Twev1701.net 2002-2012

I’m telling you, if I have another exciting night like I did last night I’m not sure if i can handle it. Yeah….right.

I made plans all day to come home and play EverQuest last night. In fact, all I did all day at work yesterday was plan out my hunt for that night. So, on the way home from work in the absolutely yucky weather we were having, I even stopped at the grocery store and picked up a bunch of snacks for my EQ night. So, I get home, make a little dinner, and decide to watch an episode of Blue Submarine No. 6 while I eat. About 3/4 of the way through the episode, I can feel myself starting to drift off into a light sleep. We can’t have this while plaaying EQ, so I decide to go lay down for a short 20 minutre “powernap”. This was at 6:30pm. I woke up from this “powenap” at 8:22am. Yes folks, that’s AM! Not only did I not even get a chance to load up EQ last night, I didn’t get a chance to do anything else! What a crappy night that turned out to be!!

So, to make up for it, I’m going to try and squeeze maybe 3 hours of EQ in before I have to be at work by 2pm. I would love to call off, but they would kill me on a Saturday night. Plus, I do believe I have tomorrow off, so it’s all good to try and play EQ all night tonight and tomorrow.

So, I think I’m going to go forrage around in the kitchen for some food-like substance, and then hop on EQ for a few hours before work. Later…

I’ve been playing EverQuest on and off now for a little over 3 years. When I first started playing, I was running a Pentium II 233 mhz processor with 128 megs of RAM. I then got a new computer that was running a AMD K62 500 mhz processor with 512 megs of RAM. However, that computer ended up being a piece of shit, and never really ran EQ well at all. It was tolerable, but especially have the “Shadows of Luclin” expannsion came out with the new character models…it would just look at me with sort of a “WTF?” expression. That is, if you believe that computers have expressions. But I digress…

When I built this new computer a little over a month ago, I slapped a nice Intel 2.6 ghz chip in here with 512 DDR RAM and a nice Radeon 9800 card. I was all excited because I could finally play EQ again. So when I loaded it up for the first time, you can imagine my disappointment when I noticed some lag. Ok, while it is true that I am still on a shitty ass dial-up internet connection, these we not bandwidth lags…these were game engine lags. Totally discouraged, I thought that my dreams of a nice, flowing EQ were gone forever. That is, until tonight.

I was playing my newly formed Halkfling Druid, trying to get him to level 5 to get a new set of spels actually, when I found myself going through the options while I was healing and medding. I started playing with the sound settings, and then gradually moved on to the video settings. I had everything max out except the resolution an the draw distance. The resolution was set at 1024×768 and the draw distance was near. I was curious to see what my max resolution was so i decided to crank it. The max resolution was 1600×1200, so I set it and decided to see how bad the graphical lag was. Much to my horror and dismay, the sonofabitch ran smoother then it ever has before. Granted, I couldn’t read any of the icons, but that bastard ran like it was nothing. So, I cranked it down to my normal desktop resolution of 1280×1024. Again, smooth as a baby’s ass (or so I’ve been told!). Going for broke, I cranked the draw distance to the farthest setting. Viola!! I now have the nice flowing EQ I have been dreaming about.

So wrap this around your brain.

Low resolution = choppy performance.
Insane resolution = kick ass smooth performance.

Who would have thunk it?

Well, it looks as if we’re in for another winter treat. Once again, this is going to be a nice mix of frozen and not-so-frozen shit. It’s starting late tonight with snow, then moving on to sleet and freezing rain, and then possibly going snow, before becoming freezing rain once again. As of this moment, (like they really know anyway!) they’re calling for 2-6″ of snow. This is good and bad on a couple of different levels. If we do get a respectable amount of snow with some nice ice on top of it for tomorrow morning, that means I get to call off work and play games and watch anime all day. Then unfortunatly I have to go out and clean this shit up. That’s the optimal scenairo. The not-so-nice scenairo goes a little something like this. I wake up @ 5am (work @6am) to it juuuust starting to snow. I have no excuse to use so I go in. While at work, it snows like a motherfucker. Then, right around the nooish hour, it starts to sleet like a bitch, coating the 6 inches of fresh snow with a nice glazing of ice. This continues for the next 3 hours. Then, when 3pm comes around, I get to try and kill myself by driving in this shit to come home. I can see this little adventure taking well over an hour (usually a 15 minute drive). Then, once I get home (barely), what do I get to do now? Relax?? Hell no!! I get to go right back out there and clean this shit up. Then, once I’m done with that, I finally get to eat and relax for a bit.

I think you can get a hint as to which scenairo I prefer.

Now, to switch topics, to one I could become a venerable preacher to the masses in: Microsoft Internet Explorer sucks ass. I know this. I have always known this. To be honest, the only time IE gets launch is to browse my intrenet website becaue I wirte it just for IE so I can catalog my desktop wallpapers and make it easy and convienant to swtich wallpapers. As for using this pile of Bantha poo-doo for actual internet browsing…I don’t think you could pay me enough.

Here where my intial argument begins.

Me – “IE sucks ass!”

M$ Whore – “No it doesn’t!”

Me – “Yes it does! It doesn’t even adhere to web standards!”

M$ Whore – “Of course it does. Micro$oft invented the internet and therfore IE is the web standard.”

Me – *SLAP*

M$ Whore – “Ow!”

Me – “Now site down, shut the fuck up and listen. Go to this site. (random site (like this) that uses alphs channels)

M$ Whore – “Why does this site look like ka-ka?”

Me – “Because IE can’t render alpha channels. Now, let download Mozilla Firebird *trumpet fanfare* and we’ll show you what this page should look like”

*a few minutes later, the same page is loaded up with Mozilla Firebird *trumpet fanfare*

M$ Whore – “Wow! This site looks awesome! Why can’t IE make it look like that?”

Me – “Because it sucks ass. Are you senseing a patten developing yet?”

In conclusion, IE sucks ass. If you’re using IE to view this page, this is why it looks fucked up. Do yourself a favor and download Firebird from http://www.mozilla.org.

This is some really fucked up shit. First it’s snowing, then it’s sleeting, then we move on to rain, and then back to snow. This isn’t an all day account either. We’re talking this is literally what it has been doing every 20 minutes or so since 9am. When I stepped out into the parking lot at work to go home, I suddenly found myself in 3 inches of pure slush. Needless to say, my shoes were soaked immediately. I can help buy laugh at the giant ice castle that the valley might become if it gets below freezing tonight.

This is something that JP and I have known about for well over a year, but have never done. In fact, we never even considered it before. That is, until tonight. And ironically, it all happened by accident.

We had originally set out to play a little XBox. So, I head over to his place and when I get there he says that there’s a problem. He modded all of his breakaway controller connectors so he could use his XBox controllers on his PC for playing Halo. No big deal, I told him, since he lent me one of the ancient “bigfoot” controllers a few months ago. So, we hop into my car and head back to my place. When we get there, I give him his controller, and also give him his laptop back that I was borrowing. (long story there) Anyway, when we get into my car, we both agreeded that we were hungry and deicded to go for some Taco Bell. So, along the way, JP turns his laptop on and start playing around with it. I joked that I had a friend who had a wireless network hooked up to his DSL, and that I bet we could hack into it. Well, once I said that both of our eye lit up simultaniously. Even though I had been joking, we both realized that we could in fact do that. So…off we went. Unfortunately, where my friend lives in a death trap right now due to the snow. We did find an access point and were able to get some internet access, but it was sparatic at best. We decided to move on. The problem was though, we had just gotten the taste of something fun. So where do we do next?? Down into the city where all the dorms are for the 2 downtown colleges. Needless to say, that just driving around within a 1 1/2 mile radius yielded no less than 11 access points. The best one we had total net access and were downloading at 11mbs. Very nice for some free bandwidth.

After about 2 hours of this, we our stomachs reminded us that we had forgotten about them, and we headed for some tacos. That, and his laptop battery died. So when we got back to JP’s apartment, did we play “Raven Shield” for the XBox liked we had planned?? Hell no!! We spent the next 5 hours downloading better software for detecting wi-fi access points. In fact, we madea nice little list of things we will need, and plan to go back out again tomorrow. We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with all the data we collect, but all I know is that this is a lot of fun!!! I’ll keep you posted on how we make out.