Journal

December

12/01/2004

Another month has passed by. Wow, I'm glad that's over. Yeah, November was a strange month, a busy month, and a month where I realized that my monitor was posing a potential danger to myself, my home, and my computers. Yeah. See... It's started making this nice pinging sound, almost as if some gremlin were sitting inside the tube, knocking on the glass at random intervals. Oh yeah, and then there's the random loud "POP!" and crazy rainbow stripes. Yeah, I hang on to broken and/or worthless junk waaaaaay too long. Actually, I've been avoiding buying a new monitor for several months. I've been having problems for a while due to some damage that the power and monitor connectors apparently suffered. Maybe I bumped them when I moved, maybe something happened when I rearranged some furniture last year... who knows? All I know is that the monitor's a suspect in the slaying of one innocent video card and both connectors at the back of the case are not only loose, but touching them causes random hiccups, coughs, or bleeding at the mouth... if monitors had mouths... and could bleed... and... yeah. Exciting stuff...

What else? I have no clue... there's been much social-ness lately, and much anti-social-ness as well. I hung out with Lauryn a lot, had lots of calamari, somehow ended up with two kittens (which may or may not be the cause of what appears to have been a stroke in one of my gerbils), I went to see the, gag, Sponge Bob movie (more on that later), did family stuff, blah blah blah, etc... So, yeah... the movie, the deal was that I would play designated driver for Lauryn and her drunken companions. Yeah... and even though they were drunk, they still didn't find it funny... imagine how I felt. I didn't even buy popcorn, so the option of sticking a bag over my head just wasn't there. I also played chauffeur for Carrie on a few occasions and we've been going out... sort of... does staying in and watching a lot of movies count? Well, we went out for donuts once... yeah. Hmm... thinking... so... I also braved the mob and 31 degree weather to get a cheap hard drive. 200GB (read that 186GB in non-inflated-realistic-speak) hard drive for maybe $46 after tax, rebate, coupon, etc... I'm pretty happy with the purchase. Those digital photos have been killing me and it helps to be able to organize things before burning everything to DVD's.

Speaking of DVD's... I bought a Sony DVD writer over the summer and some 8x HP DVD+R discs... turns out the discs are really 4x? Nero even lets me write them at 8x but they're always coasters at anything greater than 4x. Should I contact HP's customer support, deal with the hassle of sending them in the mail or whatnot? Does it matter that they were a bargain even if they had actually been marked as 4x discs? I don't know... I bought some Memorex media and all is well.

What else... video games. Yeah... video games. I bought a GameCube from Wendy over the summer and was using it to play Game Boy Advance games. I figured that I should try a few games that were actually created for that system... so... somewhere over the past few months I picked up a copy of F-Zero GX. Last Friday I also purchased a copy of Metroid Prime and Zelda Wind Waker. So... yeah... they're not really new, but those are the really the latest games I've played. I'm behind the times... but I like the old school stuff better anyway. That said, I fired up my Turbo-Duo the other day and, get this, CD-ROM games didn't have any background music. I was crushed... the games worked, sound fx worked, turbo-chip games work flawlessly... but no CD audio on the CD-ROM games... powered it off, powered it on, reset it several times... no joy. So, I stuck Super Raiden in, played to the first boss, and that did the trick. The change to the next audio track brought the music back. It seems to be working now, but I'm guessing it won't last. Maybe I'll finally have to buy a copy of Magic Engine. It's an excellent Turbo Grafx emulator that's been around for a while. I seriously considered buying a license waaaay back when it was first released... I don't even know how long ago that was... maybe 1997? It seems that the site for it is offline right now... but apparently a new version was released a few days ago... I'll check it again later. Yeah.

Um... no clue what else... I've been busy. If I think of anything else worth mentioning, it'll be somewhere after this post... right.

Beverage: flat Coke

Music: the sound of my computers