Been field testing new equipment around Austin lately, so check me out. Latest update: Amy Sage and Mike Boyd of Fiesta Explosion, covering “Game of Love” by Santana. Taken with a Flip Ultra 30-minute model, uploaded with my MSI Wind U123.

Most of the people on my IM list know that I have two working desktop computers now, after two months with just one in pieces and a laptop that was pulling total duty. What follows sounds so ridiculously cliche that I don’t even recognize myself for writing about it, but I’m surprised about something and hope someone reading this can offer some advice.

Continue reading Drive bay bezel springs…

I’m taking next week off, starting Sunday. Got lots of stuff to do, including actually learning how to make mods in NeverWinter Nights, after everyone for some reason is all-fired ready to abandon it for NWN2. It’s for class, so I kind of have to. My mod is sort-of titled “I Hate Elves” with the subtitle, “The Good-Looking Corpse.” This is what I come up with when I’m not answerable to anyone and my teacher used to work on content design for latter-era Ultimas and thinks I’m funny.

Well, she does.

Anyone on my IM list will know that I’m still alive and foisting links on people, so I’m out of habit with posting them here — and I still haven’t got around to rebuilding my permanent list of links. I only just noticed Sara Jensen has a blog. She got married, to Damion Schubert of all people, and posted pictures, mostly of Damion eating. She posted two photos from her actual wedding, and you can see me in both of them, which is really freaking weird.

Speaking of Damion, he beat me to posting about the latest PS3 commercial featuring an inexplicably creepy and apparently possessed toy baby, which is apparently the target market for Sony’s new, overpriced game console. Destructoid, which might just be my new favorite game commentary site, posted the video (which ran during the World Series, woo) and offered this quip which Brian said was much better than the video:

While their stab at pretension might have 15-year-old philosophers abandoning their Donnie Darko DVDs and Mars Volta albums in a mad rush to explain to the girl down the street how “deep” and “meta” these ads are, the rest of the world is busy readying our pitchforks and vials of holy water to stem the tide of Demon Babies Sony is bound to launch upon the world with their PS3 system.

He might be right about that.

Was reading the Wired interview that Xeni Jardin did was Pervert No. 1, Larry Flynt, and came across the following wisdom from Larry:

WN: What are your thoughts on the current state of civil liberties and individual rights in the United States?

Flynt: Benjamin Franklin once said that those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither. I think Bush and Ashcroft could learn a lot by taking a page from Ben Franklin’s book. I just can’t believe that our lawmakers actually voted for it (the Patriot Act). We basically gave away all of our civil liberties.

A lot of Americans think, “I’m not Arab, so it doesn’t affect me.” But the Patriot Act has no color barriers. They just used part of the Patriot Act to bust a strip club owner in Las Vegas. The law is on the books, and you don’t need a judge’s authority to do wiretaps, and you don’t have to provide a person you arrest with an attorney, and the books you check out of a library can be placed in question, and attorney-client conversations can be monitored. Ashcroft went to Capitol Hill and intimidated lawmakers into passing this by effectively saying “Blood will be on your hands if you don’t pass it.”

The one good thing about the Patriot Act is that it includes a sunset clause — it’s supposed to go away at the end of 2004. I don’t think they’ll find the support to renew it now.

Did anyone here know that? I didn’t. Best news I’ve heard in a while. Guess it’s another reason America has needed Larry Flynt more than most of us will ever realize. Thanks, Larry.

IOL reports that a Taiwanese man committed suicide “by burning charcoal in his bedroom” earlier this week after his real-life girlfriend fell in love with the alter-ego he created for himself over e-mail, to test if she “really loved him.”

She dumped him for “Mr. J.” So he killed himself.

Though the release can still be found on many gamer/videophile sites, the Catalyst 3.3 driver package for ATI Radeon cards, as leaked by a third-party vendor (coughDellcough) Rage3D reports that ATI is canning 3.3’s official release in favor of the next version. Says an ATI dev d00d:

CATALYST 3.3 has been cancelled and will not be posted. We will jump over to CATALYST 3.4 this time and the time frame we are looking at right now is May 12th-15th (now do NOT hold me to that) Its not a promise just that is what the schedules are looking like at the current time. These drivers are currently in the hands of our beta testers and going through the final run through. If all goes well you guys will get them in the time frame I mentioned above and you will be very happy with them. They will have performance boosts across the boards, some bug fixes, some new features, and of course the best image quality in the business!

Too bad for Radeon-using Shadowbane fans, who are still languishing with 3.1 (3.2 doesn’t like SB for some reason, at least on some Radeons.) According to Surredeth, lovingly linked by Wolfpack QA manager Kaeric Gath, the 3.3 release works just fine with Shadowbane…

…ah, my download’s done. Installing.