Wild Dog pack around my parts

I got wonderful news. My aunt’s house got struck by lightning. She lives less then a mile a way from us. They live out in the open (corn and wheat fields in all directions) so many houses there were venerable to strikes. Anyways, she came over to our house to wash clothes. She says that the lightning blew apart her chimney (to bits / pieces of bricks everywhere) thus burning every outlet in the house to black streaks. It also ripped the plaster off the wall in her basement about 5 feet vertically were the entertainment center (den) was. The TV had black streaks on the screen….from the blast. I thought that was a little funny. Yeah it was about 8PM and I saw a blinding blue light outside our house. It only took 4 seconds for the deafening boom to occur. I mean it’s the same as a sonic boom that an aircraft makes when it breaks the sound barrier right above you. Her phone line box was blown from the house to the end of the road she said. That’s about 300 feet! The wires in her electrical box were fused together. LOL! She has to replace everything. This was the first thunderstorm of the year. This whole scene was 5 minutes after I said, “Sh*t, I need to unplug my computers.” to myself. After this giant boom passed, the dog was barking, our cats were no where to be seen, and I remembered how right I was for waking up in the nick of time. I, who has hands on experience with power blow outs, knows surge protectors only do so much.

To describe further bad news today. A pack of wild dogs were on the loose. I just found out about this local crisis today actually. This one crazy dog (house pet) was leading other dogs (Lab, Retriever, Collie) and killing Sheep and small house cats. People in this area have been missing cats from what I heard. My aunt, who lives by the Sheep farm, saw the pack trying to kill these sheep, also included three RAMs. The dogs were trying to make a kill. The police come 3 times, as she described to us, and the dogs run away, but they are dumb enough to come back (The wild dogs circle the area like a pack of wolves.) The police brought shotguns though no shots were fired. One RAM was missing from the herd soon found half-alive knocked unconscious by blood lost. “Hmm, I wonder what happened?” You can’t really tell, she says, until you have a change to shave the wool off. The owner of the barn had to put 2 RAMS and a couple of sheep to sleep. The owners of these wild – uncontrollable pets – put them down because they already had to pay for property damage. I just know our dog wasn’t apart of this. The guy who owns the Alfa-dog (which in this case it describes the dog perfectly) got him neutered instead of killing him. So he is still alive and will do this all again probably. Isn’t this a sad story? I think so *sobbing*.

Now to get into some more ordinary news....

I caught The Screen Savers today and a small segment was telling about how to chat with gamers through games they play. And my response was GameSpy Arcade. But they showed Xfire. I downloaded the application myself. Very small download. You sign up for their service and it’s like MSN messenger exactly. Click on any gamer who has a server going on any game and it’ll boot your game up to that server automatically. Problem is there is no one is on your list to start you out. But there is a search buddy option. The big draw back is you need to know your buddy’s username in order to add him/her to your list. I already recommend it to a lot of people. I am hoping to meet someone to play Neverwinter Nights the night with. So far I got no damn luck!

I have never thought that it would happen this fast, but the first 512 MB GPU is available on the market. It’s actually a 3Dlabs card, the Wildcat VP990 Pro. 3DLabs says it can do 200 Gigaflops or 1.3 Teraflops of polygons. It’ll set you back 730 dollars or more, but is it worth it, after all a Geforce FX 5600 256 MB card at tigerdirect.com will only cost $130. I feel bad now. Even my slowest computer can handle any game in existence at 1200/800 (Athlon XP 1.8 GHz 386 MB RAM, Geforce 5400 Ti, 40 GB harddrive). And it looks pretty smooth. I want to upgrade to a 512 MB GPU myself, but I’m going to wait until the a card with that speed goes below the 300 dollar mark, even if it is the Wildcat VP 990 Pro since the first videocard on the market first, falls in price first. I’m guessing in September 2004 the Wildcat VP 990 Pro will be reduced to half the cost it is now. One thing is obvious, anything with 512 MB of RAM will be insanely powerful for 2 more years. Here’s the official site: http://www.3dlabs.com/product/wildcatvp/vppro/specs.htm for the specs. Playstation 3 and Xbox 2 are only going to have 256 MB of video memory, and that is still very powerful. I see that consoles game developers are going to use 100% that amount of memory to make games so console games may just look as good as State-of-the-art graphic cards for PC until 2006. UT2004 already about a generation a head of all the other games in the world developed for PC on the market and it runs on my pc perfectly. Doom 3 is coming out in December, and it’ll be optimized for a computer a little more powerful then what UT2004 mininum stats require .

Website: http://www.3dlabs.com/product/wildcatvp/vppro/