Of Sickness And Service Packs

I got sick last week... Like, debilitating, bed-ridden, sweating, hallucinating, sleepless nights sick. I missed a week of work, a show that my band was booked to play downtown, and the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

Well, once I was up to the task of moving my body and concentrating on something for more than five minutes at a time, I downloaded the SP1 redistributable package from Microsoft, made my back-ups, wiped the C: drive, and started fresh. Zero problems, runs great... I don't actually notice much of a difference from before. My FireWire Solo still has issues coming out of S3 mode, but that's it; otherwise, I've had a fantastic Vista experience, even since my days with the betas and release candidates.

Creativity

As if their history of questionable product support and false advertising wasn't enough, Creative Labs presented customers with this in the wake of Windows Vista.

Yes, that's old news, but I was reminded of it all when I went to format my Windows 98 SE machine. The CT4830 (Sound Blaster Live!) that I had been using in the previous (ancient) installation on that machine had worked just fine. After the re-installation, however, it would detect as a "PCI Early VGA Device"... Sweet. I tried a number of different fixes without any luck, so I installed the SB0220 (Sound Blaster Live! 5.1) I had lying around... Didn't detect at all. Now, it's worth noting that those two cards are special because they're OEM products that Creative Labs refused to support for many years, even though they're based on hardware identical to their corresponding retail products... Creative has since released drivers for these products, but I couldn't get them to recognize either card in my old Pentium II system. So I popped in my ISA Sound Blaster 16 (from my old Digital 486 DX2 machine), and it worked like a charm :)

In my frustration, I've removed the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS from my main system, opting to use my FireWire Solo exclusively as that system's sound card.

I'm still here...

New job's been keeping me busy remedying Windows SBS 2003 and Exchange Server issues, recovering accidentally deleted databases, resurrecting computers that run proprietary climate control software, establishing testbeds for web development, upgrading server hardware (new Ultra320 SCSI RAID arrays!), and so on... Good times :)

Anyway, I accidentally killed my NHL 08 season and my back-ups weren't working, but I'm gonna use that as an excuse to play with all the mods out there; new rosters, jerseys, etc...

Before I go, I should mention that I really dig Patapon, and God Of War: Chains Of Olympus is awfully impressive.