All posts by Mike

New Sound Card

General

After being tipped off to an awesome deal on a Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card, I had quite the interesting experience actually installing the thing in my computer. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the drivers and helper applications to install completely; it would get about 75% of the way through and either freeze completely or cause one of those magical BSODs that, until now, I had never experienced on this computer.

As it turns out (and they recommend in the documentation), a BIOS update fixed the issue completely. I installed a beta version of the BIOS since that was the newest version available, created sometime in 2005. Updating the BIOS is always something of a trying time, because one gets quite anxious fiddling with the very brains of the machine. Luckily there were no problems updating and things are just as stable as they were before, only now I have an awesome sound card as well.

Major Revisions

Web Design

As I was doing some reading online about SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, it caused me to wonder about the state of my pet project and whether it could stand up to such attacks. As I let people know more than a year ago that I would be doing a major overhaul of my site, I pretty much abandoned the current version of the site that is running in a beta state (since almost two years ago now) and pressed forward with the new revision.

Continue reading Major Revisions →

Portal and TF2

Gaming, Half-Life

Yes, I am horribly, horribly late with this.

Those who launch their Steam client more than once a year will notice that Valve has put some downloadable trailers up for Portal and Team Fortress 2, which are scheduled to be released by the end of this year, barring any delays. (We shall see!)

I was going to be getting Half-Life 2: Episode Two anyway because Episode One was so awesome, but now it has only strengthened my resolve 🙂

Me Versus RPGs

Gaming

So, I picked up a copy of Neverwinter Nights this past weekend for a LAN party. I have never played a true RPG before in my life, so it was all a new experience for me.

How was it?

Well, we only played a multiplayer game (with Archwyrm acting as the “Dungeon Master”), so I can’t comment on the game as a whole yet, but it had its moments. There was an awful lot of standing around, which kind of got old after a while. The action parts were decent, when we weren’t battling invincible zombies or getting absolutely slaughtered as we turn a corner. I also have major problems with figuring out how to manage my character, so maybe I’ll spend some time learning how the game actually works before we try this a second time.