nastybun

Tonight, on the ‘bun..

PC update. It’s been running mostly well.. until this afternoon when the graphics driver blue screened the system. Other than that, it’s been peachy. Oh.. and the thing barely boots without utterly locking up if the RAM is in dual channel mode. Which is not much of an issue, except that it may indicate a dodgy component. I’ll have to test the RAM out.. and possibly test the motherboard with other RAM if possible. Still, it’s been nice to have something that (usually) runs properly and can play games. Speaking of games…

Fallout 3.. it’s been fun. I wander about, I get attacked and (usually) survive, I find random junk, I find people to sell it to.. sometimes I even advance the plot! It’s an easy game to get sidetracked in, with a huge world to explore containing a variety of nooks to explore. There always seems to be somewhere to go, whether it be for the main plot, a sidequest, or just because someone told you that there’s something out there. Lately I’ve just been finding new caves to explore and ignoring progression. It is a lonely world though, being post-apocalyptic and all. You can expect to be attacked every few minutes by something, be it mutant, human or animal.. which means if you’re heading to somewhere remote and it hasn’t saved in a while and you die.. it’s rather frustrating. In fact, I turned the difficulty down a notch to try and lower those occurances. Though that’s probably mainly because I’m not very good at it. Still, it’s fun. I can’t compare it to the original two as I never played them, but I’m enjoying the experience so far. It’s definately not for everyone though, so if you want to check it out it’s probably worth borrowing it first, or waiting until the price drops.

Something that is fun for everyone though is Left 4 Dead. In short, it’s a game that contains many zombies whose heads require removal. It’s designed to be played co-op and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If that’s not enough motivation to go and get it now, well.. the zombie floods and special infected that pop out to try to impede you are different every time, control by an AI called The Director. This means that the swarms can come at any time.. if you find yourself doing super well, then expect a huge flood of ravenous flesh eaters swarming you, with some special guys in there for good measure. One barfs on you (attracking all the normal horde to you), one snares you with its tongue and drags you away, one leaps on you and pins you down, one is huge, super tough and beats the crap out of you and one is super fast, will disable you in one shot and is pretty dang tough… but if you’re careful you can sneak past her. All this variety changes it up nicely every time, which makes retrying levels over and over again surprisingly unfrustrating. Playing it with mates at your back makes the experience brilliant – I was playing it all afternoon today with a mate, and another one joined in later on.. we couldn’t get past a level by the end of it, but even after the 8th go at it we was still enjoying it. There’s a demo for this one, so no excuses for not trying it out. Grab it and join in the fun!

General Motors spends 17 million dollars per year on Viagra for its retired workers.

No really.. they do. This is why healthcare should be a guvvamint controlled thing…

I think I feel a flu coming on… either that or I’m just extra tired at the moment. I think it’s the former…

I was going to wait until my new PC was up and running before I posted next, but it’s taking too long. I’m waiting on my copy of Vista, basically. For the curious, here are the stats:

Intel Q6600 (2.4ghz quad core processor)
Gigabyte EP45-DS3P motherboard
4GB DDR2-800 RAM (Corsair something or other)
Gigabyte Radeon HD4870X2 2GB graphics card
2 x 500GB in RAID 0 for system, 2 x 1TB (JBOD) for storage
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Should be good.. should be a lot better than the poor excuse for a boat anchor I’m running at the moment anyway. It’ll run things properly, for one.. I hope. I’d ask you if you want my current machine, but I’m pretty sure I like you, my devoted reader. I wouldn’t want you to know the suffering that this thing causes…

Another thing I should gush about is the spam controlling measure I installed on here a while ago. It’s been 100% successful at killing the spam I was dealing with every day. Of course, it may have just prevented commenting totally.. do me a favour and submit one, will ya? The plugin is called WP-Spamfree, anyway. If you have a wordpress blog and some spam issues, give it a crack. It’s a lot nicer than CAPTCHA stuff anyway…

All porcupines float in water.

There you go, if ever you find yourself drowning, simply shove a couple of porcupines down your pants!

Brilliant.

more music charts

It should be legal to kick in fog lamps when people have them on in anything over than 5 metres of visibility… and that goes for rear foglamps too…

I have functional plumbing again! In fact, it’s even better than it used to be! And all it took was having no cold tap in the kitchen for a couple of days… To confabulate on that a little, what used to happen with the cold tap is that I’d have to turn it on about half a dozen turns, then when the water was gushing I’d have to turn it back five turns to get it to a reasonable flow rate. It also dripped incessantly, so I’d have to turn it off really tightly. It also had a second outlet and stopcock that could have a dishwasher or washing machine attached to it.. not that a dishwasher or washing machine would fit in my kitchen. Especially not where the sink is. On Monday, I was turning it off after.. something.. and due to my prodigeous strength, the inside of the handle basically disintegrated, leaving it mostly closed.. it had a fast drip happening. A few weeks ago the handle for the hot tap came off, but I bodged that back in place. Now that the cold tap was utterly munted, I figured it was a good time to call the rental blokes and get them to send a plumber out… so I did. I’d have tried it myself, but I’d probably have made it worse.. I didn’t know where to turn the water mains off, for one thing. Anyhoo, he came, he fixed, he left.. and now I have two new taps in the kitchen, a new shower rose and (hopefully) no more juddering/screaming shower pipes. Those I will test out later…

In other kitchen related news, I have been gushing to everyone about the wonderful culinary prowess I posess lately. Mainly cos I made chicken breast, grilled capsicum, pesto and parmesan puff pasty parcels for my dinner for the past few nights. They were super tasty. In case the reader has not have been gushed at, here’s how you can follow along at home:

Cook half a chicken breast any way you like. I kept it simple.. frypan, olive oil and a splash of soy sauce. Combine over heat for a while.
Half half a sheet of puff pasty thawed and ready to go. Place upon it the chook, some grilled capsicum, a slathering of pesto and parmesan to taste.
Seal pasty and paint/drizzle with beaten egg.
Bake at about 200C for 15-20 minutes, until it’s puffed and tasty looking.
Consume with desired amount of gusto.

The reason that it’s paint or drizzle with egg is that the damned den of disappointment down the road (or the local woolworths, if you prefer the latin) has been out of stock of pasty brushes for the past while or so. I’m pretty sure that every time I go there with something specific mind, they don’t have what I need so I need to compromise. It’s a lot like a Bunnings store in that regard. Somehow they can have a vast amount of stuff, but not have the item you need. They’ll have every possible related item, everything else that the vendor makes, an alternative item that’s not ideal but could be made to work… but not what you actually need. It gets a little irritating after a while…

Evil Fable 2 run is going well.. most citizens will run away if I look at them now. It seems that many aspects of the game would be easier if you’re being generally nice to people, but you stand to make more cash if you’re being nasty to people. Apparently the first game basically directed you along the being nice path, but there’s really none of that here.. you can be as nasty as you like with relatively few consequenses, if you’re careful.

In other game related news, Audiosurf is currently on sale for two and a half american buckaroos, so there’s no excuses for you lot not to check it out. You’ll need to have Steam installed so you can purchase and play it, but that’s both free and painless. It’s also a great way to purchase PC games, as it means you can easily avoid going outside and facing both bears and burning. I gushed about Audiosurf in the first post of the site actually.. it’s basically an interactive way to listen to music. Hard to explain adequately, simple to pick up and play. If you enjoy music, you have some on your PC and you like enjoying yourself, it’s for you. Is simple.

Sunbeams that shine down through the clouds are called crepuscular rays.

For some reason, the term ‘crepuscular’ just sounds like it’s to do with bottoms. Then again, it’d explain the whole ‘he thinks the sun shines out from his arse’ thing.