A Roadie!

Check out this trailer for Brutal Legend :) Oh, and this one for Street Fighter IV! And how about the new Bionic Commando? Looks pretty spiffy to me!

Finished Episode Two, had a lot of fun, can't wait for Episode Three... I really hope they're a little quicker getting that one out.

Unreal Tournament 3 feels like another Unreal Tournament game, and that's not a bad thing! Very pretty, and I'm sure there're all kinds of nuances 'n such that the hardcore fans are digging... But I'm too much of a casual fan to get into any of that here.

In a wonderful display of human error, I accidentally deleted a bunch of pictures from my recent trip to Iceland (luckily I'd already uploaded the best of that bunch to online photo albums), as well as a bunch of saved games. Since I don't really feel like starting Need For Speed Most Wanted all over again, this seemed like a good opportunity to move on to Carbon. It's been fun so far, but I think I like Most Wanted better.

I also started a season in NHL 08, and my Leafs are 4-1-0-1; it would seem my suspicions of rubber-band gameplay were incorrect.

Ubuntu 7.10 is out. I grabbed it before the rush, early this morning, and the Compiz effects are pretty nifty, though they're not perfect (on my Radeon 8500, anyway; fast 'n smooth, but a few artifacts in the corners now and again). The only gripe I have with it is with the initial rush on repositories; simple package downloads like Flash are taking ages or outright failing. Perhaps that's just local to the Canadian servers, but still...

Finally, two recent service jobs I took... The first involved a malfunctioning laptop. The girl just bought a new one, but kept trying to boot-up the old one. Turns out her hard drive was failing, and I can't imagine her tinkering was prolonging its life any. I was able to get her most important data backed-up, but it involved going through folder by folder. Fun times, let me tell you! The second involved integrating a new tower into a home network. This addition involved mixing parts between four computers to make the best possible combinations. I sat down with the guy and made a list of things to do, so once we got that settled, things seemed okay. I ended-up taking two towers (that he'd pieced together) back with me to perform a couple of clean Windows XP installations. One, a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 B, went pretty smoothly once I got the wires out of the case fan :\ The other, a 3.46GHz Celeron D 360, was a whole different story. The Windows installation kept crashing while configuring the network, so I pulled out the second NIC he'd installed, and that fixed that. Then Windows would crash every time I installed the video card drivers (256MB AGP8X GeForce 6200), but worked fine with the latest drivers for the integrated video. Then I realized that the SCSI card he'd installed wasn't running the SCSI BIOS after POST, and the SoundBlaster Live! Platinum wasn't detecting... Upon closer inspection, he had not properly seated ANY of the four add-in cards he'd installed in the system! So much wasted time, but all is working well now.

Oh, and the 'safely remove' system tray issue is back on my Vista machine... Grrr...