Samhain blessings

The day of bewitchment, ghosts, goblins, candy, and trickery is upon us.  Oddly enough, it's also the day in which we get to do a big presentation on our project to the upper management at work.  Samhain blessings to fellow pagans and Happy Halloween to the rest of you.  (Or if you don't believe in or celebrate either of those, then Happy All-Saints Day or feliz Dia de los Muertos.  I hope that covers everyone!)  Here is the requisite link on the pagan holiday for those interested.  However you celebrate your holiday this week, make it a safe and pleasant one!

Battlestar Galactica season 3

To anyone who has not had the pleasure of experiencing the science fiction drama Battlestar Galactica, do yourself a favor and make the jump now.  Pick up the DVDs of the miniseries and the first two seasons and immerse yourself in some amazing storytelling.  Short on time?  Track down a copy of the hour-long clip show to bring you up to speed and watch season 3.  This has been the darkest and most powerful season yet and it doesn't look like it's going to stop.  For a while, I didn't think they could top the miniseries, which I had to watch over the course of two days because it felt like watching a futuristic 9/11 on a global scale... I really thought it was that good.  This season, they have had episodes filled with enough action to keep those with short attention spans entertained and enough meaty story to make you think hard and evoke very deep emotions.  They have managed to elegantly show both sides of many grey issues during war and have done an amazing job of illustrating that there are no absolutes, no black and white, only different shades of grey.  The are many good questions constantly being raised... like how deep of a shade of grey is too deep and who among is is fit to make that judgment and pass sentence?

Please say it ain't so!!

From the "please say it ain't so" department of desperate business decisions, Marvel Comics is doing a crossover with the daytime television drama Guiding Light.  Read more here.  I don't even have the heart to say anything more about this horridly bizarre idea.

Upgrades!!

Hooray for upgrades!!  My old computer wasn't a bad computer by any means, but it could definitely use an upgrade and thanks to my wonderful new job with better pay, I finally got one.  Not just a little upgrade, but a monster upgrade:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.14MHz processor
• ASUS P5NSLI LGA 775 motherboard (has lots of potential for overclocking and is SLI-ready)
• 1GB PC-4300 RAM (sadly, the faster PC2-5300 RAM has been sold out at Fry's for a month now)
• NVIDIA 7600GS 512MB PCI-E video card
• all of my old hard drives totalling about 700GB of space along with my new 18x LightScribe-compatible dual-layer DVD burner
• all wrapped up in a sleek new Antec P150 case with 430-watt PSU (designed for low noise and high cooling efficiency)

Vista beta 2 installed without a hitch in under half an hour and my Windows Experience Index jumped up from 2.0 on the old system to 4.3 with the new hardware.  I am writing this blog on my new system, after pushing its limits today with demos of Doom 3, X-Men: Legends 2, and Tomb Raider Legend, and I'm just so excited to see the beautiful high-res goodness of these games running with no slowdown.  I've been intentionally avoiding most PC games magazines for the past year or so because I knew my old system wouldn't be up to playing most of the new games being shown, so now that I can play them I have no idea what kinds of cool games have come out to play.  Ah, such a conundrum. ;)

Freeform prose: Half of One

The weekend passes and a new week dawns with untold possibilities and opportunity.
Will a chance meeting with another happen on the streets that irrevocably changes my destiny?
Possibly meeting another new friend, only to get close and find that my luck has yet again
Rubbed off on them and shown them the path to true happiness with their One, leaving me alone.
Why must I constantly hear "you're so sweet" and "you mean a lot to me" but not "I love you"?
When will the veil of solitude be lifted from my life and let me find happiness in my One, too?
Perhaps I expect too much out of those around me, perhaps intentionally tearing the good things down,
Perhaps I don't realize if I'm truly ready, but sometimes I wonder if settling--just to put my arms around
A fellow compassionate soul--would be better than nothing, better than solitude while waiting.
Waiting, living, evolving, changing, surviving, persisting, existing, cursing, longing for loving.
Sadness and anxiety gnaw at the fringes of my very existence, far enough out of sight
That I can deny their presence as I continue to live my life and wait for someone that's right.
My heart doth overflow with passion and sensuality that longs to be shared
With someone sincere, no drama, no games, only willing to show that she cares
For me, who I am, quirks and flaws, and loving it all.
Willing to stand beside me, independent, strong, and tall.

Brain dump

Been awake since 4am, woke up for no reason and couldn't get back to sleep... felt really off-center all day but managed to knock a big milestone out on the project at work today... LightScribe technology kicks ass... watched the 2-hour season 3 premiere of Battlestar Galactica, picked up my jaw from the floor, absolutely amazing stuff... why is it that all of the men's size small shirts at my local Wal-Mart (and nowhere else) fit like they're an a x-large?... damn, PS3 went on preorder yesterday and limited supplies ended preorders within hours or even minutes, looks like no PS3 for me this year... I think I need my chakras cleansed, still feeling out of synch, wondering why (and how) I'm still awake....

LightScribe burners & Vista compatibility

This week, Best Buy has an 18X DVD burner by LG on sale for $60. I just picked one up and it's pretty sweet, reading and writing to just about any type of modern disc you can throw at it including the new LightScribe discs. In case you don't know about LightScribe, it's a technology developed by HP to create a label for CDs and DVDs that can be written in the same drive by simply flipping the disc over and using a LightScribe-compatible application like Nero to "burn" the label. Users of Windows Vista like myself will run into a problem with the installer rejecting the operating system version, and unfortunately Compatibility Mode is not available when running MSI installer files. Luckily, there is a workaround, however this is completely unsupported by Microsoft and the manufacturers, so proceed at your own risk! First, you'll need to download a copy of the Windows Server 2003 SDK from Microsoft. After it is installed, navigate to to the SDK's bin directory and install Orca. Launch Orca, and open the LightScribe system installer (mine was named LS_HSI.MSI). Open the LaunchCondition table and edit the line restricting the operating system by adding VersionNT=600. Save the MSI file, try running the installer again, and now Vista should be an allowed operating system so you can install the software. I've tested it on my system and have encounted no problems so far.

Crap-tacular day

Yes, it's been a crap-tacular day. It all started off with this idiot driving a white Ford Taurus at the intersection of Country Club and University in Mesa this morning. I was heading towards the left turn onto University because the light had turned green, but it doesn't stay that way for long and the dumbass in front of me seemed to panic and stopped in the middle of the intersection when the light turned yellow. It had been raining and I would have just skidded into his back end if I slammed on the brakes to stop at the line, so I slowed down and hoped he would keep going before it turned red. Wrong. A dozen flashes went off around us from the traffic cameras and he finally started moving again a few seconds later. To that guy (I got your license plate--323-TNF): you suck, and you will pay for my ticket!! I spent the afternoon fighting with various Microsoft products, trying to make them work like the documentation says they're supposed to, but with no luck. The drive home provided a bit of entertainment as I pissed off a guy driving a white Lexus trying to weave through traffic at 90 MPH by boxing him in and stopping him from going faster than the rest of us for about five miles. I guess he didn't get the hint that it was both unsafe and rude to the rest of us to do that because he went zooming off again when I reached my exit on the freeway. And to top off the day, I just tried to pick up my mail from the central mailboxes in the apartment complex. I haven't checked since about Monday and was expecting the usual junk mail and maybe a bill or two, but found a half-jammed door hiding a box full of nothing. Hopefully there wasn't anything important in there. At least I should be able to move out of this ghetto soon thanks to the new job. *sigh* I need a drink now.

X-Men: The Last Stand

I got my first full paycheck from the new job today and immediately drove over to Best Buy after work with Kaylee and picked up a few items, including The Little Mermaid (she's already seen it 1 1/2 times tonight!!) and X-Men: The Last Stand.  I'm too exhausted to do an all-out nitpick, and it isn't worth my time anyway.  I won't say I was disappointed after hearing the lackluster reviews, but it still could have been much worse too.  The whole movie seemed to lack the more complex and intelligent feel imbued by Bryan Singer and David Hayter's writing in the first two movies.  The epic saga of the Dark Phoenix in the comic books ended up being a decent, but yawn-inducing hour and a half of average X-Men action.  Also, either I wasn't very observant this time or else there weren't as many easter eggs as in the previous installments.  I spotted Stan Lee and Chris Claremont early on, but that was about it.  And the extras on the DVD?  Please... they're more like afterthoughts and shameless cross-promotions of other Fox properties.  Word is that this is planned to be the last of the X-Men movies, which is sad because it started with a bang and went out with a whimper.