04/26/2000
I'm not going to go off on video games today. The main reason being that I haven't checked the latest gaming news since Friday. Not that there could be anything worth ranting about... Not that ranting about anything is worth it.
But, what then, will I go off on? Nothing in particular. I don't really have much to say. But something is urging me to write, I just don't know what yet.
I'll bore you and tell you about my weekend. I spent the weekend with my brother, Jesse, his wife, Roxanne and their kid (my nephew), Liam.
I went down there 'cos they had just recieved their DSL modem. So I said 'Bastard! I'm coming over!'. And that, folks, is exactly what I did.
I'll warn you now though, this is longer than I expected it to be. If you read this, watch out for massive spelling and grammatical errors.... And any other kind of error you can associate with writing. I'm too damn tired to write it and I'm too damn tired to go through and edit it.
Day 1:
Friday night I set off to their house (along with my mom and sister, Sarah). Only after about a half-hour I realized I that I forgot to bring my AC adapter for my speakers with me. Doh! Working on a computer with no sound is like.... Working on a computer with no sound!
Never fear though, we're heading to the mall anyway, I'll just pick up some headphones or something. We get to the mall, I'm gonna stay in the car 'cos I don't feel safe leaving my computer alone, so my mom and sister go in, I ask them to pick up a reservation for a game I forgot the previous day. That and some canned air. They go in and come right back out. Ten minutes after we leave the mall, I realize I didn't ask them to pick me up the headphones... Ahg! Oh well, my mom needs to stop by Staples anyway.
So, we go into Staples, I look around a bit, I can't seem to find where they keep their headphones/speakers/whatever. So an employee comes up and ask's if I need help. I ask him about headphones and he walks me to the area that they're kept. They're out of stock. DAMMIT!
After this my mom stops by In-n-Out. So I get some food... We're off. About 30 minutes away from our final destination.
We pull up, Liam is staring outside... We barge into their house, I eventually get all the crap I brought with me into the house. I'm still working on finishing my food. But, Jesse and Roxanne planned on going to Arby's. I was in the mood for Arby's, but I my stomache was full. After awhile we all head out to Arby's. But first Jess and Roxanne need to get something at the store. On the way me and Jesse our wondering when we'll get the CAT 5 cable and extra LAN card we need (Software ETC. - the store Jess works at, was all out of stock, I bought the last one). We decided that he'll pick them up at Best Buy on the way home from work tommorow. But Roxanne is quick to point out that there is a Radioshack right next to Stater Bros. I figured I'd pick up some headphones at the same time. Cool, something is finally going our way.
So me an' my mom go into Radioshack (Sarah stayed in the car) to pick up the computer stuff. We walk in and this nice lady ask's us if we need any help. 'Do you carry Ethernet cards?' I ask. I get 'that look'. 'Uh, LAN cards' I ask again. 'Oh, yes.' she replies. We go over and she opens a little closet on the wall. 'We seem to be out of stock.'. Arg! So I say 'What about Catagory 5 cable? RJ-45?' She points to the cable. Behold. At least they had that. $11.99, I thought it was rather cheap (25 feet, I think. It probably IS expensive, but there was nowhere else to go right now). My mom reminds me of the headphones. So I ask, she takes us over to them... I look and they have exactly what I was looking for. $29.99. 'I've only got $20' My mom offered to give me an advance - I'd have to pay her back, but I'd get these now. 'Naw, I bet Jess has got some I could use' ... So I leave with the cable. We meet Jesse and Roxanne (don't forget Liam!) at the entrance of the store. We drive across the parking lot to Arby's. They were going to get their food to go 'All right, the sooner we go, the better, for me.' I thought to myself.
So Sarah and I sit in the car. We listened to the radio for a while, 'Who's this?' 'Who's that?' I ask on just about every song that plays. I have absolutly no knowledge of ANYONE in the music industry anymore. I listen to the same bands I was listening to five years ago. We wait... We watch. They took their food to the table. 'What the hell?!' I say. 'Looks like they're eating in.' Says Sarah. We look at each other. We were thinking the exact same thing. So we head for the door. We walk in and ask them what's up. 'They messed up. I guess they didn't hear us say we wanted it to go.' they say. 'But now that you guys are here, we might as well eat in.'. Aw crap!
I'm anxious to get home. I need to fiddle with his computer. See how long it takes me to make it un-bootable.
Finally, we get back to the house. After a while, Sarah and mom leave. Jess pulls out his DSL modem. I look at the box, look at him 'You bastard. You lucky bastard.' I say. He rips it out. I look in awe at it. 'I've only seen a few things as beautiful as this!' I thought.
Everything else draws a blank. I can't remember what we did up until the time we set the modem up.
We open our computer's up. Swap our RAM. We wanted to see if his generic RAM (I've got Crucial) was the reason his computer crashes so much (remember, he's got an Athlon, there have been reports of non-name brand memory causing problems.). We swap. It's been a while sense the last time I looked at the insides of his PC. I look and the first thing you notice is his brick for a processor (as Dustin would say)... My computer is open at the same time. Right next to his. To me, this felt like standing next to one of those guys that you see on the Worlds Strongest Man competitions. I felt like a lost and cold little school girl.
We plug his computer in and all, press the power button.... It loads... ... ... ... Windows has loaded. It wants drivers for the LAN card. We stick the first disk in. ...It goes until about 10%, now it wants the WIN98 CD. We stick that in... It needs to restart. 'Wha?? There're two disk's here. What the hell?'. Windows loads back up, everything seems to be running correctly. We check out the System Properties -> Device Manager. The card is there and appears to be working. But everyone knows it can say that and still be screwed up. So now, we stick in the GTE CD, the menu comes up. It installs the necessary software. It restarts... We open up Internet Explorer... Type in a URL... ... ... 'Host cannot be reached' The little grey box with the red x in it says. 'Aww...FUCK!' I say. Everything appeared to be in working order. The ethernet card had it's 'Link' light on... Modem was working correctly... We didn't want to call tech support. We tried a few other things... Jesse finally decides to call. By this time, it's 2:30am. It's 24-7 tech support, so we knew there was someone there waiting for us to call.
So he calls, after awhile he starts talking to the guy. Trying out all these different things. But, the one magical word the guy said was 'winipcfg'. 'Oh! How the hell could I forget THAT?!' ...So he types it into the run dialog. Boom! He gets an error. That right there seems to show that the Ethernet cards drivers are messed up. The guy suggests reinstalling them. That's it. We're on our own again. We knew something went wrong with the original install. So we tried a few different ways of installation. After awhile, Windows decided to do something slightly different with them (ask's for the first disk when it's done with the WIN98 CD). We reset and it WORKS! Woo! Finally!
The first address Jess typed in was the Counter-Strike homepage. Of course. 'Hurry! Go download it! I wanna see how fast this thing goes!' I said. After awhile he gets to the download page, he clicks on it. ... ... It's getting 30kb according to IE5 (everyone knows that isn't completely accurate). It was going faster than I had ever seen before. The download is done in a very short amount of time.
After a few more quick downloads, we go to the Windows update and get latest Windows patches. After adding about one hundred MB of crap onto his hard drive, we decide to try out Counter-Strike. ... He selects a server (that pinged around 60). It seemed like less than 10 seconds before the game was up and running. I didn't notice this though... I was kind of disappointed in his ping. He was in between 80 and 90. All I had to do though was remember my average 160 to 250. I was so jealous. The game seemed to be running at 60fps, but was probably inbetween that and 40. Everything was smooth, which I don't see often 'cos of my lousy connection.
After awhile of playing, Jess needed to get to bed, he had work in the morning. So it's my turn to take over. Mwahaha!
The very first thing I did was download video of Saffire's upcoming first person shooter found at IGN64, which I didn't download because of it's size - 56MB. And I didn't want to download a shorter, 12MB one. I wanted the full thing. And I knew I would get at as soon as the DSL arrived.
It downloaded fairly quick (it hit over 80KB/second according to IE). Than I proceeded to download the latest SBLive! drivers for Jess, that's a good 26MB. I started the download and the other one didn't even seem to notice! The speed did NOT drop. I was also surfing the web peacefully. I downloaded a few DSL patches, Winamp, ICQ, AIM, all that kind of stuff. All of this downloaded in less than a half hour! So it seemed. Next time I'm over there, I'm gonna time it, but it went very quickly.
Yes, I know all this happened in a two-day period. But it was all one day to me. So if you don't like it, I can't really help it.
Day 2:
Saturday, I woke up around...11am or 12pm... I can't remember (I went to bed about 8:30am).
I can't exactly remember what I did when I woke... I know one of the first things I mentioned was how freaking cool Saffires new game looks (I than proceeded to show him).
I think I ate something at one point, I don't remember what, though.
I can't remember exactly what I did on Saturday... I can't remember if that's the day I played Action Half-Life with Inferno or not... Well, give me a hand, Inferno! Okay, yes, it was. I remember correctly now. All I can remember from this day is... Computer, computer, Macaroni and Cheese (thanks, Roxanne!), Computer, Computer... That's all that comes to mind... I suppose it's because I didn't get enough sleep. I didn't get enough sleep the day before that, too. I felt somewhat delerious at times... Well, maybe not delerious, but something. It doesn't matter though.
The whole time this is going on, Liam is running back and forth through all the rooms in the house (going from me back to Roxanne... You'd have to see him, the kids freakin' hilarious). Other than all that, this day was a mere blur to my mind... After Jess got back from work, we went out and had dinner at In-n-Out. Then, I think Jess and I were up all night messing with the computer. I also installed my Ethernet card into my PC. I had big problems, I never figured them out. Although, I may have if I were more comfortable. You would have had to seen my layout to have believed it. Picture this: A big old lazy-boy recliner as my seat, a baby toy desk (which is probably about a foot and a half tall and wide.) as my monitor stand, the computer was ontop of a two and half foot long plastic top on the floor, the mouse was on a pile of computer boxes and I had the keyboard in my lap. The main computer desk isn't a small one, but he's got four speakers on it, the computer and a nineteen inch monitor taking up most of the room.
After a awhile, I gave up on the card, 'I'll do tommorow so I can set my computer up in a more comfortable environment' I thought. I can't remember when we went to bed, but the sun had been up for a few hours....
Day 3:
Sunday was Jesse's day off work. I woke up with pancakes available for breakfast (never you mind the fact it was past lunch). It had been a while since I had had pancakes. And boy was it a treat (thanks again Roxanne!). Uhm... Great, my mind is drawing another blank. I don't think I used the computer as much Sunday, which I don't really mind, I used it the majority of the time the day before.
Later in the day, Dustin (A friend) a came on over. So we showed him the powed of DSL (He doesn't have broadband Internet access, either). So yeah, he was as jealous as I was. I think Dustin and Jess used the computer most of the time (Counter-Strike). Eventually, something brought up food, I can't remember exactly how, but it came up. So we ordered pizza. After a long while, Jesse and Dustin both were done with the computer and we decided to watch The Usual Suspect. Awesome movie (yes, it was my first time seeing it). Again, another blank... After awhile, something brought food up again. Roxanne was going to make chicken for dinner. We were running low on soda. We only had a single Dew left and I think we were completely out of Dr. Pepper. Jesse and Dustin went out to get some soda, I stayed home trying to get that damend Ethernet card to work. Roxanne went on the 'net, I think.
I tried all the methods of installing something that could think of. This time, my machine had a different problem. It would freeze during the final fazes of booting. After 5 minutes or so of sitting there, it'd finally load. I assumed it was conflicting with something 'cos it is the exact same card as Jess' computer and his boots normally. I finally turned to the blasted manuel and it said that the card would conflict with older versions of EMM386.exe (6.22 or below). I was pretty sure that was up to date, but I removed it from my Autoexec.bat just to see. I reboot, same exact thing. The thing that really bugs me is how windows says the device is working fine. Haaaaarrruuumpphhhh!!!
'What the hell, I'll just mess around with Paint Shop Pro.' I thought. I load Paint Shop Pro. I go to check out my new desktop images I had spent all night downloading the last night I was at my house. I click the browse button... Paint Shop Pro freezes.. 'Wonderful' I said. I kill the task and try again. Same. I kill again, and I try to just OPEN an image. I click on the 'up-one-folder' button. ... ... ... Frozen. I kill it and finally give up. By this time Jesse and Dustin are back with the soda.
So while we were here, I might as well show Dustin my TFC screen shot archive (which is much bigger than I've got on this site)... But I forgot that Paint Shop Pro was being a bitch. I kill the task and try loading the images from exlporer... At least that worked. So we go through them all... After that, I shut down.
Not all of this happened in this order though, I think we watch The Usual Suspect AFTER all this crap with my PC. But anyway, onward!
Now we were gonna try and network the two machines. Jesse plugs the new LAN card he bought yesterday into his machine. We set them up... We go and set up Internet Connection sharing thing that came with Windows... I install what it wants onto my PC... After a few restarts we're ready to see if I can get online from my machine. I launch IE... Type in my fav. URL (http://thor.square.org) and ... .... 'Host cannot be reached' .... .... I ask Jesse if he can get on... He tries it out... 'Host cannot be reached' ... 'Shit. Check your IP.' I say. He checks it... He gets the error that we got before we had his DSL working... I check my IP... I've actually got one (and no, it isn't the one you have when you're off-line). By this time, we're both getting kind pissed. It's sad though. Between Jesse, Dustin and myself, we couldn't figure this out. Eventually I went through and showed Dustin all the video's and wave files I've got.
Eventually, we took my PC down, and tried to get DSL working on his again... We did get it working, I don't remember how, exactly... But it was working.
Jesse then went to bed, he had work in the morning (it was already past 5am at this time). Me and Dustin were gonna take turns playing Counter-Strike, but we got distracted... Oh, yeah, Dustin wanted to see how fast Napster worked with DSL... We downloaded it and installed, made a username and so on... Searched for a few MP3's and we were soon done with that. Than, somehow we started talking about hacked websites... So we went and looked for archives of hacked sites... We found 'em, went through most of them... After this, we decided to mess with Jesse's computer. We were going to change all his desktop icons into scenes from Pulp Fiction. We couldn't find any already made icons, so we turned to the web for pictures... We downloaded them, converted them into icons... But they were too small to see what they actually were.
So we found a picture of Samuel L. Jackson (with 'fro and all) and tiled it as Jesse's desktop... It looked hella cool.
We did all this until about 8am. Dustin decided to go to sleep, After shutting the computer down, I went out, read a magazine or two... And finally fell a sleep.
Day 4:
I woke up... Or so I think I did... It may have been a dream... But, I think Dustin was on the phone (I didn't bother to see what time is was)... He saw that I was awake and I guess whoever he was talking to wanted to know what firewall I had put on Jesse's computer (I showed him grc.com and all that the night before)... So I told him it was ZoneAlarm... And I just blacked out from there. The next thing I know is that I was HOT. It was burning up... The past two days I had got up fairly early (for me anyway), between 10am and 12pm. It was 3pm. Jesse and Dustin were both gone (Dustin is also a manager at Software ETC. But he wasn't working today, he just decided to see a movie at the mall, or something) and I think Roxanne was feeding Liam. I can't remember exactly, but I bumbled around the house for a little while not really knowing what was going on. That's the reason I hate sleeping more than 5 hours. A while back, I woke up at 7am in the morning and the sky and everything had the same tint to it as it does at 7pm (at least, through the miniblinds on the windows)... This was on a Sunday, so I freaked. I thought I missed The X-Files... I run out into the living room... No one... I listen for a second... Nothing. No one. Nowhere. I looked at the clock 'it's 7... where the hell did everyone go?!' ....I finally realized it was 7am ... I was a good 12 hours away from missing The X-Files.
Roxanne told me that my Dad had called and something about their phones being out so I would have to call the cell phone number... I have no idea what our cell phone number is... Luckily Roxanne had it somewhere... So I called... We made arrangements to come and pick me up at 5pm (Roxanne and Jesse didn't care if I stayed longer, but I felt like I needed to go home... I'm not sure why, I just felt it... Homesick maybe?).
So I go into use the computer.. It's even hotter in here since the window is facing west. The sun is beating down... I cover the window with a blanket... It seemed to help a bit. I turn the computer on... And something just doesn't seem right... I messed around a bit with this and that... Now something is REALLY wrong. Windows won't boot. It goes straight to the 'It is now safe to shut down your computer' screen. Roxanne just so happened to be on the phone with Jesse, and he just so happened to want to talk to me. 'Hey, what's up' he says. 'Uh, nothing much' ... Cool, we talked for a bit... Than I say 'Hey, is it okay with you if I reinstall windows? It's uh, just not working quite as well' ... He wouldn't have been angry about me corrupting his Windows, I know that. But I felt kind of bad, you know, breaking his computer without his permission.
But he knows that I'll reinstall Windows every chance I get. So he said go ahead and do it. I gave the phone back to Roxanne...
So I begin the procedure, I pull out all the disc's I need... Trying to decide what style of install I want. I went for a clean install. I didn't format though. I deltree'd the Windows directory and started the install.
Something that had bugged us when we were messing with the LAN cards is that it always wanted the WIN98 cd. But the people that originally installed it, didn't do it right, or something. They had done the thing where you copy the WIN98 folder onto the hard drive and install from there. That's all good and everything... But it shouldn't need the WIN98 CD for the things we were doing. It was looking for C:\WIN9X ... Not C:\WIN98... Why the people originally did this is beyond me, but hey... So I installed it from his hard drive... it all went very smoothly as I expected it to.
The first thing I did was get his DSL working. That went more smoothly than I can describe. Next, I went and installed the latest drivers for all his hardware. The next thing I know is I'm testing out Unreal Tournament! UT didn't work online before I reinstalled Windows... So it's a VERY good thing that I screwed something up. Otherwise I wouldn't have done the reinstall.
This is my very first time playing UT online. And it's been a long time since I played it offline. I played for about 5 minutes... And just from that I can see how much ass this game kicks. As soon as I get the money, i'm going out and buying it.
But I also wanted to see if any of the problems we had with Half-Life and any mods were still there. We couldn't ever get it to run in a resolution of 1024x768 or below (Imagine that! You have so much power you can't have games run like crap!). I originally thought it was a driver issue, but I installed different drivers before I reinstalled Windows. It wasn't. I load TFC up with 1024x768... It seems fine... I escape and go back to the game several times.... Perfect.
So I play for a bit. Latency was at the high 90's and low 100's... I was in heaven. I was sucking, but those few people I sniped I would have NEVER got with my 56K modem at 200. By the time I got done I broke even with a score of 7/7. My mom had arrived to pick me up.
I loaded my computer into the car and everything... Liam is wanting to go with us, running out barefoot and trying to get into the car (he's only two years old). My mom talks a bit with Roxanne... We say good-bye and head home.
My mom needs to stop a couple of places. One of those places is Target. I inform my mom that I have run out of Pop-Tarts....
We get home and I am welcomed back with kids fighting, crying and everything else kids do. There was pizza there waiting for me. I pick up 3 or 4 slices, grab a coke, sit down on the couch and I'm just in time for Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network... Life can seem to just go perfect at times.
Thus, this ends my best weekend ever. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed living it! Oh well, this, I'm sure was rather boring for you all that decided to read it, so I shall give you something I promised.
Remember I promised in my room tour that I'd give you a screen shot of my desktop the instant I put an image on it? Well, here is is!
Tell me that's not cool. I dare you. Final Fantasy IX is going to kick so much ass.
Ugh, I haven't got anything else to say.
-Jonathan 'bzzt' Ward
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