Surreality TV

Amazon has LR3 for $222 and change, so I went ahead and bought it. Just playing with it (thanks to Adobe's free 30 day trial (full featured, not a crippled demo)), it's absolutely amazing at noise reduction and clean up. It's also really nifty how it stores everything as a database of deltas and doesn't actually touch the original file in any way. I'll have to play with it's post processing ability for doing more than just clean up too, after watching some of the tutorial videos on line. I haven't even touched on its abilities for photo management yet, but wow it's got a lot of ways to sort, tag, group, and manage pictures. As I currently have just under eighteen thousand photos on my hard drive, that's going to come in really handy.

I also bought Portal 2 via Steam this morning, and now I'm going to have some fun.

While I have a Dreamwidth account (username same as here), I really only use it to back up this journal (the ability to import my entire LJ, comments and all? Awesome) and to allow me to comment on folks who live over there. I have no intention of moving as of right now. While I have accounts on both FB and Twitter, I don't have them linked to here (I used to crosspost my LJ entries, but it seemed sorta redundant). I have considered, just for fun, having LJ echo Twitter, FB echo LJ, and Twitter echo FB (maybe even throw Google Buzz into that loop) and watch the chaos, but then, I use these accounts and sabotaging myself seems rather silly.

Rule of Thumb No. 1 still holds: Pay attention.

It's not that hard to not screw up.

While I have a Dreamwidth account (username same as here), I really only use it to back up this journal (the ability to import my entire LJ, comments and all? Awesome) and to allow me to comment on folks who live over there. I have no intention of moving as of right now. While I have accounts on both FB and Twitter, I don't have them linked to here (I used to crosspost my LJ entries, but it seemed sorta redundant). I have considered, just for fun, having LJ echo Twitter, FB echo LJ, and Twitter echo FB (maybe even throw Google Buzz into that loop) and watch the chaos, but then, I use these accounts and sabotaging myself seems rather silly.

Rule of Thumb No. 1 still holds: Pay attention.

It's not that hard to not screw up.

Moving a Dell monitor from its default base to a dock integrated monitor stand is a thirty second operation, if you're moving slowly. It involves pushing a button to unlock it, removing the monitor from the base, putting it on the dock stand and making sure the button popped (indicating it locked in place properly).

Moving an HP monitor from the stand it shipped with to an integrated dock/monitor stand? It seems I'll need tools to remove the monitor, attach it to the arm on the dock stand and then attach the arm to the base. This involves using multiple sized allen wrenches and hex screws/nuts.

Why? Why does HP insist on making its hardware difficult, non standard, and just generally annoying to deal with? Compaq lives on in HP's gutters, it seems.

I'm walking on sunshine. But I'm doing it alone. Who else amongst you is on Wave?

I'm walking on sunshine. But I'm doing it alone. Who else amongst you is on Wave?

...To stop fucking with Java. I have this NetApp that is administered via Java applets, most of which don't even pretend to work with versions of Java six months prior to whatever release of ONTAP you're using on your NetApp. I've spent the last while building a VM that I will not patch, and can only hope the NetApp will feed me whatever Java version it works with when I connect to it. If it sends me to Sun, I'm going to jump off the fucking balcony. Or, better yet, I'll throw the fucking NetApp off the balcony.

I'm not sure who I hate more, Sun for breaking shit with every subsequent Java release, or vendors who rely on this fucking shit and make my job impossible without it (there's a lot I can do from the command line on this thing, but some things can ONLY be done via the Java GUI that of course doesn't even pretend to try and work).

Until I recently bought the GeForce 9800 GTX+ I have now, I hadn't given you any of my money since back in June of 2000. My recent purchase reminds me WHY.

The fucking thing is unstable as hell. The Witcher? I will apparently never get to finish this game, since you will not run it for more than about half a minute before you crash to the desktop with a driver error. Crysis? As long as I only want to see it in DX9, everything is great! DX10, not so much. Anything running on the HL1 engine is random; sometimes Counterstrike will run for hours glitch free and then I'll be looking at driver crashes every few minutes. HL2 based games run fine, however. Other things are just as random, where they either run fine, run fine for a while at random, or are totally unplayable. And these are games with a fucking Nvidia logo spammed into their start up cinematics, like Neverwinter Nights, which your hardware can't seem to reliably deal with.

And I'm sure by this time next year, you will have abandoned me on the driver update front as well, since you orphan hardware like it's going out of style.

Next upgrade cycle? It's back to ATi.

Until I recently bought the GeForce 9800 GTX+ I have now, I hadn't given you any of my money since back in June of 2000. My recent purchase reminds me WHY.

The fucking thing is unstable as hell. The Witcher? I will apparently never get to finish this game, since you will not run it for more than about half a minute before you crash to the desktop with a driver error. Crysis? As long as I only want to see it in DX9, everything is great! DX10, not so much. Anything running on the HL1 engine is random; sometimes Counterstrike will run for hours glitch free and then I'll be looking at driver crashes every few minutes. HL2 based games run fine, however. Other things are just as random, where they either run fine, run fine for a while at random, or are totally unplayable. And these are games with a fucking Nvidia logo spammed into their start up cinematics, like Neverwinter Nights, which your hardware can't seem to reliably deal with.

And I'm sure by this time next year, you will have abandoned me on the driver update front as well, since you orphan hardware like it's going out of style.

Next upgrade cycle? It's back to ATi.

Is something my machine here at home lacks. Ever since I replaced the failed Radeon HD 2900 with the 9800 GTX+, things have been...odd. I'm thinking about a reinstall from scratch as maybe there's some old ATi cruft still hiding somewhere that's causing problems, although I'm severely tempted to replace the motherboard as well, since my video card is PCI-e x16 2.0, and my current motherboard only does PCI-e x16 1.x. Although it looks suspiciously like my DDR2 800 RAM won't work in any of the newer PCI-e x16 2.x motherboards, which is irritating.