ozoneocean [..] wrote:
 
@ Lonne- I was joking :)

 
 
I know.  But I just had to run with it.  >:D

Dammit, now I want to go to Berlin... I've been to Trier btw.

@ayes
Its coming up to christmas. I forgot about that. Now its manditory that I become a massive tightwad and grump. Ill have to stick a paddle attachment to the cane so I can successfully get across the atlantic without freezing my hands off... as much. Glad to hear that the appendec-blah-de-blah-blah is better. Or getting there at least.
@Oz
I'll never be able to get rid of the northern irish twang so it'll just be a terrible immitation of the american accent. Meaning I must be doing it right.

Nice warm day today... and of course I chose today to do some long overdue gardening- cleaning up all those horrible leaves out the front of my house so the place doesn't look abandoned. :(
Worked at that till I almost couldn't stand. Frick it was hot out there! And I seem to have this idiot tendency to keep working at things beyond my natural safe level, like some brain dead machine...

ozoneocean [..] wrote:
Nice warm day today... and of course I chose today to do some long overdue gardening- cleaning up all those horrible leaves out the front of my house so the place doesn't look abandoned. :(
Worked at that till I almost couldn't stand. Frick it was hot out there! And I seem to have this idiot tendency to keep working at things beyond my natural safe level, like some brain dead machine...

I guess what you'd call hot, us Brits would call the centre of the sun. I had to rake up leaves last month and it was about 3 degrees celsius and I still ended up too warm. 

Here's something I'm trying to figure out...
 
Is my current computer (AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core 3800+, 2 gigs RAM) still relevant this day and all I need do is upgrade the video card?  Or should I do a full system upgrade ASAP?  Decisions, decisions...
 
Yet another reason why my father keeps telling me to get a girlfriend.  She could make those tough decisions for me.... -_-;

@Lonne- Drunk Duck IS your girlfriend.
 
@Reve- At 3 degrees you were prolly wearing a whole lot more than I was out there yesterday! No wonder you got hot. :)
It's good to have it warm out there at the moment. So far Summer has been pretty cool. No more garden work for a while though.

Well... went and did it.  Just got my upgrades, and it was worth it.  Only thing I can't upgrade yet is my hard drive as the prices are very VERY HIGH at the moment.  The reason?  Apparently the factories in Thailand which make most of the world's hard drives have flooded and it'll be a few months before prices go down.  There was another computer store that was offering me 500GB hard drives for under $100, but the owner of the computer store where I've always bought my computer equipment for many years warned me against it; their drives are probably refurbished and won't last very long.  Worse... the store offering me cheap hard drives may not last too much longer.  Doesn't help that the guy who opened that store was a former worker for the store I shop at, and that guy wasn't a very nice guy to deal with...
 
As for my system right now, I'll have to say that while I've used GeForce cards for a long time, I'm not fanboy.  I'm now running an ATI card in my system and it performs better than the GeForce GT 520 they had there (and the 520 runs even worse than one of the GT 400 series cards!!!).  Anyways... specs...
 
AMD Athlon II X2 260 Processor 3.2 GHZ
4 GB System RAM (only 3GB used as I'm running Windows XP)
AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6570 Sapphire with 1024 GB DDR3 video RAM
All on a Gigabyte S2P motherboard (with special adapters to allow my IDE hard drives to interface with the SATA parts on the motherboard as there are no native IDE ports)
 
Not the beefiest system in the world, but I'm not a hardcore gamer who demands maximum performance from his games and game systems.  :)

Yeah hard drive prices have gone up recently for that reason but i found getting stuff from chain stores negates the rise, well with some of them anyway.  It's the independents taht jack it up quickly as they don't hold loads of stock at giant warehouse and get it to order.  I added 1TB to mine recently and it cost me £50.

Genejoke [..] wrote:
Yeah hard drive prices have gone up recently for that reason but i found getting stuff from chain stores negates the rise, well with some of them anyway.  It's the independents taht jack it up quickly as they don't hold loads of stock at giant warehouse and get it to order.  I added 1TB to mine recently and it cost me £50.

I'll still wait.  I've been burnt with a "refurbished" hard drive before (new ones will last 5 years, refurbs will last a year or 2).  Hopefully prices go down in a few months.  Not that I need that much space.  I don't download that much anyways.

Heh... finished the last of my upgrades.  Now in addition to the rainbow LED fan (yellow, red, green) that came with my case I now have red and blue case fans lighting up the interior of my computer.  Now if only I can find a rainbow LED CPU fan...

Sounds like a good machine Lonne! But you really should make the move to Windows 7 soon...
 
I worked harder than I thought when gardening on Saturday- either that or I'm way less fit than I thought. Or maybe those damn shoes I wore were the problem since it's my feet and various leg muscles that are aching like a bastard two days later. Owwwww!

ozoneocean [..] wrote:
Sounds like a good machine Lonne! But you really should make the move to Windows 7 soon...
 

 
 
Heh...  thanks.  Soon as I can (and when it's dark) I'm tempted to take a picture of the system with all its lights blazing.  Heh...  this thing has a lot of lights on it.

omaha, snomaha, homaha.
blech.

Lonnehart [..] wrote:

ozoneocean [..] wrote:
Sounds like a good machine Lonne! But you really should make the move to Windows 7 soon...
 
  
 
Heh...  thanks.  Soon as I can (and when it's dark) I'm tempted to take a picture of the system with all its lights blazing.  Heh...  this thing has a lot of lights on it. 

do it!!!!!!

@Lonne:  you definitely need to get a song to go with what sounds like a wmp skin.  I suggest Sousa.
 
and Oz, how much is Microsoft paying you (windows 7: rah rah rah)?  
XP is perfectly functional, and not every manufacturer (hard and soft) has their updated drives and patches so what worked before will continue to work with that which is Windows 7.
 
---
 
So you're all wondering, aren't you.  (I know you're not).  The good news:  I AM back at work.  The bad news, I AM back at work -- and there's a month of insanity to instantly absorb. *where are those pain killers?*  
Also, it keeps sounding like the microwave is finished zapping something, BUT there is NOTHING in the microwave . . . .
 
beep.  beep.  beep.

Well... here it is...
 

 

 
Luckily I also replace the power supply.  My old 380 watt power supply would be weeping from having to support all those lights and equipment...

@Lonne:  keepin those matches right there by the PC because . . . .  ?

ayesinback [..] wrote:
@Lonne:  keepin those matches right there by the PC because . . . .  ?

I have a set of candles nearby.  Just in case the power goes out and it lasts more than a few minutes...

Playing through ME2, but this time with some downloaded content.  Messed with that one glitch that the ME wiki mentioned.  It was only supposed to be done twice and... well...
 
I normally would've gotten 900 credits from that last safe I bypassed, but this time I got 5400 creds instead.  :)

Impressively pretty case!
I'd image the video card, CPU and ram gobble up far, far more power than a few LEDs?
 
@Ayes- Yep, XP is fine enough for older machines, but with something newer like Lonne's beasti it makes more sense to go with the newer OS.
My home comps are all XP and Vista and they work well enough for my needs. :)

ozoneocean [..] wrote:
Impressively pretty case!
I'd image the video card, CPU and ram gobble up far, far more power than a few LEDs?
 

  
The CPU and RAM would eat more power, but the video card doesn't use as much as the high end ones.  It doesn't require itself to have its own power supply connection.  I was told that the ATI 6570 Sapphire is an entry level card just as the GeForce GT 520 is.  However, the ATI card performs much better than the GeForce entry level GT.  Just don't expect great performance if you're going to try running at resolutions higher than 1280x1024.
 
I have yet to be disappointed (my monitor can't handle resolutions higher than what I mentioned).  :)
 
One thing about video cards I'm trying to figure out is this... how are some people able to tell the quality of the various video cards out there?  Assuming the cards are running a game at the same frame rate, how does one tell which has great graphics vs not so great graphics?  My personal standards for graphics must be low since I'm satisfied with XB360 graphics...

I shouldn't worry too much about graphics, what the 360 and ps3 push out is pretty good.  Sure powerful PCs can do better but I don't see much point, which is why I do most of my gaming on console even though my pc is pretty powerful.

For me, I measure the worth of my card in that it doesn't use as much power as the last one and has no issues running my 1920x1080  TV and 1600x1200 cintiq, so I can watch a DVD on one screen while photoshopping on the other... or whatever. The only games I give a crap about thses days are the Mass Effect series, and it has no problem there.
 
Speaking of graphics, people seem to be going mad for that Skyrim game, but the graphics in all the vids I've seen look like something made for an iphone... Crude, chunky polygons, low textures and muddy colours. Looks about 10 years old... So the gameplay and story much be amazing right?

the graphics on skyrim are mixed, but the overall effect is good.  It's the gameplay and depth of the setting that make it though.

I've officially seen every episode of the Twilight Zone now, except for one - The Arrival. I don't know what it is about that episode that freaks me out so much, but I've watched the first 5-10 minutes of it twice and then got too scared. I'm about to try again, though. I did the same thing with the one with the wax figures, and it's much less scary if you just watch the entire episode. I get frightened far too easily. Very silly.
 
I need a new show to watch now, though - any suggestions? 

Genejoke [..] wrote:
I shouldn't worry too much about graphics, what the 360 and ps3 push out is pretty good.  Sure powerful PCs can do better but I don't see much point, which is why I do most of my gaming on console even though my pc is pretty powerful.

I play everything on a console because my tv is nice and big and it's in front of a super comfy chair by the radiator and I can bundle up in blankets. :] Who wants to hunch over and use mouses and whatever, ugh. There's been like, twice I wished I played a game on the PC. Once was because a friend I wanted to play with only had it on PC, and the other because of a super awesome sounding mod set was available. I'm pretty happy with most games out of the box and everything though.
 
I am looking forward to skyrim because I played the hell out of Oblivion, it took me months to beat that game. I've set aside christmas break for it so hopefully I can get most of it out of my system before I have to sit at work wishing I was home playing it. :]
 
Then again I thought I'd spend ages playing saints row 3 to death. I played it through once and did almost everything and I'm not sure when I'll play it again. :I
 
vidya gaaaaames

Niccea's Epic Saga:
 
Well...I have been waiting a while to put this up because I was wanting to see how things panned out, so I won't get too much pity, so here it goes...
 
The long and short of it is that I was kicked out of OT school. I can appeal my grade but my advisor says I don't have a chance and wishes me luck with a different career.
 
The internship I was on was going pretty good. However I lack clinical reasoning and safety. I can give you therory until I'm blue in the face but I can't seem to get it to work in a clinical setting. My clinical instructor decided to terminate my internship with 2 wks left to go. I probably did deserve it, I was doing ok but not at the passing level. I am kinda upset about it because it all came down to me with being a day late with writing out my goals for the last two weeks and they decided to boot me then and there.
 
Today I had a meeting with aforementioned advisor at the OT school. We looked into my options and came up with three ideas; appeal the grade (really slim chance), reapply to OT school in 6 years (after getting some much needed OT skills and also exploring other opportunities), or giving up on OT all together get some career counseling and possible enroll in another graduate program.
 
Well, the career center didn't have any appointments available until next week. So I went to the Admissions office, told them my story, and they gave me information about other graduate programs that the school offers. One that I had considered getting even before this went down was an MBA.
 
I met with the assistant director for the School of Management and we hit it off. She told me that even though applications were due last week, I can still quickly shoot her one and I'm almost guarenteed admission. She is even going to waive one of the critera that said I needed 5 years of work experience because of how long I have been in college. So now I'm going to get stuff in order for that and with any luck, I will have my MBA in 15 months.
 
Other good thing is that is night school so I can also get a part or even full time job while I'm doing classes (in fact, it is encouraged).
 
The only thing left to do...is tell my parents.

skoolmunkee [..] wrote:

Genejoke [..] wrote:
I shouldn't worry too much about graphics, what the 360 and ps3 push out is pretty good.  Sure powerful PCs can do better but I don't see much point, which is why I do most of my gaming on console even though my pc is pretty powerful.

 I play everything on a console because my tv is nice and big and it's in front of a super comfy chair by the radiator and I can bundle up in blankets. :] Who wants to hunch over and use mouses and whatever, ugh. There's been like, twice I wished I played a game on the PC. Once was because a friend I wanted to play with only had it on PC, and the other because of a super awesome sounding mod set was available. I'm pretty happy with most games out of the box and everything though.
 
I am looking forward to skyrim because I played the hell out of Oblivion, it took me months to beat that game. I've set aside christmas break for it so hopefully I can get most of it out of my system before I have to sit at work wishing I was home playing it. :]
 
Then again I thought I'd spend ages playing saints row 3 to death. I played it through once and did almost everything and I'm not sure when I'll play it again. :I
 
vidya gaaaaames

Nowadays with an HDMI cable and a USB controller for the PC (or one of those mod kits that lets you use an XB360 controller with your PC) you can do that as well.  Especially now that video cards are coming out with connectors/adapters for HD TVs.  The Radeon Sapphire HD 6570 that I got when I upgraded my system supports HDTVs.  Now if only HDMI cables weren't so expensive...

eh? hdmi cables aren't expensive.  Or at least not over here.    sure some stores may try and sell you a gold plated super dooper mega hdmi cable but after a point they are all the same.  You shouldn't need to spend more than $20 dollars on one, at a guess.