| 22 February 2004 at 12.38.59 ZuluTime
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Posted by Gremlin [24.8.22.236 - c-24-8-22-236.client.comcast.net] on 22 February 2004 at 12.38.59 ZuluTime:
My laptop is back in the shop again. Something I shoulda done in the first place, of course; but I was trying to get to the bottom of things with BestBuy Corporate before doing anything rash, like letting them touch my machine again. Ironically, the most interesting bit of news came in when I was handing the thing over to the techguy at a different store.
The two things I've really been trying to figure out all this time have been A) why in the living hell these 'tards would replace my M key with another J key [no one seems to have a real answer to that question, apart from a lot of blinking at the keyboard], and B) why these morons thought they could charge me nearly four hundred bucks to fix a computer covered by the extended warranty. While I still haven't got a solid answer to that question, I have got some interesting news regarding procedure.
It turns out that, in the event that something is broken and not covered by the extended warranty, BestBuy require not only written consent to repair the thing, but a cash advance. Ultimately, there's no way in hell for BestBuy to charge for a repair without first having got a deposit. So, while no one can figure out what Anna was thinking when she hit us with the pay-for-this-or-we'll-keep-your-laptop extortion, she's now being investigated by Corporate for breaking all known rules, for whatever reason.
So we'll see what comes of that.
Meanwhile, I'm in the process of building a new supercomputer here. The technology is finally catching up, after only fifteen years, allowing me to build a Wintel machine with the general parameters of my Amiga. In fact, the new G5 Mac gets pretty close, if you buy two of them and ScreamerNet them together. We should be seeing 5GHz Wintels hitting stores by the end of 2005. Which is something I've been waiting for since 1992 or so.
I'm hoping to have the new machine up and running by the end of the month. At the moment, I'm mostly waiting for all the parts to get here. I won't be able to take it with me to restaurants, of course; but it'll do some good sitting here rendering things while I'm out setting up new stuff in a laptop all night. Then, I just come home, give the latest .lws to the tower, and let that render through the next night. It's the same basic principle as downloading the numbers in CounterStrike from the server while your computer decodes them and appoints your native polygons to them all, so you can see where everyone else is. But, obviously, on a larger scale, requiring several gigahurtz and gigabytes of RAM to get a given scene done in a single night. Stuff you can't really do on a 2.4GHz laptop with 768 megs of RAM--particularly while you're working on other things.
Meanwhile, since I need two computers and have zero, I'm plotting things out with mechanical pencils and graph paper. Mostly, I've worked out that I could do everything ten times faster with nothing more than Microsoft Paint. But only if my UpArrow key weren't locked on. Which is why BestBuy have my laptop again, and I've got state-or-the-art Scripto and Mead to use for this these days.
Pandemic is still very much on hold. I used to be able to write novels in Spirals, ten years ago; these days, I'm too used to writing a couple of pages, reading them over, and rewriting most of it instantly. I've never really worked out how to write a whole thing, read it over, and fix problems after it's done. When I write a book, any given page builds exactly off of all the pages before it; changing something on page 242 ultimately breaks something on page 608; it's just not how I do things.
Loosely on the subject, DawnoftheDeadMovie.net has finally been updated. A lot. It's an interesting design, with a couple of flaws--most notably that it's locked into a popup at 800*600 [I think] which can't be resized to anything large enough to seen at 1400*1024. Other than that, it's one of those silly LARPer sites which make some attempt to allow the user to pretend that the events of the film are actually happening. Since, in the even of a zombie outbreak, you could reasonably expect cablemodems to keep working, allowing you to stay abreast of the news exclusively at UniversalPictures.com. Call me kooky, but I won't be having filmsites broadcasting news in Pandemic.
Like, once I get my laptop back. If I ever do.
At this point, I'm seriously thinking about giving up and buying a new Toshiba 609. Not that the thing would fit in my laptop case; it's got a seventeen-inch widescreened monitor in it. But I might cancel all my BestBuy extended warranties, run across the street, and spend the three thousand bucks on one of those at CircuitCity, who, I know from experience, actually have extended warranties for a reason. It's a thought.
Meanwile, I'm back to playing videogames a lot. I reconnected my largely useless N64 and played through Shadows of the Empire: the Adventures of Dash Gaydar, which seemed a lot more interesting back in 1996 or so. I can't figure out where Rogue Squadron ended up, so I moved on to Rogue Leader and Rebel Strike on the GameCube. Timewaster games. But then, I've got some time to waste, at the moment.
I also picked up...I forgot the title now. Oh, here it is: Shadow of Destiny, in which you wander around as a terribly-aliased version of the guy from Dawn, trying to change history an hour in the past to prevent your own death. Which, as silly as the guy is, isn't quite worth doing. So far, I've talked people into standing around in the town square, and stomped out a fire which should have burned down a pub. Then I switched over to Star Wars games instead.
I should mention, though, that I picked up Manhunt a few weeks ago. And that's worth playing. Interestingly, if anything actually fits the genre of Survival Horror Reality Television, it's this. Which would be great if I hadn't already coined that for Deadache.
And I got back to playing with SilentHill2, which I still haven't finished. I don't think I've even opened the case for SilentHill3 yet. Something about the SH games just fails to keep me interested for long. I think it might be that I keep noticing how much better Resident Evil was at doing the same thing. The only thing I've caught SH doing better than RE, so far, is the music. Which can be napstered from WinMX, removing the need to play the games.
Drat. Which reminds me: I was gonna buy a new synth, since my ageing Ensoniq is...ageing. And I was gonna grab a new 88key Yamaha. And I've only seen it at fucking BestBuy. I guess I'll keep looking.
In any case, I've been thinking a lot about the music side of Deadache lately. Instead of literally writing a theme, I might alter something like Marche Funebre for it [yes, Public Domain songs can be useful after all]. Or, maybe, Ten Little Indians, which has always been a lot creepier than anyone gives it credit for.
I'll figure it out. After all: I've got an Ensoniq, and I didn't buy it at BestBuy; so that still works for me.
Anyway, I think that's about it for now. More later....
--Gremlin