lazy-fox.net

My break, I mean. Three weeks kind of flew by. I finally got caught up on sleep and haven’t really been doing much other than playing games and watching a lot of Arrested Development and campy movies. It’s still kind of shocking to me that I go back to work on Wednesday but the 40 hour weeks will be welcomed and I get to see a bunch of my old co-workers again.

Well, what’s been going on… I finally got my GTX260 Core 216s SLI’ed and working correctly. The improvement over my old 8800GT SLI setup is incredible. Especially considering that one GTX260 had slightly better performance than the 8800GT SLI setup. They run a bit on the warm side and didn’t fit in my old mid-tower by mere centimeters, but I’m glad I finally upgraded from cards that are running almost 4 years old now. The new cards have taken anything I’ve thrown at it with everything cranked running at 1900×1200 absolutely wonderfully.

I started playing Dragon Quest 9 on the Nintendo DS. I haven’t played a Dragon Warrior game since 3 on the NES but the soul is still there. I feel like I’m playing 3 all over again but with a different story and an improved render engine. The basic core sounds, the JRPG soul, the dialogue, is all Dragon Warrior. I’m not very far in to it yet but I’m quite enjoying what I’ve been playing so far.

I nuked my Facebook account, finally. I had been pondering the decision since Facebook’s most recent privacy policy change since I did not agree with it. The countless pornography and spam friend requests finally pushed me over the edge. I was getting at least two or three an hour which is ridiculous. And I had all my privacy settings set insanely restrictive so I’m not even sure how they found me. Well, the deed’s been done and I don’t have to worry about that any more.

So, I bought a Wii. Why? Well, there are simply some games I really want to play that have only been released on the Wii. I don’t really understand why because the Xbox 360 and PS3 are both beyond capable of handling anything the Wii can, but that’s not my business decision to make. Games like No More Heroes 2, Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, Punch-Out!, Rune Factory: Frontier, Monster Hunter Tri, Metal Slug Anthology, etc. There’s also some WiiWare and Virtual Console stuff I wouldn’t mind having. This doesn’t change my disposition on “waggle gaming” that’s become so incredibly common (and somehow popular) with the Wii (I don’t like it). The experience should be interesting, assuming the thing doesn’t break. I personally know someone who has gone through five Wiis now and, because of the horrible way Nintendo handles accounts/DRM/whathaveyou, all of his purchases from the WiiWare/Virtual Console go down the drain with the console since they’re not actually tied to any one account. Absolutely dreaded way to handle that stuff, but there’s nothing you can do.

I feel like I had a lot more to post about but all this overtime is really frying my brain. I surge in between a raging fire and a tiny fizzle that’s really tired and wants to go to bed at 8 o’clock.

I think The Last Airbender might get the worst score of all time over on Rotten Tomatoes. As of this post, it has a 6% rating which is the absolute worst I’ve ever seen a movie get on that site. The really bad part? My taste is generally dead on with the scores that films get over there and I was interested in The Last Airbender…

I upgraded the site to WordPress 3.0. Hopefully, nothing broke itself in the process. If it has, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

Better post coming soon, promise.

No meaty post tonight; I spent this evening out with Chase and his wife at the awesome Seven Stars Pepper Szechuan restaurant over in Seattle’s international district since this is the last big meal he can eat for quite some time.  In short, we got a few things he had been reading up about and the hot pot they’re known for, DanDan noodles, and some green onion pancakes.  All of it was absolutely fantastic even though we kept leaving the cabbage in the hot pot too long.  I’d definately go there again.  And they’re even in the same building as one our favorite Vietnamese places, Huong Binh!  If you’re in the area, check it out.

Since it’s bed time for me, here’s two last things.

First, the song I’ve had stuck in my head for the past week:

And second, the reason I’m not a fan of press kits via mailbag on Giantbomb (some cussing):  http://www.giantbomb.com/giant-bomb-mailbag-meat-murder-edition/17-2604/ Seriously, a USB key of an already released trailer packaged in raw meat?  Regardless, I’m looking forward to Bulletstorm but what a waste…

The company who now owns my old domain squeakyweasel.net has it up for sale.  Naturally, I bid what I thought the domain would be worth (it still gets 60 hits a month, apparently, most likely spam bots), $10.  To me, a company who got it for free or whatever once I didn’t renew it, $10 is a reasonable price for a domain that barely gets any hits anymore.  Well, the site’s minimum bid is $60.  OK, really pricey but I’m working overtime right now, I could fork out $60 for nostalgia value.  The company who owns the domain now (Sedo) is asking at least $5000 for it.  Seriously 5 grand?  That’s way more than I thought the domain was even worth.  I mean, the site never even took off beyond being a personal blog.  Maybe it’s the fact that I had it so long some business person somewhere thinks it’s got a “huge web presence” or something.

I got a deal on a Sharp Aquos LC46LE700UN 46″ LED 120Hz that I just couldn’t pass up.  This means I’m going to donate my “old” Sony Bravia KDL-40V4100 to my brother and his wife with almost immaculate timing as he’s going to do a lot of sitting around in-between surgeries and can’t do much.  Plus, the TVs they’ve been given are pretty old and most of them have burned out leaving them with a little 25″ or so.  And trying to play video games on that just doesn’t fly.  Now, I just need a way to get it over there once my TV comes…

There’s no doubt you’ve heard about the iPhone 4 coverage at the WWDC and that AT&T is offering some customers early upgrade prices.  I think I’m one of these people but my account was setup as a Microsoft business account and, as such, I’m taken to a special Microsoft page whenever I click on the upgrade eligibility thing which only offers Windows Mobile phones (like the Samsung Jack or iPaq).  Despite others experiences, I’ve had an extremely positive experience with AT&T and very negative ones with both Verizon and Sprint but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the HTC Evo 4G and HTC HD2 (Hey, look!  T-Mobile finally got something worthwhile!) didn’t look awesome.  Not to mention, Android is making some real leaps and bounds lately.  I think I’m going to see if I’m eligible for the iphone 4 come the 15th and, if I am, pre-order it.

Had a pretty good night tonight. Got together with my brother, his wife, her immediate family, and my immediate family for some Chinese food. It’s kind of a last hurrah before Chase’s surgery although we’re doing something again early in the week as a final sendoff by going to a proper schezschwan place in Seattle. I’m looking forward to it.

Overtime’s really taking it’s toll on me lately and the worst hasn’t begun. I’m still on 9 hour days for the rest of this week before dumping back in to 10 hour days and 8 hour days on the weekend. So, if I’m tired and easily irritable, I’m sorry. Work’s been really hectic and stressful.

Still looking for a place to house neowulf. I want to keep it local but prices here are kind of steep when compared to Denver, Chicago, and various places throughout the Midwest. I still want to add some more ram and need to buy rails so I’ve got some more time to keep looking and hunting for the best deal.

Lazy-Fox.net – now playing nice with (most) of your smartphones.  It should have a special interface for those people visiting on an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android based phone, Palm Pre, or Blackberry Storm.  Nifty!  As such, I can only test it with my iPhone so if it’s broken on an Android, Pre, or Storm, you’ll have to let me know.

I’m messing around with some themes; trying to find one I like.  Currently, nothing’s hitting me over the head screaming “Yes!  Use me!”  The one that’s currently active isn’t too bad but I like lighter themes; it’s perfect on the minimalistic end though.  Maybe I can mess around with the CSS and PHP code and turn it in to a light theme (with #336699, of course).  Also, I need to hack up that side bar a little bit and nuke that “Blogroll” section.  What the devil is a blogroll anyway?  Sounds like a trendy buzzword that I want nothing to do with.

If you haven’t heard already, AT&T is doing away with their unlimited data plans.  In case you weren’t aware, the “unlimited” plan isn’t unlimited; it’s capped at 5gb.  Checking my data usage since I’ve owned my phone (March, 2009), I have never gone over 170mb in a month.  According to the new pricing chart, I can save $15 a month on my wireless bill by docking down to the 200mb/mo plan.  Or, hell, I even save $5 a month by switching to their 2gb plan.  I’m a fairly moderate 3G user, most of my heavy data usage is done at home when my iPhone automatically connects to my WiFi network and just uses that instead (it’s faster too).  Not to mention, if you’re already on AT&T’s unlimited plan for $30/mo, you can keep it…  for now, at least.

But seriously, this has been met with such ferocity.  People are so incredibly angry about losing their “unlimited” plans.  Give it a rest.  Seriously.  I’d really like to see what the huge deal is.  So far the only two arguments I’ve gotten are “I stream all my podcasts live” and “I use it for tethering to my laptop”.  In regards to the podcasts, just have your computer download them and sync them to your device.  With hard drive space being ~$1 for 10gb, there’s no real excuse to that unless you’re using one of those silly 16gb solid state drives as a primary drive for some unknown reason.  I don’t have much on the tethering issue (mostly because I don’t do it myself) other than “learn to be patient” or look up whatever you wanted to know with your phone.  Remember when going on vacation usually meant no phone or computer usage?  Would that really kill you?  Besides, it’s nice to “go off the grid” every now and then and get a chance to relax.  But really, people make way too big of a deal about tethering (most people don’t even use it) or any change whatsoever.

TLDR: People whine about the most trivial things that most of them don’t even come close to taking full advantage of and it wouldn’t affect them in any negative way.  In most cases, it would reduce their monthly bill by up to $15 a month.

The server came. That’s partially why I’ve been slacking. I installed FreeBSD, got some power usage figures, then realized it only has an 80gig hard drive. Well, that won’t do. I did luck out and it came with two gigs of ECC ram instead of just one. I’m waiting on a newer WesternDigital Caviar Green drive now and then I’ll try to find a good colocation provider in the Seattle area, get some rails, and away we go.

Specs on the server:
Dual Intel Xeon LV 2.8gHz (hyperthreading)
250gig Western Digital Caviar Green
2gigs of DDR2-800 ECC ram
ATI Radeon Mobility onboard graphics
Dell PowerEdge SC1425 1u rackmount case