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Fun Diversions

October 4th, 2007 · 15,462 Comments · Gaming, Personal, Stuntwork

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I took a little time to kick back and relax tonight after spending around two hours on my monthly report to the board of directors here at GDnet. Yes, we have a board of directors. See? You learn something new every day. If you’re wondering exactly what I mean, check out our company chart. Oh and no, you can’t read it.

Anyways first I installed a few program updates as I do at the start of every month thanks to FileHippo’s Update Checker telling me what new versions of programs are out. I also installed some new apps I got off the latest Maximum PC disc. My favorite is Stellarium, a virtual sky gazing program. Using Google Earth, I positioned myself in my backyard and now I can look up and see a real-time rendering of what the sky looks like above my roof. And I do mean real-time – the stars and planets all move! You can select any star in the sky and learn stuff about it – almost like Google Sky but cooler.

Then I installed the World in Conflict game demo to check it out. I’m a pretty big strategy buff and this looked like a fantastic game visually so I decided to check out how it played. I’m a bit disappointed it didn’t scale to my native screen resolution, but what can you do. I have it set to 1440×900 and the graphics detail set to High and I’m churning out an average 16fps (I know this cause they have a cool benchmark utility built into the game. Sweetness). Not too shabby. Very High graphics slow me down to a choppy average of 9fps – that falls below the 12fps limit where stuff starts getting very noticeably herky jerky. I played through the tutorial and someways through the first mission. I’ll have to go back and play some more before I can decide if I like it though, as I’m not used to the style of gameplay it employs for controlling units and “building” units and such and such. At least I can confirm it’s a very pretty looking game.

In other news, it looks like I won’t be shooting my scenes tomorrow nite on my bike, seeing as the tail lights are now completely fried or something. I jiggled wires around to no end and the best I got was the turn signal on my right light to start working if I held the wire in the right spot. Dammit. Now I have to order a new part that’ll cost me about $80 and delay my shoot. Talk about timing right? Geeez.

Oh and I found this pretty cool as well. Never knew they were making USB monitors. Lappie fans should be happy.

I also tried out Pidgin tonight as a possibility to replace Trillian as it supported GoogleTalk and MySpaceIM (despite many people’s hatred of MySpace, I’ve found it an effective means to keep in touch with my friends) in addition to the services supported by Trillian. However upon loading, the buddy window decides to stick itself to the upper-left corner of my left monitor and refuses to budge. WTF is up with that?? I couldn’t drag it anywhere despite every effort, and there was no option to be found to undock it from the top of my screen. Oh well. Maybe I’ll try again a few versions down the line.

Crap. It’s almost 6am – better be off to bed. Before I go tho, the links for this entry…

Gaiiden’s Links: Email

LinkedIn – Professional networking site. It’s the “in” thing to get linked-in so hop to it! Hey if you’re a link to me mind sending me a reccommendation? Call me a loser but my profile completeness is at 90% and I need another reccommendation to help push me to 100%! 😛
Plaxo – A nice service to keep info updated amongst your contacts and stored online for access anywhere
POPFile – Screw those built-in filters. Here’s the only spam filter you will ever need. Let me check my stats… 98.95% accuracy after 31,590 emails. Yup, that’ll do!

Previous Link Posts

Compression
Communication
Audio

Don’t forget to add your own useful email tools in the comments and check out what others have suggested. I’d also be interested in your opinions in World in Conflict if you’ve played it.

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