Time to stop venting about games for a bit, and update the faithful (WOW did that come off sounding pretentious... and so does using the word "pretentious," come to think about it...) AAAHHHH spiralling off-topic... sorry.
Since last week, the weather has turned absolutely brutal around here: several very severe thunderstorms have rolled through, and made a thorough hash of the local power grid. Tonight, for example, we had a brown-out that almost wiped out our stereo, and shut down our desktop PC. Thankfully, no permanenet damage was done, but it's driving me a little loopy trying to keep up with events from my laptop in school while I'm supposed to be working/tutoring/ etc.
Speaking of tutoring: things are going well there. I have several regulars who have been begging me for help on VB and Calculus. The former, I'm starting to refresh, but Calc... it's there, but it's not there if you get my meaning. The light's starting to flicker, but until it starts blazing, I'll keep sweating.
On the game front, I've picked up Diablo 2. Graphically, it's a little ugly: if the sprites were any grainier, I could make bread from them :) . Gameplay-wise, it's harrowing... especially starting out. Everything is coming at you from every direction, trying to kill you... and of course, I pick the weakest character melee-wise (Necromancer), so it's hammering me even worse... until I realized, "Hey! I can use the skeletons as meat-shields (yeah, I know: bones don't have meat) and save my own skin!" Things have smoothed out a lot since then.
Tech news: I've been impressed with Vista for some time now. It's been very stable and secure, and it does look nice. One problem I've had was performance; even with minimal settings, everything was a bit laggy. No more!!! At the local BestBuy, there was a sale on laptop DDR2: 1GB for $45. Naturallly, I dove on it (the cheapest I'd seen to that point was ~$100 for 1GB... and that was the slow RAM), and now, I have 3X the memory. HAMMER HAPPY!
(One quick side note: if you ever get Vista... rephrase, any Microsoft OS has this problem... turn off any screensavers. For some reason, they do not release the memory they use, and clog system resources. I watched my memory usage go from 40% to almost 90% when the screensaver kicked on, and it stayed there until I memory-defragged it back.
Short version: screensaver = memory leak. Memory leak bad. :lol: )
Sanity has left the WH40K forum. It's somehow made it's way to the 40K Union. Poor thing ;) .
On a darker note: the one person who has been tracking me since my first blog seems to have gone *poof*. I have no idea why... I have no idea for how long... all I know is I miss the crazy Romanian with the semi-broken English (which, by the way, isn't as bad as some of the English-speaking posters I've seen). If anyone knows just what happened, please clue me in; if some moderator is lurking around and sees this blog, FREE TEKMET! (I always wanted to shout that.... :lol)