Keepin' busy...

Made little more progress in Jak 3, stuck on annoying boss battle in Ratchet & Clank on PSP (it's one thing to make a battle hard, it's another to make you redo the five minutes of mindless glorified mini-games that lead up to the actual battle each time you die), unlocked some of the co-op-only songs in Guitar Hero III (Sabotage! Reptilia!), am now trudging through Crysis (gameplay is so monotonous! Time-based events with no timer are annoying!), the "Title Update" for Gears Of War made no discernible difference in terms of performance on my PC (the sporadic chunkiness is there regardless of visual settings), I'm having some good mindless fun with TimeShift (it's not a bad game, just a stupid one; still fun) and I lost another game on "Medium" in NHL08... This time was against Nashville, and Jason Arnott scored both goals (the second one coming in OT). Like the previous loss to NY, only star players did anything for the other team, and their goaltender was fantastic (Chris Mason saved 47 of 48!?)... I'm assuming some player stats are randomly decided by a dice roll of sorts before each game?

Picked-up a DFI NFII Ultra Infinity off craigslist to replace the dead ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. I paid a little too much for it ($75 CDN; I was hoping for around $50), but they seem to be hard to find and going fast when they do pop up. Anyway, I got it home and discovered that the integrated ethernet controller doesn't work and that it's super fickle about RAM configurations (so it's running 1GB instead of 1.5GB). Still, it seems to be solid, and I've got everything up and running well. During the rebuild, however, I discovered that the ASUS board also took out my GeForce 6600 GT... Luckily, BFG offers a lifetime warranty :) Got an RMA number over the phone from a very helpful tech, and we'll see what they send back. Here's the real kicker though... Earlier today, I realized that the computer I built for my mom is running an Athlon XP 2200+ on an MSI K7N2 Delta-L motherboard... Yeah, I had a 400MHz FSB-supporting nForce2-based board at my disposal the whole time :\ Still, it would've meant either getting her a replacement board that likely would've run around $50 anyway, or doing a lot of work to transfer her stuff to the 2.4GHz P4 (which I am now planning to sell) that I was replacing with the Athlon 3200+ system.

I know I had something else to say here, but it escapes me for the time being, and I have stuff to do...