Meh, new desktop.

Yep, changed it again. The resolution of the image I used for the old desktop was nowhere near high enough to be used as a proper desktop, and the blurriness was hurting my eyes. Besides which, I think this one is a bit easier on the eyes. ;-)

I might change it later, but I haven’t decided yet. We’ll see.

A brief Halloween story…

Here’s a little something that happened last Halloween that I thought was absolutely hilarious, and so I thought I would share it with all of you at home.

Anyway, Missy had told me the Saturday before Halloween that she was thinking of going to a haunted house with her niece and nephew. I wished her a fun time, and off she went. Fast forward to that evening, when I was sitting at my PC bored out of my skull. I remembered Missy was out, so I picked up my cell phone, and sent out a brief text message, and then went back to what I was working on.

… at that very moment, Missy was creeping along this haunted house with her niece and nephew, and out of nowhere the cell phone, on high vibrate, goes off in her pocket. Of course, she was on edge already and not expecting it, so she screams in fright. Her niece also screams, startled. Her nephew takes off running. She manages to calm herself down, get the phone out of her pocket, and check it. She then reads the text message I sent her.

“Boo!”

:-)

Ooooh… I want.

http://www.uberreview.com/2005/10/biggames-home-video-arcade-machine.htm

Talk about taking retro gaming to the next level. Target Stores will offer BigGames Home Video Arcade machines that will retail for less than $500 nationwide in November of 2005. Each unit plays 12 of the original arcade versions of the most popular Midway® games including: Defender®, Defender® II, Robotron®, Joust®, Bubbles®, Splatâ„¢, Sinistar®, Rampage®, Rootbeer Tapperâ„¢, Wizard of Worâ„¢, Timberâ„¢, and Satan’s Hollowâ„¢. The unit stands 62” tall and has an included, built-in, full color monitor. It comes with additional A/V inputs that allow (almost) any existing home video game system, DVD player, VCR or any other A/V product to be plugged in and viewed on the built-in monitor. I only have one question, where is the Galaga?

I’ll have to see about getting one of these. ;-) BTW, the reason Galaga isn’t on there is the same reason Galaxian, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders aren’t on there. Midway was only the American distributor. All of the mentioned were actually Namco games, aside from Space Invaders (which was a Taito game).

Stolen from groovychk… again.


Sci-Fi Lover
Your Sci-Q is 91!
You are a Sci-Fi Lover!

You greatly enjoy Sci-Fi movies, and probably watch a weekly Sci-Fi TV show as well. You look forward to the next Sci-Fi film, and more than likely own several of your favorite films.
This is a good place to be because it also means that you probably aren’t a rabid crazy fan. You have some semblance of a life beyond the typical geek things. Not to say you aren’t a geek, rather you are probably a well adjusted geek.

Qapla’ (This means success in Klingon if you didn’t know). ;)

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 73% on Sci-Q

Link: The Intergalactic Sci-Fi Movie Test written by tech_art_nature on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Spike TV’s 2005 Video Game Awards Nominees Announced…

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6136524.html

Spike TV’s Video Game Awards show is returning this year, and it’s bringing some actors, rappers, and rockers with it. The 2005 edition of the awards show will take place Friday, November 18 in Los Angeles. The show praises the best in the business, as voted on by industry vets, and is accompanied by celebrities and musicians.

BEST FIGHTING GAME
Fight Night Round 2 (Electronic Arts)
Soul Calibur III (Namco Hometek Inc.)
Tekken 5 (Namco Hometek Inc.)
Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (Capcom)
Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (Midway)

One of these is not like the others. :-P

Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks isn’t a tournament/one-on-one fighting game. It’s an action/adventure game, or as my friend Josh put it, a “beat-em-up adventure”. Personally, I think it should have gone under “Best Action Game”, if any. Then again, looking at this list, the whole damn thing is suspect, to put it mildly. One game that was nominated, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, was only released yesterday. Two others, Perfect Dark Zero and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, aren’t even out yet. (PD0 is a launch title for the X-Box 360.)

*sigh* The only reason I posted it on MK Online is the fact that Spike TV is a big name, so to speak. Otherwise, I wouldn’t touch this with a ten foot cattle prod.

EDIT (9:00 PM): Aeon Flux. 50 Cent: Bulletproof. True Crime: New York City. James Bond 007: From Russia With Love. Mark Ecko’s Getting Up. NONE of these games have been released and yet they’re nominated. I’m sorry, but that is just disgusting. I certainly hope they don’t contact us at MK Online for assistance in getting the word out; they’d have to give us a very satisfactory explanation as to why we should give this awards ceremony ANY degree of legitimacy before we’d lift a finger to help.

More on the hard drive…

Well, now that I know my main PC requires a new hard drive, I went ahead and did a bit of shopping on Newegg and at Fry’s for new hard drives. Unfortunately, for what Fry’s wanted for a 200 GB Serial ATA drive, I could have gotten a 320 GB one from Newegg. So, I ended up ordering two 320 GB Serial ATA drives from Newegg this evening. My new motherboard has a RAID 0/1/0+1 controller on it, so what I’ll end up doing is putting the two drives into a RAID 0 configuration, making them into a single 640 GB megadrive. :-)

Before you ask… no, I don’t need redundancy. All of the critical data is either on my server which is backed up nightly, or on another machine (as is the case with my music collection). So, losing the array won’t bother me too much. Besides, with improved performance with the two drives working in tandem… it should be win-win for me.

The only downside is that I don’t believe the drives will get here before Friday, so I’ll be stuck on the Powerbook until then, and likely through the weekend as well. I really do with Apple had made official docking stations for the Powerbook line, but for now I can make do with this.

I also picked up two games while at Fry’s: Quake 4 and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Of course, with no hard drives I can’t install them yet, but I wanted to take advantage of Quake 4 being $15 off today. Oh, well…

In any event, I should be heading to bed. More later…