Gosh, I love the 80’s :)

I’m listening to Club977.com at the moment and they’re playing Atlantic Star, Always.  It strikes me how very romantic and pleasant this tune is.

Oh yeah, totally enjoying the 80’s tunes.  *dances in chair*  Even enjoying Jackson’s tune; that boy was the stuff back then.

The 80’s tunes puts me in a good mood.
That is all.

~Slightly Sleepy Silly St.. Mysk

Tyazul’s Sister

The mysterious enchantress will get to walk Norrath (or my stories in general) thanks to a change that is being brought to EQ2.  Since they’re removing the awful “archetype” classes and, apparently, added new lore and content for new characters, playing her will hopefully be an entertaining experience rather than a mindless grind through 20 levels before she’s actually able to be her proper class.

Then again I may not bother to play her at all.  That could be a bit strange, RPing a female; then again maybe not.  Eh, I dunno.

I’m rambling, obviously. :p

Reminiscing

Reminiscing. Brief thoughts of my childhood flitter through my mind. My thoughts were clearer back then, sharper. I understood things in a light unpolluted by “adult rationalizing”. I find at the moment that I miss it.

Ty The Necro

http://www.flickr.com/photos/releasethepenguins/76951505/

Tyazul (what a funky name) has finally reached the necro stage.  The spell effects are wicked cool, so having the caster pet out during a fight is something of a treat; at least until I’ve seen them too many times.

Anyhow, this image is pretty basic.  Ty is in skeletal form with ye’ol black cloud at his feet.  Perhaps I’ll replace this with a better image later. :p

Back!

So, for the last four days or so I have been off of my computer. The technical explanation is that the master boot record of my hard drive was corrupted. The not-quite-as-technical explanation is that my computer was unable to figure out how to load the operating system (aka Windows). I was ultimately unable to get it working again and had to spend basically $63 to buy a new hard drive.

How did this happen? Well, as you most likely know, I do some reviews on my primary blog Shadows In Motion. My last serveral reviews have actually been a journal, of sorts, that I kept as I attempted to get various distributions of Linux to run. None of them would run correctly, but my last review really fudged up. To make matters worse, it was a commercial distribution of Linux that the company agreed to give me for free so that I could give it proper review.

I was excited about this turn of events. It’s awesome to get an email from a company that says (paraphrasing), “Hey I’d like to send you the full commercial version for review”. My reaction was, “Hell yeah!”.

It turns out though that the product, Linspire, has a long standing bug in the area of code that allows you to choose which operating system to choose when you turn on your computer. It’s supposed to allow you to run both Windows as well as Linspire, and you just select which one you want your computer to boot to. For the not-so-technical of my readers, this is a fairly common practice referred to as dual booting.

This dual booting program goes into an area of the hard drive called the MBR, or Master Boot Record. When your computer is turned on it reads that area to know what operating system to load. Generally this is windows.

This bug in Linspire hit my computer pretty hard, though. Be it a fluke or just another side effect of the bug, it corrupted my hard drive’s MBR. Ouch! Suddenly I was seeing “error loading operating system” when I turned on my computer.

It turns out that the floppy drive (3.5″ sized drive) on my computer is so old that it wouldn’t read the boot disk that I made. I could not access my system at all. Of course, the Windows install CD was of no help, either (technical: fixmbr and fixboot didn’t fix the problem and I couldn’t access DOS to run fdisk /mbr).

So this left me with two options: Spend a little money for a 3.5″ sized drive so that I could use a bootable ‘floppy’, and hope that the “fdisk /mbr” command worked, or, buy a new hard drive. There was no gurantee that the boot disk approach would even fix my problem, so I spent $63 on a new hard drive. $63 that I really can not afford to spend on something like this, but suddenly had no real choice!

It’s possible that it’s extremely unlikely that anyone else who uses Linspire will encounter this bug, let alone have their drive’s MBR corrupted. Nevertheless, I did, and I’m not too bloody happy about it. That’s a lot of money to have to spend out to get my system going again; money that could have been better spent.

Now I’m short a chunk of dough, went nearly a week without my computer operational (note: should get a cheap trash system for testing stuff), and I have to call Microsoft to activate Windows because of their “screw the consumers’ rights” copy protection.

It just goes on and on.. I am not a happy camper.  In fact, I’m through with Linux.  Not touching it again unless someone sends me a completely prebuilt, preinstalled system for free (and pays for the shipping).  That isn’t likely to happen.
~Mysk

Character Fiction – Tyazul

Tyazul – Dark Elf Necromancer (to be)

NOTE: With the Feb 2nd 2006 patch to EQ2 this story is now largely void. There is no boat ride, there are no more archetype classes, and so on. The sister / brother idea and all of that is still there.

Thanks to the SOGA models, EQ2 now has character models that fit the “true” EQ dark elf look. I have to admit that despite all of the misgivings that I have with EQ2 (and there are many), it is sort of nice to see a reflection of sorts of my original character. It’s that nostalgic feel.

According to the lore of EQ2 (not that SOE will ever follow it), the world of EQ2 takes place 500 years after the original EQ. Though dark elves do have long lives, the backstory of the EQ Mysk already had him at a couple of hundred years old, or there abouts. Due to his age and the massive cataclysm that ocurred in the EQ2 story I consider the original EQ Mysk character to be dead.

This is very fitting because that character will never rise again in an EQ game. If he does then he’s not played by me.

The situation provides an excellent clean slate with which to start a new character story, however.

EQ2 “Extreme Quality” and “High Quality” Screenshot Comparison

Since I can still post if I stop the loading of the page I’ll go ahead and post these two screen shots. The images will be stored on imageshack since they’ll certainly vanish after a few weeks if uploaded to wordpress.com

Here are two screenshots from EverQuest 2 that were taken on 12/10/2005. One is taken at so-called “Extreme Quality” level and the other is taken at “High Quality”. Generally speaking I run the game at High Quality, though there are times (especially in Qeynos) that I set it to Balanced due to performance problems.

Keep in mind that these images have been compressed and resized. Though to be honest I haven’t been very impressed with EverQuest 2’s “Extreme Quality” setting…

This is the “Extreme Quality” shot:

This is the “High Quality” shot:

Update: Go here to see a large uncompressed “High Quality” screenshot of Coen at Flickr.com.

There is more detail on the character model in High Quality than there is in Extreme Quality. My best guess as to why is because my 3D card has 256 MBs of video memory and Extreme Quality was designed for 3D cards with 512 MBs of v.vram. Therefore, there may not be enough memory on the graphics card to contain all of the textures, and the runes on the character would take a lesser priority than the shadows and textures in the game world.

Then again, that’s just a guess.

Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering options are set to “application controlled” in the driver’s options. So there will no doubt be jaggies.

~Mysk

WordPress.com – Very Difficult To Post

I find myself in the odd position of using a free service and yet seeing the need to complain about it.

There is the old problem of the images vanishing that still seems to exist (that or they deliberately delete images without saying that they do so), the time stamp on every new post is set to a point of over 20 years ago (one has to select the option to edit the timestamp to prevent this), and now it’s difficult to post at all.

There’s a script on WordPress.com that loads two tabs in the top right corner. The loading of these two tabs hangs constantly, and on the page for entering a post this causes the wysiwyg editor to hang. There used to be an option to disable the editor but now I can’t find that option anywhere. Either I’m half asleep or they’ve removed it. Either is quite possible.

So I find myself annoyed and wondering how this post is going to turn out.

Music Industry Goes After Lyric Sites

“The music industry is to extend its copyright war by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics… MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed. Guitar licks and song scores are widely available on the internet but are ‘completely illegal’, he told the BBC.”

The only thing that I can think to say at the moment is a very uncivilized response. Then again, perhaps an uncivilized organization does in fact deserve an uncivilized response.

Fuck them.

read more | digg story

Fitness Journal – Alternative Work Out

I just found an alternative to jumping rope that I can do inside.  It likely can’t be used as a regular replacement but it’s going to be much better than doing nothing but push ups, sit ups and squats.  It’s very similar to jumping jacks only I don’t wave my arms up and down as I have no room to do that.  Instead, I move the legs in and out while working my arms in a running movement (forward and back).

I’ll need to be careful to not twist my ankle.  I came close to doing that twice due to the uneven nature of the floor at the spot that I tried this.

The   codes are curtesy of WordPress.com’s very sluggish response over the last few days. I was typing this entry by hand and had it nearly finished before the blog site finally responded.  Hah.