- wednesday 01 30 02 -

Fuck ExxonMobil. How ya like them apples?

- saturday 01 19 02 -

This picture was brought to you by the friendly folks at your local Starbuck's, and removed at the request of it's original author. Hopefully, no harm, no foul.

- thursday 01 17 02 -

They're back. Enjoy.

- wednesday 01 16 02 -

Shorty post - mp3's will be down for the day. Will post back when life is resumed ...

- monday 01 13 02 -

Update again on the MP3 world here - I've had to split the MP3 sections across two disks, so you can get to the A-Q folders here and the R-Z folders here. I'm probably going to be taking the server up and down over the next couple of days, so be patient. More later ...

- monday 01 07 02 -

I will pronounce unequivocally that The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, as directed by Peter Jackson, is going to be the best fantasy trilogy ever brought to film, and that the first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, is the best movie I have seen. Ever. Period. I lived in Tolkien's world for a while, having read the trilogy so many times that I have sections memorized, and seeing the world of Middle-Earth brought to life so perfectly in line with my mental picture of it ... absolutely jaw-dropping. I was transported for the full length of the film into the world of Frodo, Gandalf, and the rest of the Fellowship, travelling through the Barrens, the valley of Rivendell, into the mines of Moria, and finally to Lothlorien, finding Galadriel, Elrond, and Saruman along the way as if meeting them in person, with all their terrible power and immortal beauty. Moments of heart-wrenching emotion catch you when you least expect it. When Frodo steps forward to again take up the burden of the One Ring at the council in Rivendell, the look of sorrow and regret on Gandalf's face sent a chill through me. The death of Boromir, the terrible treachery of Saruman, the horror of the Balrog - all there, all rendered as if Tolkien were standing on the set. I can't say enough about this film, except that if you are a fan of Tolkien, you must see it. Go, now.

Needless to say, I will be updating the cinema page with a reference to Tolkien. It's over 24 hours later, and I'm still occasionally making wow noises. I think I've got some reading to do now.

BTW, for those of you out there who have hardware and OS lust, go wander through Dan's Data. I stumbled across a link from another great hardware site, The Tech Report, and spent a good portion of the day ROTFLMAO. Good stuff.

On another technical note, thanks to the joys of Terminal Services, my server is now running around without a monitor. We'll see - I need to find out how to run the thing without a keyboard or mouse. So far, the terminal client works just fine, especially over a switched 100Mbit network. If anybody who drops by knows where to get the "headless" hotfix for 2000 Server, let me know ...

- saturday 01 05 02 -

Update again .. I'll be bringing the mp3 share up and down occasionally. Thanks to those who have emailed me about it - glad to be of service. I have to turn it off at this point so that I can surf and check email, as my upstream bandwidth is being fully allocated, and I'm pretty sure that ATTBI is only giving me a half-duplex pipe. When I try to force it 100/full, I get all sorts of wonderful problems with my connection dropping every five minutes - bleccch. First they chop off my balls, and then they give me one back. Nice.

In regards to the server, I've been using Microsoft's wonderful IIS5.0 (please insert dripping sarcasm). I'm finding a lot of things that I inherently dislike about it, the first being the lack of control over http file transfer bandwidth. It appears that I have to install Active Directory and then enable the QoS service to lock that down. Seems that since they recommend http transfer as being more secure than FTP (which it is), they might include some tools to control the outgoing bandwidth on that sort of connection. However, you apparently can only shutdown the transfer of static htm and html content, which does me absolutely no fucking good. My webpages are under 1K in most cases - the mp3's are over 5MB - which one might I be more interested in throttling? Blah. My next course of action is going to be investigation of the highly recommended Apache web server - I'll be interested to see how well it functions in comparison to IIS5.0. Notably, I think I'm going to have a bit of culture shock going to command line configuration and text files. We'll see.

Gaming ... Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a joint effort by Gray Matter and Nerve Software with the collaboration of a bunch of pale, demon-obsessed guys from Mesquite. So far, kicks the living crap out of just about every other single-player based game out there, and the online play is supposed to be pretty sweet as well. Excellent texturing, awesome map design, models that don't look like a baboon's ass, fun weapons, and even a moderately interesting storyline - they all make for a hell of a good time. And with my newest gift from the gods, it runs like a dream. W00t! More later, and if you have some specific questions about the MP3 section, let me know. Au revoir, mes enfants.

- tuesday 01 02 02 -

Apologies to those trying to hit my mp3 share, but I had to lock it down. I have been unable to throttle back the bandwidth used for upstream file transfers, and there are so many people on my pipe that I can't surf or check email. I will hopefully rectify this and post an update soon.

- tuesday 01 01 02 -

Whale oil beef hooked. It's a new year. Sorry about the delay in updates, but Xmas is always a psychotic whirlwind around my house. I never get my shopping done in time, I've got a billion relatives to get around to see, and I occasionally have to sleep. Leaves very little time for farting around on a web page. SO, Merry New Year and Happy Christmas and all that happy crappy. I'm 29, it's 2002, and I sure as hell hope this year turns out better than the last one did.

The reason you haven't seen any updates in the past week is that my web server has been powered off. Managed to lose my lease with ATTBI.com, so I had to update DNS, and then I had hell getting my server cleanly installed. Trying to lock shit down to the absolute minimum needed for serving webpages, so you may experience temporary interruptions of service as I seal off ports and lock all the assholes out there on the web out of my system. It appears that several folks have been utilizing the files link, and that's a good thing, but I'm going to have to tweak a bit as you guys and girls are sucking up all of my bandwidth. I appear to have a few Russkies, and maybe a Brit or two in addition to my ususal complement of ADSL and cable subscribers. As long as you use it right, I'll leave it up. Start fucking with me, and I'll take it offline. Thanks for your support.

Gaming. Hmm. Actually got distracted from this machine long enough to check out Gran Turismo 3 and Grand Theft Auto 3 for the Playstation 2. I can attest to their total coolness. Both games involve driving, with GT3 pushing your knuckle strength to the max as you try like hell to squeeze that .001th of a second out to snatch the silver medal on the license exams, and GTA3 making your sides hurt from laughing at all the wacky shit they stuffed into the game. Of the two, GTA3 is a bit less frustrating, and a hell of a lot funnier. More on that later - my wife has control of the system for the rest of the evening. On the PC, it's been back to the world of Quake III Arena. The game simply kicks ass - I can play until my fingers are numb and my wrists ache, and still want more. And that's just with the standard maps.

Reading. Finished The Black House. Wow. King managed to finagle Straub into linking up the entire scenario presented in The Talisman around to link with his ever-expanding Dark Tower series. I will be most interested to go back and read the series - I managed to get the first two finished and then gave up on waiting for parts three and four. King has always indicated that the books will go on into the 3500-4000 page range - it will be interesting to see if he follows through on that before he dies. Regardless, an excellent book, with signature moments from both King and Straub. My next project is to get hold of Barker's newest, Coldheart Canyon. Intriguing cover, and by the reviews I've happened upon, a damn good book to boot. We shall see - Barker has never failed to be interesting, but he can produce classics when he puts his mind to it.

Final piece - if you have a GeForce 3, you have got to snag the Chameleon demo. I had better luck, in terms of framerate, texture handling, etc, with the OpenGL version than the DirectX 8.1 version, but your mileage may vary. Get it and stare at the wonder that is pixel shading ... more later.

Well, it got later, and I remembered something that I needed to share. Get yourself over to MadOnion and drool on this:

Seven-thousand twenty-two 3DMarks

I go visit it occasionally to cheer myself up - that's my new system you're looking at running 3DMark2001. My crusty 650 Athlon / GeForce DDR system squeaked out about half that much on the older 3DMark2000 benchmark. As we used to say in SiN, w00t!

Ahh, the joys of benchmarking. Unofficial as the damn online submission tool seems to be broken at the moment, but got a pleasant 9595 3DMarks under 3DMark2000 just a moment ago. It will be interesting to see if a new iteration of drivers from Nvidia or VIA will push that over 10000. It's good to be a geek ...

- saturday 12 09 01 -

First off, I've archived the old shit - damn page is getting too big.

All's well and all's well and all manner 'o things be well. King and Straub have finally released the sequel - The Black House. Twenty years after the fact, we are returned to the world of Jack Sawyer and crew, from the horror classic The Talisman. I think I've read the first book at least thirty times, so it's good to see the story continuing. So far, I can't decide who's voice is prevalent. King seemed to dominate large portions of the first - Straub seems to have taken the lead on this one. Regardless, I'm impressed so far. A final report soon.

Games, games and more games ... just got around to re-installing Half-Life on this new PC. The combined patches for this game (it *does* include TFC, but still ...) come out to 75MB of crap. DAMN. That even puts SiN to shame. Add Counter-Strike version 1.3, and you have damn near 200MB of stuff to download. Considering the recent nut-cutting that AT&T pulled, including capping my once-glorious cable connection at a measly 1.5Mbps (YAAAARRRRGGGH!), that's painful. That's going from a cap of 575KB per second, to just over 150KB per second - chop me off at the damn knees, won't ya? I can't imagine being back on dial-up - the damn thing just wouldn't get installed. I seem to remember Half-Life being worth it though - we'll see.

Other games .. Unreal Tournament runs like a dream on a 1.3GHz Athlon XP. It doesn't even care that I'm using a POS GeForce2 MX100 right now - I really can't wait to see what I can do with a GeForce3. Need For Speed 4 almost didn't get installed - I had to *beat* the damn thing into submission, and if it wasn't such a cool arcade sim, I would have given up a lot earlier. Ah well, it's running now, and I fully expect it to be gorgeous at 1280X1024 in 32-bit color.

Work is work - busy as hell. I put in 48 hours between Monday and Thursday of last week - overtime is a good thing around this time of year, so I can't complain much. Oh, by the way, Microsoft hardware support plain kicks booty. After paying $75US for a MS Intellimouse Explorer (yeah, the one with the red butthole light) and thoroughly enjoying it for a year-and-a-half, the damn thing just crapped out on me. Being the chump that I am, I tossed it into a box, pissed, but not really taking the time to check out my options for replacement. Then I spoke with friendly OEM reseller at IMS Computers, and he let me know that Microsoft has lifetime replacement on their hardware. I hit the phone, sat on hold for about three minutes, and a new mouse is on the way. Cool. Your mileage will probably be widely divergent from mine ...

And yet another BTW - if you have a chance to check out Cirque du Soleil, by all means *do it*. Some of the most astounding acts of physical strength, stamina, coordination and pure unadulterated skill to be seen in the world of the performing arts. Absolutely amazing - see their current show, Dralion, on DVD or better yet, live. Wow. Mo' better, mo' later ...

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