I just found a really nice open-source effort - www.americasarmy.com. This is a website of the US Army - they developed a first-person game based on the Unreal engine that includes many very realistic missions and physics models, for use in training and introducing the public to the Army. Great concept!

I have downloaded it and hope to install it soon. Be warned, its a 260mb download. You can also order it on CD with bonus missions for about $5 or $6.
posted by MikeM at 4:01 PM    

 
Rain! First time in a long while that we have some substantial rain without it being all at once. A long slow rainy period is just what we need.

GTA3 is far deeper than I thought - you can explore various areas and find secret places and items - very nice. A lot of work went into this game. I just went through a heavy downpour on a beach, and watched the storm move offshore as a system, complete with cloud effects and sunset lighting. Awesome.
posted by MikeM at 9:06 AM    

 
Yesterday was fun - has anyone else seen Norton Anti-Virus corrupt itself to the point where a full uninstall/reinstall fails? The online tech support points to a registry problem, but it all looks fine. I'm building a spare system to replace the flaky one with.



"Error: 1606 Could not access network location \Symantec\Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5"



Another problem with the same box is that it takes 30-45 sec to switch menus in the pulldown menus, as well as 1 min or more to open an email when an attachment is present. PST is 45mb, archived/compacted from 210mb originally. I also ran the PST 'fix' util from MS.
posted by MikeM at 9:02 AM    

 
Had a nice relaxing weekend playing in the pool and variously reading, watching TV, and playing GTA3 and MW4. Called my family and caught up on all the goings-on down south, and everyone is generally healthy and happy.

At work, the new backup routine is working fine except for a password glitch in the NT client. Looks like somehow it 'forgot' who I was right in the middle of making a backup and it stopped allowing the backup agent access to the files. Hmmm. Ah well, only one server, and I'll figure it out.
EDIT: All it took was for me to manually stop and restart the BrightStorEB NT Agent on the NT server. This has happened twice so far.
posted by MikeM at 1:37 PM    

 
BrightStor Update: I ditched all of the automated backup rotations and such, and created new custom jobs for all of the servers, alternating tape groups to get dual backup tapes per server. This has so far worked, and allows for redundancy in that two separate drives and tapes will have full backups of each server in the job set.

Yesterday was Dentist Day, a simple cleaning and filling 'one little cavity'. Unfortunately I seem to have a mild allergy to novacaine... Once the numbness wears off, I am so wiped out and exhausted - for about 24 hrs I have no energy and staying awake is tough. Should be OK tomorrow. This happened the last few times I had any work done, so I kinda expected it.

I'm also trying to cut back my caffeine intake to around 200-300mg per day. This means 2x 20 oz Mt Dews and maybe 2x 12oz, and none after 6pm if possible. So far I am sleeping better after only a few days of this - no more light sleeper I! And the days of insomnia til 2am are gone, apparently.
posted by MikeM at 2:44 PM    

 
On the work front, BrightStorEB (our backup software, from Cheyenne) has once again corrupted itself to the point where I have to re-install the database. This is a biweekly event, so I have learned how to reinstall rather quickly - 3-4 hrs usually. BrightStor is without a doubt the most hacked-together untested, unstable, unreliable piece of backup software I have ever had the misfortune of using.
Unfortunately it is also the only one we have, and the only one that supports the DAT library we use. Until that can be replaced I will just have to make do.
posted by MikeM at 11:08 AM    

 
Patty came home Saturday night! She was tired but overall had a great time. Sunday was a day of rest and playing in the pool, long naps and relaxation.

Most of the day Saturday I was watching movies - Friday I watched Nightmare on Elm St 1-4, and Sat I watched 5-7 and the 'special' DVD extra. Not bad at all!

I believe that the best Hellraiser was the 5th and last one, and the best Nightmare on Elm St was the 7th and last one. For both movies the plot was good, as was the acting and effects. Subtlety is not the forte of most horror movies, but the last installment of the two series were the best ones!
posted by MikeM at 1:46 PM    

 
Tomorrow's scheduled AD&D 3rd Ed game has been postponed until next week - this means that I will most likely spend Saturday either playing GTA3 or MW4, interspersed with 'Nightmare on Elm Street' movies.
posted by MikeM at 9:18 AM    

 
Patty went snorkeling and loved it, and went on several other shore excursions as well! She is a bit sunburned but feeling good. She comes home Saturday night, and the puppies and I miss her terribly. You think you would enjoy being a bachelor for a week until it strikes home that you are alone in the house and you cannot even hear the voice of the one you love! (No cell service on cruise ships...)

I installed Half-Life on my system, patched to 1.1.1.0 , figured out a few problems and have it working well. EXCEPT that in multiplayer I have no sound. Bother. I'm probably gonna skip the multiplayer aspect of Half-Life anyway, because out of 2500 servers on the WON network, NONE were playing Half-Life original - all were playing alternate versions or later mods, like Code Blue or Counter-Strike. Ah well.

It turns out that by switching video modes worked fine to fix the problem I was having where the menu was a blank screen if I accessed it from a game, and the sound problem in multiplayer went away when I disabled one of the advanced sound modes, so all is good. I still get dizzy playing it though. I dropped it to 1024x768 so perhaps that will be better.
posted by MikeM at 9:16 AM    

 
Last night after work I just couldn't bring myself to go online, I just wanted to relax a bit, so I grabbed a box of Corn Pops and vegetated on the sofa - both puppies on the sofa with me, of course (I had food!). Watched Hellraiser 2 and 3. I'm going to try to watch 4 and maybe 5 tonight, but I still have some installs to do on the computer - Half Life and Unreal Tournament, now that I have the hardware to run it! I also have a bunch of old 5.25" floppy diskettes that I want to archive onto the system somewhere, now that the drive is once more working. Anyone want about 50 or so 5.25" 1.2mb floppies? Many registered games and such included. Doom, 688, LodeRunner, others.
EDIT : They turned out to be 360k floppies. Sheesh!
posted by MikeM at 11:13 AM    

 
Seen the new remake of "Ocean's Eleven"? Remember that EMP bomb they set off to kill the power? Then you have to read this article on the real-world device!
posted by MikeM at 3:44 PM    

 
More Patty-Mail! She is enjoying herself but misses the puppies and I quite a lot. She mentioned an Art Auction and a planned shopping trip to St. John/St. Thomas.

I decided today to reinstall Half-Life and replay it all - with the latest 1.1.1.0 update patch coming in at just under 85mb, that is one massive update! I want to experience it with the true surround sound of my Inspire 5.1 speakers and Audigy sound card! I'll be updating my computer page tonight, most likely. The second project - assembling all the left over parts into a second computer and installing Red Hat 7.3 on it - is on the back burner until I get interested again. All the parts are back in the guest room closet.
posted by MikeM at 1:40 PM    

 
I have been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 to the point of headache and nausea, plus malnutrition and dehydration. This game should be banned simply because it is addictive. For all you other GTA3 addicts out there - the HUMVEE is the car. It rocks! I won the race with it, plus have used it to succeed in several other missions! Simply tooooo good!

I got email from Patty today! She is enjoying herself on the ship, she says she went to a vegas-style show, a nature walk in the Bahamas, and watched Monsters, Inc. She says she has a spa appt later on tonight, and hopes to be spending a lot of time in the spa over the next week, just pampering herself and relaxing.

Well, I must go eat - and take a computer break - maybe I'll catch a DVD. Hellraiser 2-5 are still waiting to be watched...
posted by MikeM at 6:41 PM    

 
Wow! This morning I got home from the airport at around 6:30 am and began backing up my computer - onto dvd-ram, a separate partition on the HD I kept in the unit, and a separate drive for safety's sake. At around 11am, I tore apart the computer, stripping out all of the scsi cabling, 2940W adapter, 2 hard drives, dvd-ram unit, Syquest SyJet drive, etc. I them reconfigured the remaining parts, added the new GeForce4 Ti 4600 card, the new Toshiba W2002 dvd-ram, the new Creative Audigy Gamer sound card, the new USB 2.0 4-port PCI card, and some spiffy rounded IDE/Floppy cables.

Booted it, floppy failure. Put the old flat cable back in and it booted fine. Installed Windows 2000...

I now have it at about 90% completed - Outlook with all my email still there, Patty's account is configured as well, so now it is easier to get her email than before. The new Creative 5.1 inspire 5300 speakers simply ROCK. I am now reinstalling all of the little programs, but I think I'll take a break and put MechWarrior 4 on it... :) See you later!
posted by MikeM at 10:40 PM    

 
Well, Patty is packed and ready to go! We have to have her at the airport at 4am, that means a very early bedtime tonight. I hope to be able to post some of her emails here, we shall see.

I just received (from ebay) a copy of Grand Theft Auto 3 for the PC. I expect to have a lot of fun with it this week once I finish rebuilding and reinstalling my computer! I will likely be out of touch over the weekend due to the rebuild, but hope to be back online asap!
posted by MikeM at 10:27 AM    

 
I just discovered a nice program called CygWin that in effect installs a linux/unix emulator on a Windows computer. This allows you to open a true linux/unix command window from your windows desktop, and use linux/unix tools and applications, including the X-windows gui! I haven't had th time to fully explore what it provides, but I will be exploring it for the next week or so!

To install it, expect to spend some time online, downloading. First, at the website for cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com), download the setup.exe program to a folder where you want to put the install files. I used C:\temp\cygwin for this. Then you run the setup.exe program - choose install from the internet, then tell it where to put the installed files - maybe C:\cygwin, it then asks where to put the files it downloads - this is a temp folder, so put it in c:\temp\cygwin again.

Then select an ftp source from the list it provides, hopefully you will find one that works. Once the list of packages comes up, if you click on the 'default' at the very top, all of them will change to 'install' - note that this installs EVERYTHING, and will download about 110mb to create a 250mb installation. Takes time and storage space!

But once it finishes, you will have a very nice linux shell!
posted by MikeM at 8:59 AM    

 
We are gearing up for the cruise - Patty is going on a cruise with a friend from college! She leaves this Saturday, and we are both hoping that the pain from the injuries suffered in the car accident several months ago doesn't cause any problems for her. She is going to therapy, and hopefully will be fine for the cruise.

This will have me at home with the puppies for a week, at which time I will take the opportunity to tear apart my computer system and rebuild it with all my new components, as well as installing Windows 2000 Professional on it.

I will also likely take this chance to watch all the DVDs I have recently acquired - such as the 8-DVD boxed set of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' and all 5 of the 'Hellraiser' series. :)
posted by MikeM at 9:05 AM    

 
I am still making minor changes to the template for this page, as well as the archive page. While I believe I have the monthly archive function working (after a fashion), I cannot put the links on this main page due to the way Geocities tinkers with the website before displaying it.

As a result, I have decided to manually insert the archives link for each month as opposed to having to link to a separate archives index page.
posted by MikeM at 10:24 AM