gushue.net

I think it might finally be time to get an Xbox soon. The Xecuter 3 is out, or just about out. It’s solderless, works with the newer 1.6 versions of the Xbox, and has a nifty looking front control panel thing with a LCD and stuff. After taxes and discounts and stuff, it would end up costing me about $325 CAD for the system with a couple of games and the modchip. Not too bad. Later on I could always add a decent size hard drive.

I don’t really care about most of the games for the Xbox, except maybe Jade Empire. Mostly I just want to use it for emulation and watching DivX/XviD/etc stuff. I’m not even as concerned about playing copied games. If a game is good, I don’t mind buying it.

I’d probably have to rearrange things slightly on my home theatre system and television, so I could use the digital audio and S-video inputs for it. But that shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Haven’t had much to update about lately. School is going well. Work is going well. Banks and bills are being annoying for various reasons. The weather is getting colder. Weblog comment spam is getting worse and sucks more than ever. And I want to redesign gushue.net but I’m just not in the mood to do it.

I finally got myself a proper wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop (which reminds me, I need to leave feedback for that on eBay), which works just fine in Linux without ndiswrapper fuckery. Which is nice and all, but I don’t want to have to deal with it. It’s much nicer to just enable a module in the kernel, and have it work. Now I just have to get the onboard network port fixed before my warranty is up.

I started using Google Adsense stuff on a forum site I run, and it seems to be going well so far. Hopefully it will help with hosting costs, so I don’t have to subtly mention donations every now and then :)

Assuming I have the money in December, I think I’m going to get a BenQ FP737 17″ LCD monitor (1280×1024). It’s about $500 CAD, and has analog/digital inputs – most LCDs around that price range lack the digital input. My video card has DVI, so I might as well make use of it. It might be a big chunk of money, but the monitor is something I have to look at every day, so getting something good makes a difference.

After that, I can think about upgrading at least my CPU, and probably increase my RAM to 1GB (768MB currently). And of course, lots more drive space. If I can find a XP2400+ to put in my current motherboard, I might just do that, instead of building a whole new system – as much as I’d like to.

My current EQ subscription expires in a few days, but I think I’ll go play something else instead. I’m looking forward to some of the things in EQ2, but EQ isn’t as fun when there aren’t as many random people to play with. A lot of what I see are level 65 (and now 70, I guess) characters, who have been playing for years. That’s what I get for trying it so late, I guess. Maybe EQ2 will be better if I start playing it earlier after release.

So many games, so little time to play them.

After I started my holidays, I started up my Everquest account again, since I knew I’d have lots of free time. I ended up getting into a (new) guild and starting a new character. It’s been fun. I was considering getting one of the expansions I don’t have but I think I’ll hold off on that, because I’ll probably get Everquest II when it’s out. My system is at the lower end of the requirements, but hopefully it’ll still run ok at lower settings. I want to upgrade soon anyway. Although, one of the first things I have to get is a new monitor, since my 17″ CRT died this week.

But instead of playing EQ tonight, I’ve been downloading the World of Warcraft Stress Test Beta. It’s pretty big, 2271mb. Right now I have about 1170mb download, just over half done :) I doubt I’d buy this game when it’s out, but it won’t hurt to play around with it while I can for free. EQ2 sounds more promising to me, especially with the 5+ years the EQ team has behind them already.

And then there are the number of games I have for computer and various consoles that I want to play. There just isn’t enough time, even if I could quit my job and play games 24 hours a day!

Oops, got distracted by crazy shit happening over in Russia shown live on CNN.