Archive for June, 2006

I’m taking next week off from work, so hopefully I can use that time to catch up on stuff I’ve been wanting to do for some time (CoLT 2.0, a Firefox profile tutorial, etc.). I may even go nuts and convert this blog to WordPress 2.0.3. I ditched an earlier 2.0 build back in February, but I’m toying with the idea of trying it out again. We’ll see what happens with that.

There are several other miscellaneous topics to discuss: I’ve decided on putting off my computer upgrade for another month or so. With the predicted AMD price cuts coming down the pipeline, I could potentially save hundreds of dollars by waiting just a little longer. So that’s what I’ll do.

I only need one more Prince Valiant book (volume 35, Doppelgänger) to complete my library collection! Volumes 38 and 39 recently arrived in the mail (I purchased them via eBay), but I have yet to read them. Unfortunately, the last volume I need is also the hardest to find. I’ve only ever seen it on eBay twice: once with a larger collection and once by itself. With any luck, one will pop up when I’m looking.

Last week I gave the Prey demo a shot, and was very impressed. I want to run through it again, and I hope to comment further on it once I do so. It’s definitely a game I just might purchase…

My only grandfather passed away on Saturday, June 24. He had been very sick over the past month or two, mostly due to liver cancer. I’m going to miss him greatly; he was a great man.

The month of June is turning out to be pretty crappy overall. My grandfather has become very sick, and my sister and I are driving down to Georgia this Friday to join my parents who are already there. That means that I’m taking a day off from work, at one of the worst possible times. I’ve got a number of deadlines looming, each of which has a number of associated problems holding me back. But all of those problems pale in comparison to spending time with my grandfather. So off to Georgia it is.

I just saw a commercial on TV for a (presumably) local college, and they touted their program by showing a bunch of “video game developers.” This motley crew of students looked no older than 20, and one girl commented “Can you believe we get paid to play games?” The people who put together this advertisement clearly understand nothing about the game development industry. I would hazard to guess that game developers spend less than 5% of their time actually playing games. Few people, if any, get paid to play games; the real glory, as well as the real money, is in development. And game development isn’t an easy task.

In college, I had the privilege to take two computer graphics courses. Both were challenging, and both gave me a new appreciation for game development. The folks who create today’s game engines are literally pushing the envelope in computer graphics. I shudder to think of how complex the math is behind games like Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Quake 4. To think that your average college kid can do this fresh out of a no-name school is a little hard for me to believe.

My current graphics card, an eVGA GeForce 6800GT, has been running very hot recently. Spending time in Half-Life 2 or Oblivion causes temperatures in excess of 75 degrees Celsius, scorchingly hot by most standards. As a result of these high temperatures, video output routinely becomes corrupted, requiring a power-off of the machine to set things right. This occurrence seems fairly recent, and I’m not entirely certain why. My computer has always done a good job of controlling its temperature, thanks to my Cooler Master aluminum case. I’ve inspected all of my system’s fans: three of my four chassis fans (I’ve disconnected the one on top for being too noisy), the power supply fan, the CPU fan, and the fan on the graphics card. Each one seems to be spinning, and airflow doesn’t appear to be blocked.

I’ve been looking at building an entirely new system for some time now, and this problem is only pushing me closer to actually going through with it. Switching to a more energy-efficient AMD processor should help somewhat, and I plan on adding an after-market cooler to my new graphics card (I’m currently looking at a GeForce 7900 GT). Hopefully these steps will bring my system’s temperatures down considerably.

I finally found a picture of my kitty cat:

I miss her greatly, but seeing a picture of her brings back good memories.

While perusing my server logs for Born Geek today, I noticed a shockingly high number of rejected requests for my photograph on the Born Geek about page. I opened up the log in vi and, a few searches later, noticed that the image was being hot-linked from a particular web forum (which will go unnamed). Clicking through said forum, I found that one of its users was using my photograph as their forum avatar.

Strangest. Situation. Ever.