s not much going on, and there are a limited number of side quests, so the end boss is depressingly hard. But chapter 2 is like endless openended goodness. You can go into a cave or something, fight a few creatures, and be completely overwhelmed by an impossible boss who is way beyond your ability to cope–go practice somewhere else, come back, and whup his ass! Unlike Oblivion, when you level up it actually means something… woot level 9! While you can indeed live the Oblivion dream to “go anywhere and do anything”, it might get you killed, and it might not advance the plot. :)

Also, switching dynamically between overview and “drive mode” cameras really works in this game.

And, I have backups!

Oh, and my new backup drive is a Maxtor OneTouch thingumie. I thought I would hate the software that comes with it, but it turns out it’s pretty neat. It simply maintains a mirror of the directories you specify, with a second mirror directory that keeps the last known copy of deleted files. It’s a pleasingly minimalistic approach to backups. Of course, I have no idea whether I’d consider it robust enough to back up business files, but at the moment I can’t really drop the $25 for Acronis TrueImage–saving my pennies to get my car back out of the shop. (Oooh, they’re fixing the dents! It’ll be like having a new car! And cost about as much!)

I noticed the GuildCafe title bar today: “Bringing the world together through games.” Shouldn’t that be “in spite of games”? Because, well, most of the games we like to play have no way of communicating with each other, so we end up using third party applications and web sites in order to… oh heck what do I know. I have a head cold and it’s making me stupid.

Object lesson here. Don’t blog when you’re stupid.