Redshift

Well as some of you know I bought an nVidia GeForce 7600GT back in October to replace my aging GeForce 5200 card that was slowly dying a slow and fairly painful death (It finally died on me when it started producing artifacts on-screen when in a game). So here’s what I have to say about the 7600GT after a month of use: It’s amazing. I know it’s not a top of the line card, I know it’s basically considered “last gen” because of the Geforce8 being out right now, But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still awesome. It does a fine job of running every source-based game I have maxed out at 1680×1050 (my new monitor’s native resolution), and it runs most newer games on medium fairly well so I’m happy. There was just one hitch with the card: The cooling system. Now when I bought this card, I didn’t pay attention to the cooler size because I’ve never had a video card that’s needed anything more than a fanless heat sink to cool it (like my 5200), but man that was a big mistake. The stock cooler on my card (Seen Here) is ridiculously tiny. The heat sink is literally non-existent and the fan did a horrible job of cooling it down, so I did what any boy with 40 bucks and semi-decent pc building skills would do: I bought the largest fan and heat sink I could afford that would fit on the card and shoved it on there. That Fan and heat sink being the Zalman VF700CU cooler. The thing is massive and is literally is bigger than the card (I’ll take a picture later), but it does such a good job of cooling the system that it makes up for size. Here’s what I mean: Stock cooler idle temp: 70 Degrees Celsius. Zalman Cooler idle temp: Between 38 and 43 Celsius. That’s one hell of a difference if I do say so myself. The load temps are about the same difference, if not more. So back on topic am I happy with my new card? Yes. Will I buy another EVGA card again? Yes. And yes, I’ll be using zalman in all of my builds from now on. And now I’m off to go play HL2: Deathmatch.

Happy Thanksgiving! If anyone cares, mine was fairly okay, involved lots of food, and random visiting with my family… Well if you consider “visiting” hanging out in the basement for most of the day lying on the couch watching TV and playing geometry wars on my 360 until I dragged myself upstairs for dinner. Anyway as you probably noticed (and if you didn’t, get your eyes checked) I updated my blog’s theme slightly. The horribly glitchy snow is back again, and I have a new winter-themed header because I was in a semi-festive mood the other day. Now for bad news: I have to work tomorrow, on black Friday. So if no one hears from me again, it’s because some woman trying to find the last Wii in town has somehow managed to kill me in a psychotic holiday-sale driven rage. And on that note I’m off to go play something. Possibly Geometry Wars, but then again I may break out the Dreamcast emulator and start playing Jet Grind Radio again.

Comic: Diet Coke+Mentos

So I’ve done absolutely fuck all today, I literally spent the day in bed up until 4pm when my mom forced me to get up. So what’s happened since 4? Well I finally listened to “Sound of Silver” by LCD Sound System (which is awesome by the way) , worked on the Lambda Records website a little bit, and then talked to mike who told me that his Legend of Zelda feather stylus for his DS came in, so I got up and checked the mail and there was mine. It’s pretty cool looking for it being a simple plastic feather-shaped stylus. It won’t ever replace the one for my DS lite, but hey it’s a free collectible stylus so I’m not complaining. I’d take a picture but I can’t find my camera’s memory stick anywhere so mike’s being kind enough to let me yoink the picture he took.

Like I Said: It’s simple but cool looking.

Comic: Fight

Well I’ve found another reason for begging my parents for a Wii for Christmas this year: Super Mario Galaxy. The game looks ridiculously fun, and the graphics are amazing. Have a look at the, you’ll see what I mean.

Well I got The Orange Box Wednesday and I’ve been playing Portal and Team Fortress 2 quite a bit. Portal is ridiculously amazing, and TF2 is just plain fun. I haven’t gotten around to HL2: Episode Two because my pc currently can’t run it and I haven’t finished the original HL2 or Episode One (thanks to the many fuckups with steam accounts and my pc needing a little bit of work to be able to run the games at a good frame rate at a decent resolution). And while we’re on the subject of my pc needing work: I ordered my new GeForce 7600GT on Friday so I should be getting that this Wednesday, so be prepared for a blog post about that (if I ever remember to do it and I’m not constantly playing the orange box).

Comic: Turing Test

Well Microsoft officially announced the new 80 GB and Flash (8 GB and 4 GB model) Zunes. So this has led me to have an orgasm of delight because all of the new software-side features are going to be added to the current Zune, Which isn’t going anywhere: It’s been rebranded as the Zune 30. All 3 new Zunes use the new touch sensitive directional pad (Called a Zune Pad). Here’s a list of new features and fixes coming to the Zune players:

1. Wi-Fi Syncing
2. Podcast support (FINALLY!!!)
3. Media Center compatibility (allows TV shows to be synced)
4. Native support for h.264 and MPEG-4 (Still no DivX but it’s progress)
5. Redesigned Interface for the devices and new Zune Software (Built from the ground up; It’s no longer based on Windows Media Player 11.)
6. DRM-Free Downloads
7. 3×3 Restriction has been edited for shared songs: You can keep the files as long as you want, but you can still only play those 3 times.
8. All accessories for the current Zune work with the new Zunes and vise versa

So yeah I’m happy about this as I’m a proud Zune owner. They’re supposed to be coming out sometime in November (along with the new updates for the current Zune and software), although an exact release date hasn’t been set.

Comic: Tapping

So today Joe and I decided to try out a new mod for Half-Life 2, and we found out that it’s pretty damn cool. The mod is called Following Freeman and it has a pretty interesting layout: Basically there’s a central hub in the game where you and your teammates start out and there are portals to different mods and such. Like there are portals into Rock 24 and The Island but instead of those being just single player Following Freeman turns them into Co-op Levels with a point system and all, it’s pretty cool. But that’s all I’ve really go to say right now, so I’ll talk to whoever reads this later.

So I upgraded my blog’s backend today to the latest version of WordPress and currently I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to use the tagging system from Word 2007. Either Microsoft is going to need to release a small patch for Word or WordPress will need to integrate something along the lines of this: [tag]insert, some, amazing, tag, here[/tag] into the system, Because I like using Word 2007 as my blogging program and I would really like to use the tagging features that WordPress has FINALLY added. In other news: Most people that read this know that I’m a big fan of the Half-Life series, and I’ve been waiting for HL2: Episode Two and Portal since I heard about them last year. The only downside is that in order to get both of them I have to either buy The Orange Box (which includes HL2 and Episode One, both of which I’ve recently purchased, so I REALLY don’t want to go that route), Or buy them separately on steam for a bit more then what they cost when bundled with everything else, which still isn’t all that great as I’m not a big fan of buying things from Steam. Ah well I guess I’ll just go ahead and buy the orange box and get Team Fortress Two while I’m at it. And now onto the hardware side of things: I’m getting a new video card for my PC in the next week or so. My current card (the dreaded Geforce FX 5200) has finally started to die on me and it’s pissing me off as it’s affecting the games I play. So since this system only has an AGP slot instead of PCI-Express I’m going for an Overclocked AGP-based Geforce 7600GT from eVGA. That should give me a nice boost in performance with my games and help extend my computer’s life, which I desperately need since I can’t afford to go out and buy a new computer, like certain other people. So yeah for the next month or so after I get my new card I’ll be glued to my computer playing games, so that should be fun. And now… I’m off to go play Half-Life 2: Deathmatch!

Today’s Comic: Pix Plz.

So my life lately has been… Well basically the same. I got Half-Life 2 again last week after my first account got stolen and I’ve become addicted to HL2 Deathmatch so that’s always fun. For the most of this week I’ve been having some odd problems with my pc wanting to crash, and then it wanted to run “Check Disk” at startup every time I started it so that was just great. But I got that fixed just now with Joe’s help (Thanks Joe), and now I’m pretty much set right now in terms of PC problems as I think I got all the bugs worked out of my system. In other news, I released a new album, and it can be downloaded here from last.fm. I’d offer it for download on here but I don’t want to go through the hassle of uploading each track and linking to it on the NRV page. Also I’m going to finally make an attempt to update the blog once or twice a week as I’ve started to get lazy with my blog posts and it’s pissing me off. I mean I used to update this at least every other day and I got further and further between blog posts. I really don’t know what happened to me, aside from school and work. And Finally, as I got a new camera, it’s time for me to bombard this with a couple pics of my stuff Because I can:

And Today’s Comic: Nostalgia

So finally, the end of cryptic and angry blog posts, I bet people were sick of that even though barely anyone reads this. =P Anyway Since’ it’s officially the 29^th this means that tomorrow’s my birthday, so woo! And as if just to make my birthday better there was a new Beck single released last week called ‘Time Bomb’, so naturally like the beck fan I am I downloaded it and like everything he writes: It’s fucking awesome and anyone that reads this needs to download it now. It’s fairly awesome and extremely catchy, it’s like the perfect song to end the summer with, and as he’s said: “Time Bomb is a song for bonfires, blackouts and the last hurrah of the summer.” So I’ve included it in the handy link at the end of this post for you to download and enjoy! =D

Anyways I’ve got my new Acer AL2016W 20-inch monitor, and I love it. I’m still having trouble adjusting to the new max resolution but hey, I can be more productive I guess at 1680×1050, and I might just be able to write blog posts more often. But yeah life’s going better, work isn’t but oh well it can only get better from this point. Also on Friday I get my new camera. So I’m happy. And on that note I’m off to listen to the song again and attempt to play XIII without my pc crashing.

Download “TimeBomb“