11/04/06

21/01/2005: 6:54pm

zomg! I am now officially on holiday for 2 weeks.

Due to the nature of 56k modems, there will be NO UPDATES FOR 2 WEEKS.

Feel free to explore the movies. I wholeheartedly recommend 777 crash. Which shows a 777 airplane crashing into a building!!!

Today's Random Picture: My New Logitech Mouse!

Deep Space Nine is awesome. Go and buy the DVDs and watch all the episodes RIGHT NOW!!!

Added a new recipe: Meatballs and Spaghetti!

I finished the first 15 missions of Ground Control, now it is on to the Order missions. I am playing the game on easy as I don't really feel like a challenge...

Today's Random Picture: My Fleet of Logitech mice. Another one should be arriving tomorrow!

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Season 2: Episode: The Maquis

This two-part episode was brilliant. The tension and action was up there with the very best episodes of all the Star Trek series.

Tonight I will be watching the final 2 episodes of DS9: Season 2.

Today felt like summer! Quite hot and nice sunshine.

I hate fax machines. Why? You never know if the fax has gone through properly, or if the person at the other end actually received it. Then you have to phone them up to see if they received it which equals twice as much work and a waste of my time.

I started playing Ground Control but unfortunately it's maximum res is 1024x768, and the native res of my Dell 20" LCD monitor (2001FP) is 1600x1200. So it doesn't look quite as sharp as it should. Another problem is that when I extend the view distance, the game becomes choppy. Only at the default setting, or slightly past it is gameplay smooth. It must be a limitation of the engine, as my Athlon 64 3200+ and Geforce 6800 Ultra is obviously more than sufficient for a game such as Ground Control... After saying that though, the training missions were fun!

Today's Random Picture: My computer speaker's volume control! Cambridge Soundworks FPS 2000 Digital 4.1 Speakers:

Yesterday I started to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein again. Today, I finished it. It's hard to imagine how difficult I found it the first time I played it back in January 2002. I simply flew through areas I can remember taking me hours and hours to finish the first time. It was still fun this time, I hope they make a sequel. What probably also made it easier this time is that my computer did not crash every ten minutes due to overheating, as my poor old Duron 650 @ 900 used to do... Even with a desk fan blowing into the side of the case it still crashed all the time. And this time I got to play it at 1600x1200 with full AF and 2x AA (I could have turned up the AA to maximum but didn't want to for some reason.) Nvidia Distance Fog owns!!! The Flamethrower is also incredibly well done, it still looks and feels amazing. This is one game that makes excellent use of the Quake 3 Arena engine.

Here is how you beat the boss in RTCW:

1) Kill all creatures except the main boss with the flamethrower. (Skeletons/Witch woman)

2) Shoot at the boss with the Venom gun, and when it overheats shoot him with the rocket launcher gun. Rinse and repeat! Circle strafing around him works well.

I have decided to play through a bunch of old games. Some for the second time, and some because I always wanted to play them but didn't and now they cost next to nothing.

These include: XIII, Outcast, Baldur's Gate 2, Mafia, Starcraft and Brood War (I got stuck half way through the Zerg campaign), Age of Empires 2 (I never really liked it for some reason - until this week), Ground Control, Star Trek Voyager Elite Force Expansion (I want to finish watching the Voyager TV series first though). And some games that I want to replay are: Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast, Unreal, Half-Life, Max Payne, Elite Force 2, Deus Ex 1 + 2, and a bunch of others I will remember in due course!

I also watched the SpongeBob Squarepants movie yesterday. It was quite funny, although I would have liked to have seen Realistic Fish Head present the news... An interesting thing is that I never checked my watch during the movie to see how long there was to go...unlike movies like Chronicles of Riddick which are pathetically boring...

Today's Random Picture: Some speakers I want - but which won't fit in my room. Is Wharfdale a good brand of speaker?:

I may have been wrong about the Enermax PSU failing (see two news events down: 03/01/2005). When I received my new Antec TruePower 550w PSU today I discovered the same white stuff all over the brass coloured things inside the PSU:

I will install it in a few minutes. Hopefully it will work well! Now I have no idea why the Enermax PSU failed, but then I'm not an electrical engineer ;)

AOE 2 rocks. I played it again last night. I thought I played a lot better, but I definitely need some more practice, as I still have no real idea how to form a decent army. Last night I just used a ton of War Elephants and Cavalry.

Today's Random Picture: Driving towards Lake Rotoma, New Zealand:

I fired up Age of Empires 2 last night. I have always hated AOE 2, but this time I really enjoyed it. Just a Random Map, all default settings. I'm going to have to play some more AOE 2 I think...

Today's Random Picture: A Plane that just flew over my house!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ALL OF US AT scottg26.com!

How eventful was your New Year's Eve? I had one and a half glasses of wine (Brut) and went to sleep at 10:30pm!

My Enermax 550w PSU died the other day, due to an exploding capacitor. I am thankful that it did not take the rest of my computer with it. I am currently running on auxiliary power only: a 400w generic PSU from my 3dfx box. Which actually has better amps on all the rails than my old 420w Thermaltake PSU did...

Added some new pictures of Goats.

Added Photos of the House from December 2004.

Updated the Premier Photos.

Today's Random Picture: A house of cards!