1-Jan-2005

Okay, so I'm a few days late.  The early New Year's Eve party Wednesday was a lot of fun, but it took me a while to recover sleep wise.  And I've been busy around here sorting out all Dad's computer stuff.  I sure wish he was here to clean it up.  I don't know what is worth saving and what is useless.  I've decided that software and books for Microsoft products that are older than 2000 are gonna get tossed.  I'm hanging on to the MSDN subscription, and that has a copy of Win 98 in it I can use, but other than that, I'm dumping all the old books and that stuff.  There is just too much to sort through properly.  I found a good ASP book, a book on Win XP Pro, some other things on networking and security...  but most of the stuff is old or duplicate (he bought a lot of HTML books the last few years, I use the web to look up all that stuff).  I sure miss how into computers he was.

I got Half Life 2 yesterday for $30.  As expected, it is an amazing game.  Now I just need to buy a gaming computer to go along with it.  My Inspiron 5100 meets minimum reqirements, and the graphics are great even on the low settings I have to use, but there is a rendering problem with my system settings, because all the people in the game show up as black shapes with no texture.  I found some online guides that tell you how to tweak your system and hardware settings, so I'm gonna take a few days back at school to back up my system and try to get it all running smoothly.  I would rather buy a good gaming system, but I don't have an extra grand to throw down right now.  Oh, btw, if you turn on and then off the flashlight in game (once you get one) that fixes the render problem, but the flashight itself doesn't actually render as a light source....  I can't wait to be a rich computer programmer some day.

I also got an external enclosure for the 120 GB harddrive I bought last semester.  It is very cool with a blue power light on one side, and an orange activity light on the other side.  Looks very cool in a dark room, and runs nice and fast.  I had problems getting the drive to show up at first, but the realized it wasn't a problem.  The guy I bought the drive from (I thought) said it was formatted and all, but I had to partition and format it.  So there were no actual problems.  Cool beans!

So, I know most of you won't read this far because I just spent three paragraphs completely losing you with computer talk.  But hey, you are gonna have to live with that from time to time.  I'm not the only computer geek out there, so I put up posts like this so they have something to read on their level technically.

Write ya lata all y'all