Eriq’s Blag

Yeah, so I missed the fact that DirectX 10 only works with Vista…oh well, I can still play Portal!

It came, I built, I conquered. More tomorrow…

My new monitor came today. It is fucking sexy. 19″, 1680×1050 max resolution (apparently unusual for 19inchers), 5ms response time. It looks fabulous. I’d take a picture, but I’m too lazy.

I thought that my computer was coming tomorrow because that’s what the UPS tracker says. However, my dad failed to mention he got a second email telling him that the OTHER parts had been shipped, so all I’m getting tomorrow is my case and LCD. I guess I can play around with the screen, but I was really looking forward to putting my computer together tomorrow and not on the 12th.

I was hoping that my computer would come today, but my dad’s credit card company thought that it might be a fraudulent charge so they denied it the first time, now it probably won’t be here till Monday. [EDIT: Holy shit! I didn't realize wordpress did auto emoticons!]

Well, I just spent all of the money I had and $123 that I will have. I hope I didn’t make a mistake.

First, yes that was intentional. Here’s the Fragmat. It’s big. That’s my mouse on the right and my lappy on the left. Unfortunately, my mouse doesn’t work well with it, so I may just mount it on my wall.

Click for more detail.

In other news, I may actually get my new computer soon…I hope…

We had to make a video for bio. I’m the only one in my group that knows how to use video editing software. I probably spent between 9 and 11 hours editing it…maybe more. However, it’s done!!!

The other day I decided that I was going to defrag my hard drive. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough space on my hard drive, so I had to delete a bunch of crap (including a large restore file that I probably shouldn’t have tampered with). After defragging, which was completely pointless as far as I can tell because loading shit hasn’t gotten any faster, I discovered that the Google Desktop gadget that I use to put my lappy into hibernation was broken. I tried removing it and re-adding it to no avail, I uninstalled it and tried reinstalling it, but nothing happened. The GUI showed up, but the buttons did nothing. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem on most computers, but mine is special and by special I mean a piece of shit (sort of). It has never liked to go into hibernation, the button in the shutdown dialog does nothing, setting the power button setting to hibernation does nothing, in fact until I found this gadget, the only way it went into hibernation was sometimes if I closed the lid when it was running on battery, this is not always helpful. Why do I need my computer to hibernate so badly, you ask? Well how would you like to have to wait 15 minutes every time you want to do some computing? I’m not sure if it’s that I have a lot of crap installed (which I do) or whether it’s actually important shit loading, but startup takes forever. So without hibernation, my laptop isn’t very fun.

You may have seen in a previous post (who am I kidding, no one’s reading this) that I got the Orange Box, but could not play it because my computers suck. Well, today my father and I went up to his office to test it out on his computer, it’s significantly newer that both our compies and we thought why not. He suggested that if it worked we could bring it home for break, of course he forgot that it was locked to his desk…I checked his hardware info and was encouraged by the fact that his graphics card appeared to be a card and not integrated (integrated is such bullshit). So, I installed Steam, installed Portal, updated Porta, ran the game, started a new game, it loaded (it looked a little rough, but beautiful and shiny), the first portal opened, hoped, walked through it, and…IT WORKED!!! I had to go back through it a couple times to make sure. It worked quite nicely in fact shiny, reflective, a bit aliased, and a little jerky, but definitely playable, I think that bloom may have even been supported. I got to play for about half an hour and enjoyed myself thoroughly. I really need to get myself that new computer.