Howdy, from Western Wisconsin, USA. Today was very ordinary day. I didn’t go anywhere today, since there was no where to go, except to a movie theater….but I wasn’t interested in seeing a movie alone. It wasn’t always like this….yesterday, I got a new Saturn analog controller (really hard to find) for my Saturn(s). Yesterday I was playing Rallisport Challenge and Ikaruga (nice shoot ‘em up for Gamecube.) The game is much harder than my experience level so I had the infinite lives cheat on. Some gamers call it the official sequel to the Saturn exclusive game, Reliant Silvergun. Good game though! I tried using my MP3 player to encode the music on it. I talked to the people at the game store and we’ve talked a lot about Mega Man. Actually it was just some small talk. I was interrupted everything a new ‘customer’ came in. I didn’t have a good feeling about staying around and left. You know this one 21 year old (a customer), skinny and very talkative. I didn’t like him. It seemed he was wondering about my intelligence, and I didn’t want to say anything to him. People get this feeling that gamers aren’t very bright or if they are, they’re “videogame smart.” He was a little shy towards me, and he asked the first question about Mega Man. I only said I had Mega Man 2, but of course, I didn’t want anyone to know that I have all the cartridge based Mega Mans on disc (NES, SNES, GB, GBA) including the Mega Man Zero (GBA) Hehehe. I use Virtual Boy Advance 1.7.2 for my Gameboy Advance games. So in a way I felt that there was no need to buy a NES and SNES for this reason. As I spoke earlier, I’d picked up 3 games for each of them. I was hesitant to pay for one when I played all those games on the computer any time I chose to. I’m waiting to own a Zodiac for this very reason. I have over 150 NES ROMs, and 50 SNES ROMs and 30 Genesis ROMs. I don’t play SNK Neo Geo, Atari 2600 or Sega Masters System.
I had this very odd dream while sleeping last night I want everyone here to know about. I went to bed around 10:30pm. I was in a building much like the trade center underground. I was sentenced there for stealing money out of my Dad’s billfold. I was given one key to open one door to bypass a keypad. I would only survive if I made it out of the bunker alive. I had 8 hours to get out of the bunker and the walls slowly caved in. There were people I use to know in high school also there, and it was my choice whether to join forces with them to get out the maze or not because they could always be wrong. I decided to go solo because my way of thinking was I had no time for disagreement. Those other people could be more right than the “route” I was taking. The whole building had a lot of halls with closed doors, some locked, and some not locked. Some door locked with even with keypads. The keypads would get me closer to the exit. To unlock those doors I had to remember the numbers on the doors that I opened, and arrange them in the correct order to open the lock. It was impossible to get the password before the building closed so I ignored them. I did make it out though, there was an exit in a long hallway and I had to make it out before I got completely swished, I had to leave two people behind who I knew. I woke up and the time was 7:30am. Wasn’t that weird, I think my dream was a version of the Playstation 2 game, ICO. Sony is making a sequel to ICO called NICO, but no one knows when it’s being released.
Since its Father’s Day today, my dad is taking me out golfing. We’re only going to be on the driving range. My dad owns his own financial business so he gets a lot of invites from clients to go golfing. He does some nice things like go golfing to raise money for the Courage Center in Hudson to help physically disabled kids. He says he does have some above average shots in although he can do about average in his game. Never mentioned golfing any time before I became a member at Modblog, believe this is the first time. I still feel it’s a sportsman sport. Did you know golf was invented in Scotland? I hear the British are golf crazy! Soccer and golf both!
[3:30 PM the same day] I got back from the driving range with a blister (go figure). Dad does above par in most of his runs, but he does know what the stance is. He shows me what the stance is. After I got a blister, he and I putted the ball. I was putting on the 9th hole instead of the putting green. I hit the ball way too hard. I find it much easier to hit the ball when looking at the stake instead of the golf ball. I was really angry at the ball. It turned out as a bad golf day. A lot of crazed golfers were over there. Can’t argue with them because they know the game more than I do and joke about amongst each other. I hate that.
Hot Shots Golf 3 is one of the premiere PS2 games over seas! You know there are about 10 golf courses within a 30 mile radius from our house? Two in Roberts, WI township, 3 in Hudson’s surrounding area, 1 in Hammond, WI, 2 in New Richmond, WI township, 3 in Stillwater, MN township, 1 somewhere in Somerset, WI.
On Thursday I saw Bob’s apartment. It was small with a Kitchen, Bedroom, bathroom and living room. The guy next door had this rock music really loud. Bob was fixing us tacos first and while he paused Final Fantasy X on Playstation 2. I couldn’t play any of his games since he wanted to find a ‘save sphere’ to save his game. I really wanted to help him since I wanted to show him my knowledge about it. He’s at the crystal forest place right after the water kissing scene with Tidus and Yuna on the butterfly quest. I remember quitting the butterfly quest because it was too difficult. I like Final Fantasy, there was always something to do. Then we played Road Kill. I got beat by Bob, but I DID beat his younger sister. It wasn’t a particularly good at this game control wise. I didn’t say anything because he kept falling in the water. Road Kill was actually a rip off of Twisted Metal. I said this to him too. After Bob slowed me Hot Shots Golf 3, I wanted keep playing this game well into 9PM, but I couldn’t, I had to go home. I heard of Hot Shots Golf on the Playstation. It plays a lot like Mario Golf. The game automatically lines you up with the hole on the green, all I had to do is click X twice on the Dual Shock II, and press X again at the little square which determines how far the golf ball will go. I got a lot better as time went on, and actually won a game against a girl golfer in the game. In the game the women tend to make more mistakes than guys do. At first it didn’t look so good.
I gave Bob the Lord of the Rings - Return of the King in DivX. He was surprised I gave him it. Usually we don’t just give up CDRs unless it has a lot of important data like MP3s on it. His girl friend, Angie, wasn’t home, so I actually got Bob’s attention most of the time. Bob feels he has to pay attention to Angie when she’s home because she’ll come in the same room for Bob, and speak to him. I was friends with Bob for 7 years and now he has a girl friend that wants his attention most of the time. Bob and Angie are keeping secrets from me, although I know it’s none of my business to find out what. Bob might be reading this so I dare not speculate. I know you’re reading this Bob – buddy! But than again, Bob and Angie do live together. I don’t live with Bob except for those times we bunked together at scout camps in the day. They both like heavy metal like Godsmack together. I find that Bob likes me for who I am and plays games that I want him to play with me. He also listens to what I have to say. We where talking about old movies like Alfred Hitchcock movies. Old westerns that include Clint Eastwood (Man with No name, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, The Unforgiven) John Wayne (True Grit, Up to Alaska, Rooster Cogburn, The Searchers, The Train Robbers, The Alamo, Sons of Katie Elder, and The Shootist), Gregory Peck (The Bravados), and Jimmy Stewart (The Man who shot Liberty Valiant, How the West was Won) He didn’t know what I was talking about half the time, so I felt he was trying to picture it the way I was picturing it. He really doesn’t like Westerns, but that’s because he never watched any. I left later that night. Bob and I may do something today after I go out to the driving range with Dad. Bob said he’s going to pay his neighbor money for a part of a T1 line through a WI-FI adapter hooked up to his computer. They can share internet this way. I told him about the free TV service Shoutcast.com is hosting which enables Mpeg 4 streams to be watched on Winamp. He found that interesting. Bob doesn’t even own a phone so the only way I can contact him is on his cell phone.
er. I hate that.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
I had my Saturn emulator running Daytona USA!!!
If this is your very first time to my site – than I welcome you, if not, I still welcome you! I went to the game store yesterday to see if Baldur’s Gate Deadly Alliance 2 was still there. It’s one of the best used game on the shelf at the time…of course it’s not there! I saw it a week before and someone picked it up since then. Before I go to this store, I read some reviews off IGN, my most trusting place to go for the latest reviews. Sure beats paying for Game Informer. For SNES and Saturn it’s a bit more difficult to find a decent review. For Saturn games I always go to Dave’s Sega Saturn Page http://www.Sega-Saturn.com for the best reviews. Screenshots are always nice to see. I pay of not told you this, but I actually dislike Saturn a lot for the lack of great titles that I know so well on the Playstation. There are a few exceptions (only 2 or 3 outstanding games for it) IGN.com deleted their Saturn section in 2001, so I haven’t had very good resources on the web on Saturn lately. I want the same games everyone else wants (rare titles). The games that’ll go up in value because they are rare finds anywhere. I probably won’t play them. I have this bad habit of collecting games without playing them. In fact, in another entry, I list all my games, which will soon pass 300 titles. One is Panzer Dragoon Saga, the RPG based game from the Panzer Dragoon franchise. Radiant Silvergun (shoot ‘em up exclusive for Saturn) and the all 3 imports of the Shining Force III saga. I would like to download an ISO image off a pear / pear unity when I get the chance. I like in-depth reviews that are 1000 words long at least. Sure, someone can like a game and write about it, but if they don’t describe it well enough, I just go to another reviewing site without much thought. Gamerankings.com makes it easy for me in this way. I have a low acceptance level when it comes to used games, a game must be very good to excellent for me to buy it. Enter the Matrix is a great example of what not to buy. I thought of buying it with my PS2 when the game had a lot of popularity, but 6 months after I never hear about it. I heard the gameplay wasn’t really good which ended up making the game overly difficult, not to mention the camera angles hurt the game. This year has a fair share of games with bad camera systems. I was ready to buy Dino Crisis 3 because it took full advantage of Xbox hardware with it’s above average dynamic lighting and high quality artwork, etc….but than I read TechTVs review of Dino Crisis 3, and the article said the camera angles were so bad that it brought the graphically beautiful game to a screeching halt! (Where’s the Dinosaurs? I can’t see ‘em cause of them damn camera angles! Damn, I died again for the 187th time!) Case and point graphics aren’t everything. The key paragraph I look for in a game is the gameplay score at the bottom of reviews.
The guy I knew must have gone to Japan already, he said he would. The girl there was really nice about getting the games I wanted. Most of the old games are behind the desk so it is hard to see them; I often ask the clerk what they have. She asked me what games I wanted next time I come. I don’t know what her name was (didn’t ask in fear that she’ll take it negatively so I refer most people by “you”) so she’ll go around in the Woodbury, MN store picking up games that I like to buy and make it much easier for me. I gave her some games to look for including these: Panzer Dragoon II Zewi, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Grandia, Mega Man X 2, and Mega Man X 3, Radiant Silvergun. I’ve been playing 5 hours of Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox and it plays well. Easily one of Sega’s better titles on any console right now. Super Monkey Ball for the Nintendo Gamecube is a surprisingly good game, it was one of the only puzzle games I own now and the graphics looked better than 90% of Gamecube launch titles. It was also Sega’s first Nintendo title. I have Panzer Dragoon I and II for Saturn and I am looking hard, high and low, for Panzer Dragoon Saga. I’m hoping once Saturone plays games, I can stick in NiGHTS or Panzer Dragoon in the CD-ROM, and play it on the computer with a game pad. It is impossible to play NiGHTs, and enjoy it without an analog controller. I remember trying to play it on the regular Saturn controller. It played awful. How did Tomb Raider fans feel when the Playstation still had a D-Pad? In fact, the analog controller for Saturn is referred as the NiGHTs controller. Have you heard of these crazy unities that let you use Playstation controller with other consoles? Yes it is true that the majority of gamers like PS Dual Shock IIs the most so why not use it with your Xbox! IGN.com wrote an article on an adapter called the “Magic Box” which allows you to do this. http://gear.ign.com/articles/364/364594p1.html?fromint=1 I really would like Sonic Team to make another NiGHTs game in the next five years. NiGHTs was the first fully polygonal action game for Sega Saturn, and it would be nice to have a sequel running in high resolution.
I never thought about inserting Saturn games into Dreamcast. Dreamcast will not play Saturn games, but strangely you can listen to music on a Saturn disc with Dreamcast’s audio player.
[June 16, 2004 8:03AM] I stayed up all night trying to figure out this emulator. The first working Sega Saturn emulator, SSF v0.07 RC10, runs Daytona USA, but still has issues running the game and runs slowly. I was running the latest build on my very powerful Pentium 4, but instead it runs on my Custom PC which is a little confusing to me. My custom PC is 1.2 GHz slower, but it has a Geforce 4 FX 5600. The first game that played was Daytona USA and without sound. It plays the game with a lot of missing frames, for example the sky is missing. I spent all last night looking for this thing the emulator calls a ST-V bios without luck! Darn! I’ll keep looking though.
I also downloaded another emulator called Saturone 1.1p, and for some odd reason WinXP Pro won’t allow my emulator to read MSVCP70.dll (a Microsoft runtime file) required to run all the plugins. I’m positive that if I reinstall Windows XP, this problem will go away. I would loose all my software though and the Windows XP installation process would destroy my Linux partitions. I found out that one great thing about Windows 2000 was that it didn’t delete present operating systems already on the hard drive. Than again that was the only good thing about it.
Leading Saturn Emulators:
Satourne Homepage http://satourne.consollection.com/
SSF Homepage http://home.h01.itscom.net/phantasy
System Requirements for Satourne and SSF
Windows 98SE
Direct X 8.0 or better
CPU at 2.0 GHz
Geforce FX 5200 64 MB
256 MB of RAM (at least)
My configuration
Athlon XP 2600 clocked at 2.1 GHz
Windows XP PRO Service Pack 1
Direct X 9.0a
786 MB of RAM
Geforce FX 5600 256 MB DRR
Here are the games that I found will run on SSF
1. Daytona USA
I guess I haven’t thought about Saturn games running on the Dreamcast. Dreamcast clearly does not play Sega Saturn games, however it did play Saturn CD audio in it’s audio player. I wonder if somebody will port a Saturn emulator for Chankast 0.2a? If you haven’t known, it is a Dreamcast emulator that plays games, only ISOs though.
Front Headlines “DIVX codec package installs bug on computer”
Today went well until I tried to install a codec package with DIVX 5.1.1 on my custom PC, but the package suddenly stopped installing and an error came up so I restarted my computer. It kept rebooting in the middle of the Windows XP loading screen after the error showed. I had an older version of DIVx on this particular computer, but I wanted to install this newer codec package which forced me to repair the file system with the WINXP Pro installation CD. That sucks. Some computers shutdown when the processor gets at a certain temperature, but I wasn’t doing any software intensive work. Today I’m ripping Return of the King for Bob. The problem of using Alcohol 120% to copy the movie to an ISO image, and burn it back on a blank DVD is that the original is using the new duel layer DVD format. Of course, I also have DVD X Copy on my computer so - hehe - I can shrink the image down to under 4.5 GB, and play it on a normal DVD player. I don’t think I want to do this. One day when I get cable Internet (if that ever happens), Bob and I will be able to trade movies over a pear network and smaller files are the only way to do this. Well no, I asked Bob if he would invest his hard earned money into a 70 dollar DVDRW burner, and he won’t do it. He is not a computer geek, I sort of am so how we spend our money is different. He asks me why he needs a DVD burner and I keep telling him to get rid of hard drive space on his small computer. What to know what his answer was to that? He says he likes all his MP3 collection and other stuff on his relatively small 30 Gigabyte hard drive. Looking at his room, he has all his games and software in a drawer bunched up together. I already lost one CD because he couldn’t find it in his mess. He also has a lot less software then I do. Five years ago it was the other way around, but whatever. He wants to get an external hard drive when he can pay for one. Some people like everything on their hard drive. I don’t know why. I learned from experience that something will go wrong with the operating system like viruses or hardware failure, the files will get deleted. When that happens, that Bob will get really angry at it. So I find that regular backups of music collections, movie collections and valuable downloads (like console bios) should be backup on CD-ROM monthly. So when something does go wrong - it’s no big deal. Getting back on topic, the big question is whether or not I should copy a movie onto DVD or to copy the movie on a super DVD (aka movie compressed in DIVX) Unlike me, I don’t think bob will leave his computer running over night encoding movies in MPEG4….he’ll just let me borrow them. I want his Monty Python Holly Grail and Mortal Kombat movies. I found out that I can put 4 or 5 movies on DVDR if they’re compressed in DivX. When ever I listen to the coconut song or Knights of Ni or the killer rabbit scene, it makes me crack a smile!
Software Picks of the Day
1. 1Click DVD Ripper 2.03 – www.soft32.com/download_26183.html - rips and encodes movies in DIVX on the fly. No longer do you need to rip VOBs to 7 GB of hard drive space and than another 1.3 GB for the compressed file. Save lots space with this unity.
2. Divx player & latest codec (5.1.1) - http://download.com....html?tag=kdxfallback
3. Mozilla Firefox 0.9 –http://www.mozilla.o...FirefoxSetup-0.9.exe - a preview of Mozilla 2.0 (next generation browser ???)
The guy I knew must have gone to Japan already, he said he would. The girl there was really nice about getting the games I wanted. Most of the old games are behind the desk so it is hard to see them; I often ask the clerk what they have. She asked me what games I wanted next time I come. I don’t know what her name was (didn’t ask in fear that she’ll take it negatively so I refer most people by “you”) so she’ll go around in the Woodbury, MN store picking up games that I like to buy and make it much easier for me. I gave her some games to look for including these: Panzer Dragoon II Zewi, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Grandia, Mega Man X 2, and Mega Man X 3, Radiant Silvergun. I’ve been playing 5 hours of Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox and it plays well. Easily one of Sega’s better titles on any console right now. Super Monkey Ball for the Nintendo Gamecube is a surprisingly good game, it was one of the only puzzle games I own now and the graphics looked better than 90% of Gamecube launch titles. It was also Sega’s first Nintendo title. I have Panzer Dragoon I and II for Saturn and I am looking hard, high and low, for Panzer Dragoon Saga. I’m hoping once Saturone plays games, I can stick in NiGHTS or Panzer Dragoon in the CD-ROM, and play it on the computer with a game pad. It is impossible to play NiGHTs, and enjoy it without an analog controller. I remember trying to play it on the regular Saturn controller. It played awful. How did Tomb Raider fans feel when the Playstation still had a D-Pad? In fact, the analog controller for Saturn is referred as the NiGHTs controller. Have you heard of these crazy unities that let you use Playstation controller with other consoles? Yes it is true that the majority of gamers like PS Dual Shock IIs the most so why not use it with your Xbox! IGN.com wrote an article on an adapter called the “Magic Box” which allows you to do this. http://gear.ign.com/articles/364/364594p1.html?fromint=1 I really would like Sonic Team to make another NiGHTs game in the next five years. NiGHTs was the first fully polygonal action game for Sega Saturn, and it would be nice to have a sequel running in high resolution.
I never thought about inserting Saturn games into Dreamcast. Dreamcast will not play Saturn games, but strangely you can listen to music on a Saturn disc with Dreamcast’s audio player.
[June 16, 2004 8:03AM] I stayed up all night trying to figure out this emulator. The first working Sega Saturn emulator, SSF v0.07 RC10, runs Daytona USA, but still has issues running the game and runs slowly. I was running the latest build on my very powerful Pentium 4, but instead it runs on my Custom PC which is a little confusing to me. My custom PC is 1.2 GHz slower, but it has a Geforce 4 FX 5600. The first game that played was Daytona USA and without sound. It plays the game with a lot of missing frames, for example the sky is missing. I spent all last night looking for this thing the emulator calls a ST-V bios without luck! Darn! I’ll keep looking though.
I also downloaded another emulator called Saturone 1.1p, and for some odd reason WinXP Pro won’t allow my emulator to read MSVCP70.dll (a Microsoft runtime file) required to run all the plugins. I’m positive that if I reinstall Windows XP, this problem will go away. I would loose all my software though and the Windows XP installation process would destroy my Linux partitions. I found out that one great thing about Windows 2000 was that it didn’t delete present operating systems already on the hard drive. Than again that was the only good thing about it.
Leading Saturn Emulators:
Satourne Homepage http://satourne.consollection.com/
SSF Homepage http://home.h01.itscom.net/phantasy
System Requirements for Satourne and SSF
Windows 98SE
Direct X 8.0 or better
CPU at 2.0 GHz
Geforce FX 5200 64 MB
256 MB of RAM (at least)
My configuration
Athlon XP 2600 clocked at 2.1 GHz
Windows XP PRO Service Pack 1
Direct X 9.0a
786 MB of RAM
Geforce FX 5600 256 MB DRR
Here are the games that I found will run on SSF
1. Daytona USA
I guess I haven’t thought about Saturn games running on the Dreamcast. Dreamcast clearly does not play Sega Saturn games, however it did play Saturn CD audio in it’s audio player. I wonder if somebody will port a Saturn emulator for Chankast 0.2a? If you haven’t known, it is a Dreamcast emulator that plays games, only ISOs though.
Front Headlines “DIVX codec package installs bug on computer”
Today went well until I tried to install a codec package with DIVX 5.1.1 on my custom PC, but the package suddenly stopped installing and an error came up so I restarted my computer. It kept rebooting in the middle of the Windows XP loading screen after the error showed. I had an older version of DIVx on this particular computer, but I wanted to install this newer codec package which forced me to repair the file system with the WINXP Pro installation CD. That sucks. Some computers shutdown when the processor gets at a certain temperature, but I wasn’t doing any software intensive work. Today I’m ripping Return of the King for Bob. The problem of using Alcohol 120% to copy the movie to an ISO image, and burn it back on a blank DVD is that the original is using the new duel layer DVD format. Of course, I also have DVD X Copy on my computer so - hehe - I can shrink the image down to under 4.5 GB, and play it on a normal DVD player. I don’t think I want to do this. One day when I get cable Internet (if that ever happens), Bob and I will be able to trade movies over a pear network and smaller files are the only way to do this. Well no, I asked Bob if he would invest his hard earned money into a 70 dollar DVDRW burner, and he won’t do it. He is not a computer geek, I sort of am so how we spend our money is different. He asks me why he needs a DVD burner and I keep telling him to get rid of hard drive space on his small computer. What to know what his answer was to that? He says he likes all his MP3 collection and other stuff on his relatively small 30 Gigabyte hard drive. Looking at his room, he has all his games and software in a drawer bunched up together. I already lost one CD because he couldn’t find it in his mess. He also has a lot less software then I do. Five years ago it was the other way around, but whatever. He wants to get an external hard drive when he can pay for one. Some people like everything on their hard drive. I don’t know why. I learned from experience that something will go wrong with the operating system like viruses or hardware failure, the files will get deleted. When that happens, that Bob will get really angry at it. So I find that regular backups of music collections, movie collections and valuable downloads (like console bios) should be backup on CD-ROM monthly. So when something does go wrong - it’s no big deal. Getting back on topic, the big question is whether or not I should copy a movie onto DVD or to copy the movie on a super DVD (aka movie compressed in DIVX) Unlike me, I don’t think bob will leave his computer running over night encoding movies in MPEG4….he’ll just let me borrow them. I want his Monty Python Holly Grail and Mortal Kombat movies. I found out that I can put 4 or 5 movies on DVDR if they’re compressed in DivX. When ever I listen to the coconut song or Knights of Ni or the killer rabbit scene, it makes me crack a smile!
Software Picks of the Day
1. 1Click DVD Ripper 2.03 – www.soft32.com/download_26183.html - rips and encodes movies in DIVX on the fly. No longer do you need to rip VOBs to 7 GB of hard drive space and than another 1.3 GB for the compressed file. Save lots space with this unity.
2. Divx player & latest codec (5.1.1) - http://download.com....html?tag=kdxfallback
3. Mozilla Firefox 0.9 –http://www.mozilla.o...FirefoxSetup-0.9.exe - a preview of Mozilla 2.0 (next generation browser ???)
Friday, June 11, 2004
Probation stinks ...
Today is a big day and it’s Friday, than the weekend. After 2 weeks I may see Bob again. He may have already moved to this new apartment! It probably won’t look very good, but he lived in a small house, so his apartment at least has to be the same size. He says it has a pool.
I have to convince my school I can go back to school, even under probation, I can make the grade at school. Dad and I had a long talk about staying in school. I haven’t done very well last semester. I did pass my classes though, but wasn’t enough in the school’s opinion. He once thought I was in denial since I “denied” the fact that I wasn’t making the grade. The school's dean put me on probation because in their view I didn’t want help therefore I didn’t want to be there. That is untrue. Most of the time, this is the reason for probation. I’ve been asked this question many times before, and I learned it’s better to admit you’re in denial. I knew if I didn’t, I would just yet into a complex loop of lies. At first, he didn’t believe me when I told him that I was paying attention to whatever was said at school. I never was talking to anyone during class 95% of the time, therefore I was listening and doing most of the assignments during class. College is going to almost guarantee me a job with good pay, so staying in school will be a good idea. I like to be a technician as my career, and I don’t really like Cisco. I don’t think anyone does…. I hope that I’ll do well on my final chance to do great. I plan to do the writing questions after the review questions in each chapter in the Cisco book during the summer so I’m not behind during the year. It’s better to be safe than not – in case I get stumped in Cisco. I had a taste last year in Cisco1, and the course is entirely at Cisco.netacad.net reading and doing the tests online. It’s the 21st century way for big corporations to have proof that a particular student is succeeding or doing poorly. Cisco handbooks are hard to understand anyways, although reading is understanding, right? I started to get ahead of myself and pondered how it was a conspiracy against me in my head. Speaking your thoughts out loud can be dangerous. So after a night of pondering….I concluded conspiracies are more trouble than their worth so I stopped thinking of this nonsense, and paranoia and started thinking of how I can ensure success over there. Had this never happened, I wouldn’t have gone through the grief of having dad telling me to get a job instead or stay in school. I was a nice student, hardly ever rude, and asked a lot of questions. So it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. I also had a habit at handing my work in late in both classes.
The top blog on the Modblog talked about how CISCO deals with hackers….and it just so happens that I am apart of that small group that takes CISCO classes though-out the Fall – Spring schedule at WITC. How do you think I feel about hackers? It is true that many businesses buy CISCO routers for the sake of having the most sound hacker proof router out there. Truth is any router or switch board can be hacked, Cisco just follows the rules of IEEE more closely than most. This little routers and switch boards have their own firewall to block alien data from entering. I like to use alien data because it sounds cool not that people use “alien data” as a technical term. Businesses are also coming to Cisco because the networking giant guarantees Gigabit bandwidth luxuries all the time. All the government buildings stick with CISCO because they fear they won’t get high quality support from other vendors, Hewitt Packard is an example. Time is Data, therefore data is money. I’m going for the A++ certification at school. A++ is 2 grades lower than the Cisco certification, but I’ll still receive a good salary in the end. If you have CISCO certification than you achieved the Doctorate of Networking and everyone will want you working for them. In A++, you can take the test for free, and can re-take the test for better competing scores as long as you pay extra for them. Hopefully half of those employers who want CISCO certification employees also want a few A++ certification employees. Hoping that’s the case.
I like to say I love my Yahoo.com account. The only junk email I got in my account is from those Tigerdirect spammers and the Nintendo Webring I signed up over a year ago. They keep sending me news I don’t want. I unsubscribed to it and they wouldn’t stop sending me emails. When ever some gamer puts in a comment it is sent to everyone’s email address. MSN messenger is great, never had spam on it, ever. Only one bad thing that MSN messenger doesn’t have is an option to receive offline messages. I use Trillian so I have my AIM, ICQ and MSN accounts online whenever I’m on. I also have X-Fire, that’s not my primary account.
My cousin, David, is in Japan somewhere now. He’s getting Internet sometime, so I’ll speak to him soon. I wouldn’t be surprise if he learns to speak fluid Japanese while he’s there. I never picked up a second language myself. His cell number is out of service, must have been a domestic only cell phone number? That sucks! He says Japan is 6 hours ahead of our time so I’ll have to wake up at 1pm to talk to him. That’s disappointing. Two weeks ago he mentioned that he’s probably going to log onto Diablo 2 there soon. He didn’t call me this week yet. I wonder if he lost interest in me? I want that Panasonic Q console. It is a Gamecube / DVD player hybrid. If Nintendo still sells that in Japan - that would be very cool or the PSX (PS2 / DVD burner hybrid). Both of these consoles are rare in the USA, but than again I have two DVD burners. So if you wanted to record TV shows onto DVD than that would give you that option. Hearing how much PS2 breaks down after usage, I wonder how the PSX will hold up. Don’t get this confused with the abbreviations PSX meaning Playstation versions 1 and 2. PSone is version 3 of Playstation. The first Playstation released in 1994 had an expansion port for the GameShark or similar port. As Sony decided that there is no need for it, the Playstation version 2 came out without the extra port. This helped drive the price down. The PSone is about half the size as the PS version 2, and was released in 1999 bringing Playstation to 99 dollars.
I beat Star Trek Elite Force II…it was fun, a little short. It’s funny, the aliens act human. The blue guy is very funny. Fighting the Romaneons was strange, I thought they were on our side. Maybe they were renegade Romaneons? I’m thinking I’m going back to play Diablo 2 as my primary choice just because it’s online and the game is so addicting. I read somewhere that the game is unbalanced in gameplay, but after playing it for years, I realized that it’s not the unbalanced gameplay, it’s the straight forward hack ‘n slash gameplay that never gets old. I have friends on Xfire that play Diablo 2, and I like to meet up with them. It feels like I’m getting something accomplished there. With Mountain Dew by my keyboard and Winamp playing my favorite playlist, I am ready for battle. My account could also be used in Warcraft III, but I’m not a big Warcraft fan. The battles are too short and I dislike the Player vs. Player aspect. That’s one of the reasons I played Neverwinter Nights last year. I thought I could fight hordes of enemies in dungeons. My friend, Bob, hates Diablo 2, so he’ll never play it. My cousin, Brian, is in love with Diablo 2. I never play him though. He plays on US East, I play on US West on Battlenet.
Freeware Pick of the Day
Xfire 0.14 – Xfire.com – A gaming chat client that automatically loads and connects to the server another player is using. It shows that a buddy/friend is playing a particular game. The client has not yet included popular instant messengers like MSN, ICQ and Yahoo. I have a feeling that it will incorporate them as new releases come available.
I have to convince my school I can go back to school, even under probation, I can make the grade at school. Dad and I had a long talk about staying in school. I haven’t done very well last semester. I did pass my classes though, but wasn’t enough in the school’s opinion. He once thought I was in denial since I “denied” the fact that I wasn’t making the grade. The school's dean put me on probation because in their view I didn’t want help therefore I didn’t want to be there. That is untrue. Most of the time, this is the reason for probation. I’ve been asked this question many times before, and I learned it’s better to admit you’re in denial. I knew if I didn’t, I would just yet into a complex loop of lies. At first, he didn’t believe me when I told him that I was paying attention to whatever was said at school. I never was talking to anyone during class 95% of the time, therefore I was listening and doing most of the assignments during class. College is going to almost guarantee me a job with good pay, so staying in school will be a good idea. I like to be a technician as my career, and I don’t really like Cisco. I don’t think anyone does…. I hope that I’ll do well on my final chance to do great. I plan to do the writing questions after the review questions in each chapter in the Cisco book during the summer so I’m not behind during the year. It’s better to be safe than not – in case I get stumped in Cisco. I had a taste last year in Cisco1, and the course is entirely at Cisco.netacad.net reading and doing the tests online. It’s the 21st century way for big corporations to have proof that a particular student is succeeding or doing poorly. Cisco handbooks are hard to understand anyways, although reading is understanding, right? I started to get ahead of myself and pondered how it was a conspiracy against me in my head. Speaking your thoughts out loud can be dangerous. So after a night of pondering….I concluded conspiracies are more trouble than their worth so I stopped thinking of this nonsense, and paranoia and started thinking of how I can ensure success over there. Had this never happened, I wouldn’t have gone through the grief of having dad telling me to get a job instead or stay in school. I was a nice student, hardly ever rude, and asked a lot of questions. So it wouldn’t be a conspiracy. I also had a habit at handing my work in late in both classes.
The top blog on the Modblog talked about how CISCO deals with hackers….and it just so happens that I am apart of that small group that takes CISCO classes though-out the Fall – Spring schedule at WITC. How do you think I feel about hackers? It is true that many businesses buy CISCO routers for the sake of having the most sound hacker proof router out there. Truth is any router or switch board can be hacked, Cisco just follows the rules of IEEE more closely than most. This little routers and switch boards have their own firewall to block alien data from entering. I like to use alien data because it sounds cool not that people use “alien data” as a technical term. Businesses are also coming to Cisco because the networking giant guarantees Gigabit bandwidth luxuries all the time. All the government buildings stick with CISCO because they fear they won’t get high quality support from other vendors, Hewitt Packard is an example. Time is Data, therefore data is money. I’m going for the A++ certification at school. A++ is 2 grades lower than the Cisco certification, but I’ll still receive a good salary in the end. If you have CISCO certification than you achieved the Doctorate of Networking and everyone will want you working for them. In A++, you can take the test for free, and can re-take the test for better competing scores as long as you pay extra for them. Hopefully half of those employers who want CISCO certification employees also want a few A++ certification employees. Hoping that’s the case.
I like to say I love my Yahoo.com account. The only junk email I got in my account is from those Tigerdirect spammers and the Nintendo Webring I signed up over a year ago. They keep sending me news I don’t want. I unsubscribed to it and they wouldn’t stop sending me emails. When ever some gamer puts in a comment it is sent to everyone’s email address. MSN messenger is great, never had spam on it, ever. Only one bad thing that MSN messenger doesn’t have is an option to receive offline messages. I use Trillian so I have my AIM, ICQ and MSN accounts online whenever I’m on. I also have X-Fire, that’s not my primary account.
My cousin, David, is in Japan somewhere now. He’s getting Internet sometime, so I’ll speak to him soon. I wouldn’t be surprise if he learns to speak fluid Japanese while he’s there. I never picked up a second language myself. His cell number is out of service, must have been a domestic only cell phone number? That sucks! He says Japan is 6 hours ahead of our time so I’ll have to wake up at 1pm to talk to him. That’s disappointing. Two weeks ago he mentioned that he’s probably going to log onto Diablo 2 there soon. He didn’t call me this week yet. I wonder if he lost interest in me? I want that Panasonic Q console. It is a Gamecube / DVD player hybrid. If Nintendo still sells that in Japan - that would be very cool or the PSX (PS2 / DVD burner hybrid). Both of these consoles are rare in the USA, but than again I have two DVD burners. So if you wanted to record TV shows onto DVD than that would give you that option. Hearing how much PS2 breaks down after usage, I wonder how the PSX will hold up. Don’t get this confused with the abbreviations PSX meaning Playstation versions 1 and 2. PSone is version 3 of Playstation. The first Playstation released in 1994 had an expansion port for the GameShark or similar port. As Sony decided that there is no need for it, the Playstation version 2 came out without the extra port. This helped drive the price down. The PSone is about half the size as the PS version 2, and was released in 1999 bringing Playstation to 99 dollars.
I beat Star Trek Elite Force II…it was fun, a little short. It’s funny, the aliens act human. The blue guy is very funny. Fighting the Romaneons was strange, I thought they were on our side. Maybe they were renegade Romaneons? I’m thinking I’m going back to play Diablo 2 as my primary choice just because it’s online and the game is so addicting. I read somewhere that the game is unbalanced in gameplay, but after playing it for years, I realized that it’s not the unbalanced gameplay, it’s the straight forward hack ‘n slash gameplay that never gets old. I have friends on Xfire that play Diablo 2, and I like to meet up with them. It feels like I’m getting something accomplished there. With Mountain Dew by my keyboard and Winamp playing my favorite playlist, I am ready for battle. My account could also be used in Warcraft III, but I’m not a big Warcraft fan. The battles are too short and I dislike the Player vs. Player aspect. That’s one of the reasons I played Neverwinter Nights last year. I thought I could fight hordes of enemies in dungeons. My friend, Bob, hates Diablo 2, so he’ll never play it. My cousin, Brian, is in love with Diablo 2. I never play him though. He plays on US East, I play on US West on Battlenet.
Freeware Pick of the Day
Xfire 0.14 – Xfire.com – A gaming chat client that automatically loads and connects to the server another player is using. It shows that a buddy/friend is playing a particular game. The client has not yet included popular instant messengers like MSN, ICQ and Yahoo. I have a feeling that it will incorporate them as new releases come available.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
I installed 1 more GByte stick in my PC today!
Hello once again. I got another Gigabyte of dual channel RAM, and eventually I installed it! The “Ultra 1 Gigabyte PC2700” came in the mail today all the way from Tigerdirect, Florida for $250. There is a smaller difference than when I went from 256-MB to 786 MB on my custom PC, which drastically increased by performance for games. From my gaming experience my custom pc can do Unreal Tournament 2004 at 1200x912 32-bit colors at 66 frames per second. I have a 256-bit Geforce 4, and with one of ‘em laser mice….I don’t have enough room on my desk to use it so I use it on a book in the top drawer. My way of thinking is reuse the older monitors so I have more desktop performance money. I was seriously thinking of getting a 17” LCD screen, but for that amount you can get a regular 21” monitor at a nicer resolution. Of course, my Dell is faster than my custom PC. My custom PC is 1.2 GHz slower than my Dell, and with a lot less RAM. Okay, in terms of UT2004, you know how the game maps take about 14 seconds to load? It takes about 8 seconds now. The graphics of course are lossness. My computer now does 59 frames per second on average at 1600x1200 res. I can’t tell very well, but it looks as if it’s running 60 frames. So the loading times have been cut in half because I put in another gigabyte of RAM. This is really nice, right! I have tried Unreal Tournament, and it runs very fast - maybe 200 frames per second. The graphics quality is over clocked, and it’s running at maximum resolution. Every game loads quicker than with 1 GB as if 1 GB weren’t enough already. What is there to say? Benchmarking is difficult when comparing 1024 MB to 2048 MB. It’s like comparing a 27” TV with a 31” TV, not that much difference except for the price. Except if you are the die-hard gamer who needs the best performance possible…no one needs more than one gigabyte of RAM to run today’s programs / games. It’s just very cool if you do eventually put that amount in your PC.
I went to WITC, although I was under probation, and downloaded the much needed America’s Army patch. I downloaded some Unreal Tournament 2004 maps at UT2004maps.com. I might add more maps tonight and play them, not online because of my very, very, low ping. So I play against the computer….which isn’t bad….it’s just not as fun. I don’t mine Onslaught, but I prefer Team Deathmatch myself. Team Deathmatch is best because I like players on my team. Capture the Flag is cool too, but it doesn’t have the oomph of Team Deathmatch or Onslaught. UT2004 can also play UT2003 maps, I only have a few I downloaded off the Internet. They aren’t the originals. This guy booted me out of the room, and he said, “Dude, move to a different room.” Then I went through an unlocked door into a next room to get on the Internet (cause the room I was in wasn’t hooked up), he saw me and said, “Dude, you can’t be in this room. You must be in the room I told you to be in!” I mean I dislike being called ‘dude’ from someone who I don’t know. I do take it as a friendly jester for the most part. I don’t plan to come back until school starts again. I feel great about being let back in school yet I also feel like I’m going to mess up somehow, and the year hasn’t started yet. This is a normal feeling for most people.
For half of the day I had really nothing to do so I opened UnrealEdit 3.0, and I experimented with the tool bar. Right now it looks like a grid so I tried dragging stairways and walls to it. Anyways this is the 2nd or 3rd time I worked with this, and so far I learned how to use the SHIFT, and mouse to move around the 3D grid. I don’t know how to ‘paint’ my map. I know how to add ogg vorbis to my map. Yay! I have this wire-frame map with music. Yay!...talk about boring stuff….learning this program couldn’t be more boring. If it takes longer than 3 days to get this, than I’m going to go back to play the game, not make maps. Surfing the Internet or playing Unreal Tournament 2004 is much more fun. I say that to myself a lot so I don’t forget. It seems that most games that come out including first person shooters or RPGs come with their own map editor. The Neverwinter Nights map editor could quite possibly be the easiest map editor I’ve played with. All the objects and characters were loaded on screen. The editor automatically generates a random map or I can modify one just by dragging pieces of land from the toolbar onto the 3D map. Building a map works a lot like the toolbar in Simcity 2000/3000/4. All the games have an option to import MP3s into their editor.
Doom 3 Release Date announced
I like to again thank those who come to my webpage on a regular bases. I don’t always talk about games as you can see. iD Software confirmed that September 15, 2004 will be the official release date for Doom III in the USA. That’ll be nice. I hear that it will not have a big multiplayer although the mod community can make more Deathmatch & Capture the Flag maps and some much needed multiplayer enhancements not in the retail version. I read off Doom3.com that the multiplayer aspect of Doom 3 will be very basic.
I am getting into the alien / space exploration / weird science stuff. Besides Planetary Radio, I heard about this radio station that streams audio over the Internet at http://Coasttocoastam.com. It’s about weird news such as space exploration, and odd alien sightings. This Coast to Coast AM can’t be any weirder than Planetary Radio. http://www.plantary.org/radio/ The talk show hosts on that talk about some crazy space phonation stuff at times. To listen to the broadcast free go to this site http://www.streamaudio.com/radiostations/list.asp?type=state&criteria=MN-Minnesota, and listen to it every weekday at 12:00AM Central Standard Time.
Also download Quintessential Player [http://quinnware.com], and stream in this Californian station http://www.ksco.com/kscolive.m3u to listen to Coast to Coast AM or go to bed while ripping it to your hard drive using its unique MP3 ripping feature. The stream and the program are free.
Most Ridiculous News of the Day, “10 year anniversary of unrevealing of Roswell.” I watched the movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” It was about marions which reminded me about Roswell. In 1959, a Marion escaped from Area 51 (a top secret government facility by Rachel, Nevada to return to ‘his’ home world before ‘we’ caught ‘him’. The other Marion was killed, and brought back to Area 51 whose body chemistry was examined (as you see in the movie Independence Day). The Army later sealed off an area in Mexico where “a sphere” containing space technology was taken back to some faulty also to be studied. This incident was called Roswell Incident (Roswell for short). The government classified the activity as weather balloons recover exercise. After all they don’t exist. Remember - in 1959 - no one had satellites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere because they weren’t invented yet except for maybe Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. The first time I heard about it was when I watched the cartoon show, “The New Adventures of Johnny Quest” which had an episode on Roswell 8 years ago when it first appeared on Cartoon Network. After all, there are no such things as aliens. I watched the whole mini-series of “They” on the SciFi channel, and the series had their own version of Roswell. It was directed by Steven Steilberg, the same director of “Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind”. Just remember there isn’t any such thing as marions until we have proof of them. And don’t think of connecting the Face of Mars with ancient alien technology because if you believe in that sort thing than watch the movie, “Mission to Mars.” To read the official unclassified Roswell report, go to http://www.af.mil/lib/roswell.html.
Information on Area 51 (Fun Links)
1. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/area51.html
2. http://www.roswellnm.org/
3. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ritson/scispi/roswell/main.shtml
I went to WITC, although I was under probation, and downloaded the much needed America’s Army patch. I downloaded some Unreal Tournament 2004 maps at UT2004maps.com. I might add more maps tonight and play them, not online because of my very, very, low ping. So I play against the computer….which isn’t bad….it’s just not as fun. I don’t mine Onslaught, but I prefer Team Deathmatch myself. Team Deathmatch is best because I like players on my team. Capture the Flag is cool too, but it doesn’t have the oomph of Team Deathmatch or Onslaught. UT2004 can also play UT2003 maps, I only have a few I downloaded off the Internet. They aren’t the originals. This guy booted me out of the room, and he said, “Dude, move to a different room.” Then I went through an unlocked door into a next room to get on the Internet (cause the room I was in wasn’t hooked up), he saw me and said, “Dude, you can’t be in this room. You must be in the room I told you to be in!” I mean I dislike being called ‘dude’ from someone who I don’t know. I do take it as a friendly jester for the most part. I don’t plan to come back until school starts again. I feel great about being let back in school yet I also feel like I’m going to mess up somehow, and the year hasn’t started yet. This is a normal feeling for most people.
For half of the day I had really nothing to do so I opened UnrealEdit 3.0, and I experimented with the tool bar. Right now it looks like a grid so I tried dragging stairways and walls to it. Anyways this is the 2nd or 3rd time I worked with this, and so far I learned how to use the SHIFT, and mouse to move around the 3D grid. I don’t know how to ‘paint’ my map. I know how to add ogg vorbis to my map. Yay! I have this wire-frame map with music. Yay!...talk about boring stuff….learning this program couldn’t be more boring. If it takes longer than 3 days to get this, than I’m going to go back to play the game, not make maps. Surfing the Internet or playing Unreal Tournament 2004 is much more fun. I say that to myself a lot so I don’t forget. It seems that most games that come out including first person shooters or RPGs come with their own map editor. The Neverwinter Nights map editor could quite possibly be the easiest map editor I’ve played with. All the objects and characters were loaded on screen. The editor automatically generates a random map or I can modify one just by dragging pieces of land from the toolbar onto the 3D map. Building a map works a lot like the toolbar in Simcity 2000/3000/4. All the games have an option to import MP3s into their editor.
Doom 3 Release Date announced
I like to again thank those who come to my webpage on a regular bases. I don’t always talk about games as you can see. iD Software confirmed that September 15, 2004 will be the official release date for Doom III in the USA. That’ll be nice. I hear that it will not have a big multiplayer although the mod community can make more Deathmatch & Capture the Flag maps and some much needed multiplayer enhancements not in the retail version. I read off Doom3.com that the multiplayer aspect of Doom 3 will be very basic.
I am getting into the alien / space exploration / weird science stuff. Besides Planetary Radio, I heard about this radio station that streams audio over the Internet at http://Coasttocoastam.com. It’s about weird news such as space exploration, and odd alien sightings. This Coast to Coast AM can’t be any weirder than Planetary Radio. http://www.plantary.org/radio/ The talk show hosts on that talk about some crazy space phonation stuff at times. To listen to the broadcast free go to this site http://www.streamaudio.com/radiostations/list.asp?type=state&criteria=MN-Minnesota, and listen to it every weekday at 12:00AM Central Standard Time.
Also download Quintessential Player [http://quinnware.com], and stream in this Californian station http://www.ksco.com/kscolive.m3u to listen to Coast to Coast AM or go to bed while ripping it to your hard drive using its unique MP3 ripping feature. The stream and the program are free.
Most Ridiculous News of the Day, “10 year anniversary of unrevealing of Roswell.” I watched the movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” It was about marions which reminded me about Roswell. In 1959, a Marion escaped from Area 51 (a top secret government facility by Rachel, Nevada to return to ‘his’ home world before ‘we’ caught ‘him’. The other Marion was killed, and brought back to Area 51 whose body chemistry was examined (as you see in the movie Independence Day). The Army later sealed off an area in Mexico where “a sphere” containing space technology was taken back to some faulty also to be studied. This incident was called Roswell Incident (Roswell for short). The government classified the activity as weather balloons recover exercise. After all they don’t exist. Remember - in 1959 - no one had satellites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere because they weren’t invented yet except for maybe Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. The first time I heard about it was when I watched the cartoon show, “The New Adventures of Johnny Quest” which had an episode on Roswell 8 years ago when it first appeared on Cartoon Network. After all, there are no such things as aliens. I watched the whole mini-series of “They” on the SciFi channel, and the series had their own version of Roswell. It was directed by Steven Steilberg, the same director of “Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind”. Just remember there isn’t any such thing as marions until we have proof of them. And don’t think of connecting the Face of Mars with ancient alien technology because if you believe in that sort thing than watch the movie, “Mission to Mars.” To read the official unclassified Roswell report, go to http://www.af.mil/lib/roswell.html.
Information on Area 51 (Fun Links)
1. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/area51.html
2. http://www.roswellnm.org/
3. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ritson/scispi/roswell/main.shtml
Home Movies on SVCD or DVD?
Welcome back to my humble site! I have to say congratulations to myself because when someone types in “Ian’s Blog” in the Yahoo.com search bar http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ian%27s+blog&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-pull-web-t&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt, I am the 15th listing. Having such a great place on the Internet excites me. Renegade Viking has the #1 spot on both Yahoo and Google search engines, type in "Renegade Viking's Webpage" in the text box. This wasn’t the first time I got noticed by the big search engines, when I was formally known as Hoppymister, Spidey, and Nightwalker, they all had Google / Yahoo listings too. Red Dragon Productions was a nice site until I deleted it. I had Dreamcast, N64, Gamecube, and Saturn reviews on it. I tried reviving it, but it’ll never seem to gather as many hits as it did in 2000 – 2001. I had 20 hits a day then, the graphics weren’t too horribly out of date as one would except from neglect over time. RDP had custom graphics with a dragon, a nice link menu and background. I wasn’t smart and deleted it else I would give a hyperlink to everyone. The whole site originally was on a couple of floppy disks although somehow they don’t exist anymore. If I remember right, the disks got corrupted from constant use.
I did two recreations of Red Dragon Productions after the old Geocities site got deleted. They aren’t updated however.
• http://www.geocities.com/nightwalkers101/rdp_mainpage.html
• http://www.geocities.com/nightwalkers101/gamearchive_v4.html
I know, I am really not supposed to talk to strangers at the videogame store, but I talked to the clerk there yesterday. He always cuts me 10 dollars off of my buy since I am one of the stores best customers. Are you surprised? No really - are you? I spent 80 dollars, and received six games in return. I spent 2 hours there just trying to confirm my decision. After all it is my money. I knew I was going to get Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox. I have Panzer Dragoon I and II for Sega Saturn. Never played either of them, both discs are in excellent condition thanks to resurfacing at the game store. As for my Saturn…it’s in very good condition. I bought 3 PSX games, and got Ridge Racer as a bonus. I know it’s an old game…it is a free game, that’s the beauty of it. Ridge Racer was one of the launch titles for the Playstation. When the development team tried making Ridge Racer Type 4 run at 60 frames per second instead of 30 FPS, proved too expensive, they used that technology for Ridge Racer so it wasn’t wasted. Ridge Racer became the only racing game that could run at 60 FPS on PSX. If you look closely the interface in Ridge Racer looks a lot like racing games in the 16-bit generation. Namco tried saying that Ridge Racer ran in “high resolution.” Ha! High resolution to what? Super Mario Kart or F-Zero? Anyhow, I was playing R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, and I got passed the first and second circuits on the first try. That says a lot about my driving skills, huh? I like the music in this game. It has a certain jazzy beat to it, which I like to drive too. Who says good music doesn’t help you win races? It is true! It’s much better than that “Garbage – I think I’m Paranoid” tune we hear over and over in Gran Turismo 2. PSX.IGN.com gave GT 2 a 9.3 out of 10. Gran Turismo 3 - A Spec had over 50 songs. Last game I got was Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The truth of it was I couldn’t buy Orge Battle 64 at the game store so I bought Conker’s Bad Fur Day instead. Microsoft bought Rareware, the famous Nintendo developer, for 133 million dollars. *Snuffle* Ah, who cares, I own an Xbox, I’ll get “Conker Live and Uncut.” A note on IGN.com says that the Conker demo at E3 was drop dead gorgeous! I looked at the screenshots, and it did look like Conker was much fuzzier than the N64 game. Maybe with some luck, Microsoft will publish Perfect Dark 2 for both Xbox and Windows? Some rumors on the Internet that Microsoft plans to buy Capcom next. With out certainly. The software giant certainly has the money, although Capcom also has to agree to it too. It’s not how much money Capcom is worth, it’s how much profit Microsoft can make after Capcom sells stock to them. Microsoft can easily make up the deficit by selling more Windows XP Upgrade CDs. Plus, if this were the case, I think someone at Microsoft wants Onimusha 2, Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, and Resident Evil on Xbox very badly. [Note: Capcom put RE2 and RE3 on PC]
As for non-game related news today, I went to school earlier this week to download Ulead Video Studio 8, I’m sure there are better, but none that will let me download a trial version. I want to film the Internet and edit it and show my Internet short film on TV from a SVCD or if that’s not possible, a DVD. I would use DIVX to compress the video except the DVD player we own won’t support DIVx only MPEG 2, so I’m out of luck. This isn’t the first time I made a home movie. I edited a VHS tape with Apple iMovie on the new ambulance building in River Falls, WI. I volunteered to make a short-film quality video last year in 12th grade. I edited out where the camera shook, deleting the blurry camera shots, and some unneeded talking until it was downsized as much as I thought it should have been. I wanted to do voiceovers, but that would take more time, and I couldn’t find a microphone to speak into. I could have brought one from home, but I didn’t to have done that. I put the edited stuff back on VHS tape via 'digital to analog video in' adapter (hub). And guess what? They wanted me to edit it more and make it even shorter. I said, “No!” Most of the time I was willing to help others computer problems all except for the typing, I was against typing for others. There was someone else at school, whose computer skills wasn’t really known (known to his buddies in secret), and this guy gave me the creeps in 12th grade. He knew everything I knew and he wasn’t going to college for it. He gave me a creepy yet strange erg to speak to him about Linux. I found out he knew a bit about Red Hat. I ignored my feelings about his creepiness and tried to be friendly with him for once and share a few pointers, but he barely spoke a word to me at school. Could it be that he was hinting that he hacked into stuff regularly? I stopped seeing him after high school ended.
At the end there was a celebration party, and Dr. Mottaz (our school coordinator) was there. As part of my job as an intern at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls - I had to make a film, I chose my Caribbean cruise, and ported it to DVD via Apple iDVD to verify that the DVD-RW worked in their burning room. The first working copy of my edited movie I kept for myself. I could tell that the compression wasn’t very good since looked on the flip side and 7/10s of the DVD disc was a dark shade, the movie was only 50 minutes long! I want to know how someone can compress Lord of the Rings Return of the King, a three hour movie with MPEGII on DVD? What technique does the movie industry use? Theoretically the movie would run out of space, but it didn’t. I also heard of this 9.4GB DVD format? The industry calls these DVD-9s and I just found out about it today. I haven’t seen 9.4 GB DVDR packs at Wal-mart, that’s probably why. I mean Wal-mart doesn't sell them at all. Anyways to get back on topic here, I also managed to make 15 minute short film of myself complete with dialog, background music, and a DVD title screen. I really didn’t have a clue what I was talking about…just said anything for a long time, and I added that to the same DVD which I gave to the school. I can try to make a DIVX compression version of MPEG 2, but MPEG4 codec can’t encode MPEG2 versions, for the same reason MP4 ACC audio can’t be used to help encode MP3. The new DVD players on the market support Divx. If the text is somewhat readable on TV, that’s all I care about. In my first Internet based home video, I plan to have voice-overs, and maybe even music playing in the background…. I have audio software saved on CD for that sort of thing. It would be nice if I only spend 5 hours to create a decent quality video on the Internet, to show people, edit it, add music and copy it to SVCD or DVD.
I spent some time using Ulead Video Studio 8.0 and its pretty good, very easy-to-use interface and simplified options. I can like go to the Window that compresses. Ulead also gave recommendations that I need. Ulead Video Studio 8 doesn’t have a MPEG II encoder either. I was currently searching sites off Google for some hints on where the plugin folder is. I haven’t tried adding Xing MPEG encoder with it yet - don't know which directory to put the files in? If anyone knows...be sure to let me know, okay? Real Interactive makes one of the best MPEG encoders available, or whatever compression polls on Afterdawn.com say it to be. I have heard very good news about Real's MP3 ACC audio encoder, Xing. There is also Xvid, but I don’t know how good this encoder is. I only know I can fit 30 minutes of high quality video about 440x440 resolution on SVCD (Super Video Compact Disc) with the default settings. I may have to compress what I have in High quality MPEG1, and than find a MPEG 2 encoder to burn to SVCD or DVD. I don't know whether or not SVCD supports MPEGII?
The first video I made was on a VCD and the video image is really, really small. The big deal about this is MPEG is nowhere near as compressed as MPEG2. I have movies like Family Guy, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Tombstone, and Tomb Raider on CDR thanks to DivX compression. The resolution is twice as large. People who like to rip DVDs do this sort of thing, I don’t. My first disc worked playing the 35 minute short film on TV, put the sound cut out in the last 15 minutes. The video was really small, I couldn’t see anything, not even the graphics - it was just a blurry image through-out the whole movie. I am going to have to burn on DVDR now, but before that I’ll have to make a new video sometime. I hate to use DVDs up. DVDs aren’t overly expensive, although I only would get a 10 pack of DVDRs for the same price of 50 pack of CDRs. Hmm - since 6 CDs = 1 DVD, I would get more MBs for the buck if I bought DVDs. I would even get more MB for the buck if I invested my dollars into a DVD-9 pack, if I found a vender that carries them. For someone who’s not ripping DVDs like me, DVDs are just an oversized option. When the time comes that I need something more than 700 MB, DVDs would be a real option. Right now I backup everything I download onto CD every month. Last month I made 6 hard drive cd backups which are uncommon for a modem user to do.
I’ve been drinking a lot of Mountain Dew lately. I take in about two 24 ounce bottles daily. Mt. Dew tastes really good, and is very hard to put down believe me. Does Mt. Dew slow your thinking process or speed it up? It must have speeded my IQ just a tad since my hand / eye coordination was better than without Mountain Dew. Good for games! I beat R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 in less than 2 hours on normal setting. This includes learning how to drive, which was easy for the most part if it wasn’t for the game’s only limitation, only 6 tracks to race on. And during it all, I was speaking to the game throughout the race.
I am going to school for Industrial Network technician, but I also know basic knowledge for other things such as game emulation, website building, desktop management, finding files quickly off the Internet, using Redhat Linux OS, exedra… It’s creepy to know someone who can figure out virtually any computer problem that accurse with networking, and just about everything else. Someone who knows a lot about how to make 10 different types of cable including cross over cable. I only know how to make 2 types right now (phone line cable and RJ-45.) The scary thought of talking to a fellow computer user who has little interest with the subject you’re suggesting, which seems to only amuse him anyways since he is much more knowledgeable about it than I am. There is always someone out there that knows more than I do. Most times I never really worry about it since I’m in my room surfing the Internet, and everyone’s really friendly in giving advice on a certain problem. Where message boards are plentiful and where comments on help sites are just as plentiful. On this blog, I am already giving advice on stuff all the time. I often wish the real world would work this way and it doesn’t. Making choices are much easier online than in the real world. The real world doesn’t have rating systems. I often wonder if people go online to get away from it all interacting with blogs and instant messengers. Interesting enough, my CISCO class is entirely online. CISCO reading material is updated weekly. Such as when I took CISCO I nearly a year ago, I found myself reading information I never really came across before in my life. Which is normal for most people, but I continued to read the words and memorize it on the online class, doing my best at it. In 9th grade, I was the first student ever to do a math online course in the entire school (back in 1999). I did fairly well on it. It’s like the math course in a sense, but with out the text messaging. It goes to show that text messaging along with online help is really an advantage to just reading material. If only Norton Netware would allow MSN messenger to log in at school, that would be very, very cool! I found out that AOL and Yahoo instant messengers still log on with Norton Netware running. Text messaging could be used as a cheating device at WITC. In fact college students are getting away with this type of cheating.
Joyce told students that Cisco is now at version 3.2 and that the version is entirely different from 2.4, making earlier classes invalid. This makes all the power point presentations I got from Phil last year, worthless. V3.2 involves a lot of rewriting of a lot of the information. Cisco does this to make students like me angry because it’s a lot of re-reading in a slightly different way. I have to take CISCO 1 and 2 anyways as part of my curriculum this fall. I may find that I’ll have to login to cisco.netacad.net, and download the newest version, and try to decipher it before school starts on August 12th. That is if someone didn't find a rogue student and delete my old account!!!
I like to close this up saying that summer vacation so far has been fun. I’ve been entertained thus far, might as well be entertained a little longer. I’ll let everyone know now the Internet VCD turns out next time I write something. Bye!
Freeware Software Pick of the Week:
Burn4Free - www.burn4free.com - Create Audio CDs from MP3 files or real cd. or is great for backuping software to cds for free!
I did two recreations of Red Dragon Productions after the old Geocities site got deleted. They aren’t updated however.
• http://www.geocities.com/nightwalkers101/rdp_mainpage.html
• http://www.geocities.com/nightwalkers101/gamearchive_v4.html
I know, I am really not supposed to talk to strangers at the videogame store, but I talked to the clerk there yesterday. He always cuts me 10 dollars off of my buy since I am one of the stores best customers. Are you surprised? No really - are you? I spent 80 dollars, and received six games in return. I spent 2 hours there just trying to confirm my decision. After all it is my money. I knew I was going to get Panzer Dragoon Orta for Xbox. I have Panzer Dragoon I and II for Sega Saturn. Never played either of them, both discs are in excellent condition thanks to resurfacing at the game store. As for my Saturn…it’s in very good condition. I bought 3 PSX games, and got Ridge Racer as a bonus. I know it’s an old game…it is a free game, that’s the beauty of it. Ridge Racer was one of the launch titles for the Playstation. When the development team tried making Ridge Racer Type 4 run at 60 frames per second instead of 30 FPS, proved too expensive, they used that technology for Ridge Racer so it wasn’t wasted. Ridge Racer became the only racing game that could run at 60 FPS on PSX. If you look closely the interface in Ridge Racer looks a lot like racing games in the 16-bit generation. Namco tried saying that Ridge Racer ran in “high resolution.” Ha! High resolution to what? Super Mario Kart or F-Zero? Anyhow, I was playing R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, and I got passed the first and second circuits on the first try. That says a lot about my driving skills, huh? I like the music in this game. It has a certain jazzy beat to it, which I like to drive too. Who says good music doesn’t help you win races? It is true! It’s much better than that “Garbage – I think I’m Paranoid” tune we hear over and over in Gran Turismo 2. PSX.IGN.com gave GT 2 a 9.3 out of 10. Gran Turismo 3 - A Spec had over 50 songs. Last game I got was Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The truth of it was I couldn’t buy Orge Battle 64 at the game store so I bought Conker’s Bad Fur Day instead. Microsoft bought Rareware, the famous Nintendo developer, for 133 million dollars. *Snuffle* Ah, who cares, I own an Xbox, I’ll get “Conker Live and Uncut.” A note on IGN.com says that the Conker demo at E3 was drop dead gorgeous! I looked at the screenshots, and it did look like Conker was much fuzzier than the N64 game. Maybe with some luck, Microsoft will publish Perfect Dark 2 for both Xbox and Windows? Some rumors on the Internet that Microsoft plans to buy Capcom next. With out certainly. The software giant certainly has the money, although Capcom also has to agree to it too. It’s not how much money Capcom is worth, it’s how much profit Microsoft can make after Capcom sells stock to them. Microsoft can easily make up the deficit by selling more Windows XP Upgrade CDs. Plus, if this were the case, I think someone at Microsoft wants Onimusha 2, Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, and Resident Evil on Xbox very badly. [Note: Capcom put RE2 and RE3 on PC]
As for non-game related news today, I went to school earlier this week to download Ulead Video Studio 8, I’m sure there are better, but none that will let me download a trial version. I want to film the Internet and edit it and show my Internet short film on TV from a SVCD or if that’s not possible, a DVD. I would use DIVX to compress the video except the DVD player we own won’t support DIVx only MPEG 2, so I’m out of luck. This isn’t the first time I made a home movie. I edited a VHS tape with Apple iMovie on the new ambulance building in River Falls, WI. I volunteered to make a short-film quality video last year in 12th grade. I edited out where the camera shook, deleting the blurry camera shots, and some unneeded talking until it was downsized as much as I thought it should have been. I wanted to do voiceovers, but that would take more time, and I couldn’t find a microphone to speak into. I could have brought one from home, but I didn’t to have done that. I put the edited stuff back on VHS tape via 'digital to analog video in' adapter (hub). And guess what? They wanted me to edit it more and make it even shorter. I said, “No!” Most of the time I was willing to help others computer problems all except for the typing, I was against typing for others. There was someone else at school, whose computer skills wasn’t really known (known to his buddies in secret), and this guy gave me the creeps in 12th grade. He knew everything I knew and he wasn’t going to college for it. He gave me a creepy yet strange erg to speak to him about Linux. I found out he knew a bit about Red Hat. I ignored my feelings about his creepiness and tried to be friendly with him for once and share a few pointers, but he barely spoke a word to me at school. Could it be that he was hinting that he hacked into stuff regularly? I stopped seeing him after high school ended.
At the end there was a celebration party, and Dr. Mottaz (our school coordinator) was there. As part of my job as an intern at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls - I had to make a film, I chose my Caribbean cruise, and ported it to DVD via Apple iDVD to verify that the DVD-RW worked in their burning room. The first working copy of my edited movie I kept for myself. I could tell that the compression wasn’t very good since looked on the flip side and 7/10s of the DVD disc was a dark shade, the movie was only 50 minutes long! I want to know how someone can compress Lord of the Rings Return of the King, a three hour movie with MPEGII on DVD? What technique does the movie industry use? Theoretically the movie would run out of space, but it didn’t. I also heard of this 9.4GB DVD format? The industry calls these DVD-9s and I just found out about it today. I haven’t seen 9.4 GB DVDR packs at Wal-mart, that’s probably why. I mean Wal-mart doesn't sell them at all. Anyways to get back on topic here, I also managed to make 15 minute short film of myself complete with dialog, background music, and a DVD title screen. I really didn’t have a clue what I was talking about…just said anything for a long time, and I added that to the same DVD which I gave to the school. I can try to make a DIVX compression version of MPEG 2, but MPEG4 codec can’t encode MPEG2 versions, for the same reason MP4 ACC audio can’t be used to help encode MP3. The new DVD players on the market support Divx. If the text is somewhat readable on TV, that’s all I care about. In my first Internet based home video, I plan to have voice-overs, and maybe even music playing in the background…. I have audio software saved on CD for that sort of thing. It would be nice if I only spend 5 hours to create a decent quality video on the Internet, to show people, edit it, add music and copy it to SVCD or DVD.
I spent some time using Ulead Video Studio 8.0 and its pretty good, very easy-to-use interface and simplified options. I can like go to the Window that compresses. Ulead also gave recommendations that I need. Ulead Video Studio 8 doesn’t have a MPEG II encoder either. I was currently searching sites off Google for some hints on where the plugin folder is. I haven’t tried adding Xing MPEG encoder with it yet - don't know which directory to put the files in? If anyone knows...be sure to let me know, okay? Real Interactive makes one of the best MPEG encoders available, or whatever compression polls on Afterdawn.com say it to be. I have heard very good news about Real's MP3 ACC audio encoder, Xing. There is also Xvid, but I don’t know how good this encoder is. I only know I can fit 30 minutes of high quality video about 440x440 resolution on SVCD (Super Video Compact Disc) with the default settings. I may have to compress what I have in High quality MPEG1, and than find a MPEG 2 encoder to burn to SVCD or DVD. I don't know whether or not SVCD supports MPEGII?
The first video I made was on a VCD and the video image is really, really small. The big deal about this is MPEG is nowhere near as compressed as MPEG2. I have movies like Family Guy, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Tombstone, and Tomb Raider on CDR thanks to DivX compression. The resolution is twice as large. People who like to rip DVDs do this sort of thing, I don’t. My first disc worked playing the 35 minute short film on TV, put the sound cut out in the last 15 minutes. The video was really small, I couldn’t see anything, not even the graphics - it was just a blurry image through-out the whole movie. I am going to have to burn on DVDR now, but before that I’ll have to make a new video sometime. I hate to use DVDs up. DVDs aren’t overly expensive, although I only would get a 10 pack of DVDRs for the same price of 50 pack of CDRs. Hmm - since 6 CDs = 1 DVD, I would get more MBs for the buck if I bought DVDs. I would even get more MB for the buck if I invested my dollars into a DVD-9 pack, if I found a vender that carries them. For someone who’s not ripping DVDs like me, DVDs are just an oversized option. When the time comes that I need something more than 700 MB, DVDs would be a real option. Right now I backup everything I download onto CD every month. Last month I made 6 hard drive cd backups which are uncommon for a modem user to do.
I’ve been drinking a lot of Mountain Dew lately. I take in about two 24 ounce bottles daily. Mt. Dew tastes really good, and is very hard to put down believe me. Does Mt. Dew slow your thinking process or speed it up? It must have speeded my IQ just a tad since my hand / eye coordination was better than without Mountain Dew. Good for games! I beat R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 in less than 2 hours on normal setting. This includes learning how to drive, which was easy for the most part if it wasn’t for the game’s only limitation, only 6 tracks to race on. And during it all, I was speaking to the game throughout the race.
I am going to school for Industrial Network technician, but I also know basic knowledge for other things such as game emulation, website building, desktop management, finding files quickly off the Internet, using Redhat Linux OS, exedra… It’s creepy to know someone who can figure out virtually any computer problem that accurse with networking, and just about everything else. Someone who knows a lot about how to make 10 different types of cable including cross over cable. I only know how to make 2 types right now (phone line cable and RJ-45.) The scary thought of talking to a fellow computer user who has little interest with the subject you’re suggesting, which seems to only amuse him anyways since he is much more knowledgeable about it than I am. There is always someone out there that knows more than I do. Most times I never really worry about it since I’m in my room surfing the Internet, and everyone’s really friendly in giving advice on a certain problem. Where message boards are plentiful and where comments on help sites are just as plentiful. On this blog, I am already giving advice on stuff all the time. I often wish the real world would work this way and it doesn’t. Making choices are much easier online than in the real world. The real world doesn’t have rating systems. I often wonder if people go online to get away from it all interacting with blogs and instant messengers. Interesting enough, my CISCO class is entirely online. CISCO reading material is updated weekly. Such as when I took CISCO I nearly a year ago, I found myself reading information I never really came across before in my life. Which is normal for most people, but I continued to read the words and memorize it on the online class, doing my best at it. In 9th grade, I was the first student ever to do a math online course in the entire school (back in 1999). I did fairly well on it. It’s like the math course in a sense, but with out the text messaging. It goes to show that text messaging along with online help is really an advantage to just reading material. If only Norton Netware would allow MSN messenger to log in at school, that would be very, very cool! I found out that AOL and Yahoo instant messengers still log on with Norton Netware running. Text messaging could be used as a cheating device at WITC. In fact college students are getting away with this type of cheating.
Joyce told students that Cisco is now at version 3.2 and that the version is entirely different from 2.4, making earlier classes invalid. This makes all the power point presentations I got from Phil last year, worthless. V3.2 involves a lot of rewriting of a lot of the information. Cisco does this to make students like me angry because it’s a lot of re-reading in a slightly different way. I have to take CISCO 1 and 2 anyways as part of my curriculum this fall. I may find that I’ll have to login to cisco.netacad.net, and download the newest version, and try to decipher it before school starts on August 12th. That is if someone didn't find a rogue student and delete my old account!!!
I like to close this up saying that summer vacation so far has been fun. I’ve been entertained thus far, might as well be entertained a little longer. I’ll let everyone know now the Internet VCD turns out next time I write something. Bye!
Freeware Software Pick of the Week:
Burn4Free - www.burn4free.com - Create Audio CDs from MP3 files or real cd. or is great for backuping software to cds for free!
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