i must apologize...

i've been oh so absent!

well, this last week has been left me ludicrously out of the loop. it all started with working the weekend, followed by an overnight shift on monday to prepare for the

launch of windows vista on tuesday. since then, it's been a chore to try and get my life caught back up. so, i haven't really posted much. even more obnoxious is the fact that i haven't been bookmarking things that i've found on the great internets with as much ferver as i normally do, so, content here is going to be a bit thin.


motivational, and then some...

i really love despair.com's demotivators. however, i also really enjoy the internet phenomenon of emulating these great works. now, if you've ever seen these


some of them are really funny, and truly speak to me. such as this, because i am a procrastinator by nature. so, it says, "hey, stupid, you procrastinate!" i don't know if it would ever help me, but oh well. of course, i'm well aware of my poor habits, and, ironically, i spend a lot of time stressing out over them, so, anything i can do to dwell on my failings will likely help me out.








then there's some of them that make very little sense at all other than being really, really funny. this is a classic example. while 'is that a bear?' can hardly be called into play in most office settings, it clearly a very humorous image of a group of golfers... and a bear. so, who cares?







of course... there's lot of funny pictures on the interwebs...




now, in all honesty, i can say that i love things that make me laugh, and this definitely makes me laugh. these images all came from xkcd.com's current 'top funniest' images. basically, xkcd is a really funny comic that tends to operate on a slightly higher level. the 'top funniest' is a collection of various funny images ripped from all over the tubes of the interwebs. it's a dynamic system that presents you with a pair of images and you pick the one you think is funniest. the list is constantly updating it seems.

what's great is that they also have the the fairest, which is where they've taken various photos and you choose the one you think is prettier, and then there's the cutest... i'm sure you can guess what that's all about. i will say that it's probably the birthplace of many a fark cliche.








how i've been wasting me time...

so, i've been playing a bit of star trek: legacy, which is far better than i was lead to believe. in addition, i also picked up tomb raider: legend from the clearance bin at target. i can't complain about only paying $5 for pretty much any game, but tomb raider is more than worth the price. i'm still playing me some rainbow six: vegas, and, microsoft released their first 'windows vista ultimate extras' on the release date which included a free texas hold 'em game.

now, i wanted to talk a little bit about windows vista and gaming. they do not go hand in hand... yet. here's a little break down, and of course, i know there's a lot of websites out there like driverheaven.net and tom's hardware that have done some breakdowns already, but i really wanted to throw my 2 cents into the ring.

so far, i've had time to play star trek: legacy, tomb raider: legend, rainbow six: vegas, and company of heroes under both windows vista and windows xp.

for a little reference, my system specs are pretty 'upper middle of the road'. i run a hand built system with an amd athlon 64 3800+ on a bfg nforce ultra 4 motherboard. i have 3gb of low latency ram (2x1gb kingston, 2x512mb pny optima), and a pny verto geforce 7900gs pcie with 256mb gddr3 vram. it's all driven my an asus truepower 2.0 500 watt psu. as to windows, my windows vista ultimate is the 64 bit version, and my windows xp is professional with service pack 2. in fairness, i will point out that my xp install is pretty heavily tweaked for performance, so that i have only 27 processes running while my vista install is running with a much scarier 54 processes.

so, here's the skinny. the only game that runs similarly under both operating systems is rainbow six: vegas. as a matter of fact, i can't say for sure, but it seems that rs:v actually runs better under windows vista than it does under windows xp. it seems to load at the same speed and play at the same or better speed. graphics are clear and smooth.

tomb raider: legend, however, has given me a lot of trouble. under windows xp i can play it at 1680 x 1050 (i have a 21" 16:10 gateway monitor) with all the 'next gen' features turned on, and it runs very smooth and crisp. however, under vista, when i try to play at the same settings, the game will load into a level, and then within 30 seconds the video locks up. the sound continues, and if i hit keys, you can hear lara croft making noises as she runs and jumps and shoots her gun. IF i turn off the 'next gen' options, the game runs fine, although, it seems to actually run slower than it does under xp with all the bells and whistles turned on.

company of heroes, which is a big 'games for windows' title, which has been touted as being 100% compliant with windows vista... runs pretty poorly under vista for me. again, i run the game at 1680x1050 with everything turned on, and it's smooth as silk under xp, but under vista it will hitch and lag a bit as the camera turns and changes. now, if i turn the resolution down a notch, it will play fine and dandy, but, it's a little frustrating that i have to.

lastly, star trek: legacy. under xp, again, this game runs like a champ, it's beautiful with all the settings cranked at a 1680x1050 resolution, but, under vista, i can't even load into a 1680x1050 res, so, i run at 1280x720. i can have the settings cranked, but, the sound will hitch occasionally, and anytime that i fly through a 'nebula', or even have a 'nebula' on screen, the game acts as if i've gone into slowmo mode... which is more than a little annoying.

now, in windows' defense, i am running the 64-bit version, and all of these games are 32-bit. what that means is that each of these games has to run through a compatability layer to operate under vista, which, i'm assuming may have a bit of impact on the performance. i'm hoping to get a 64-bit version of farcry soon to try out, becaue, i've played the 32-bit version and love it, and i would love the try 64 vista vs. 32 xp comparison, just to see if it makes any difference.

the other problem is that windows has decided to completely rebuild the way that the sound stack works, so there's no hardware support for sound, so everything is 'directx'. this means that any audio processing is now done by the cpu only and the sound card as no say in the matter. needless to say that creative labs is a little pissed about that.

now, a big pro for windows is that my adobe products actually run better under vista than they did under xp, and, it seems that everything the system does is more stable. vista and productivity do seem to go hand in hand. tom's hardware seems to agree with me about photoshop, but they point out a whole lot of other applications that are nearly 100% slower.

now, what i will say, and again, this is in defense of windows. there has never been a windows release that was faster than the previous, and, by all rights and regards, the features typically far out way the performance hit. also, this is, far and away, the most stable first release of a windows system ever to hit the market.

however, for now, anyway, i will continue to dual boot into windows xp for the purposes of gaming.

*note* i have read a lot of opinion articles about people who's hardware failed to work under the rtm, and about people who spent six hours or more installing their copy of windows vista. i'm not sure about that, because, for me, everything worked except my sound card, which was fixed in about 5 minutes after the system was up and running. install took me a whopping 29 minutes (yes, i timed it), from the time i reboot the system with the install dvd in the drive to the time that i had a functioning desktop. i will say though, my system's 'experience score' is a 4.9, and my average (because i like averages better than the lowest) subscore is 5.5, i would not want to run vista with a much slower system...


beyond games and operating systems...

i have not mentioned much in the way of books, music, or movies lately, because i really haven't had much to do with either, but, i have a small pile of books, a short list of bands, and thin stack of dvd's that i need to get to, and hopefully i'll be doing that pretty soon.

in addition, i haven't really been doing much writing, arting, or picturing... so, i'm hoping to get a little of that done soon as well, but, that remains to be seen.



in movie news...

mike sent me a great new york times article about grindhouse. it may want you to login in to read it and see the pretty pictures, but, bugmenot is a great tool for such things.


and because you have to watch this every so often...



the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny!

and one last thing... the new challenger is schmexy!



the fact is, this thing really recalls the original 60's challenger...



and that's it for today!