I got on the Diablo 2 LOD ladder! Pic to prove it

Hello Bloggers. I don’t think I ever covered Iraq in my entries so I got into reading this one guy’s Blog from Iraq and I was intrigued to read all of it. I hear Iraq’s new government a lot on satellite. But you know I didn’t think Iraqis had Internet over there. Anyways, you know American Army has Internet access through their camps. Yeah, they all have portable laptops right? So some of them besides emailing friends and family are doing Blogs instead. Blogs are relatively new to the Internet, right? Since this guy, Raid, quoted, “American radio is very interesting” [http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/ ] The military broadcast’s American Radio in Baghdad at 107.7 FM. It’s called SAWA. So far I know it broadcast’s advertisements that we may hear in Wisconsin. Not odd to us, just odd to Iraqis. I’m sure they have Fords, Chevys, Chrysler and Coca-cola over there. Raid doesn’t get it though, he’s an equal. Saddam isn’t controlling him anymore. The whole blog he writes sounds like he never is equal person to Americans. This is a misconception. He has the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness now. Hey Raid, go to http://www.UnitedStates.com. There’s a message board I think you should know about :) Who knows, maybe you can learn something.

There is a question I like to ask him. Do they have fast computers over there? Well if you got the Internet than maybe you can order one off EBay or Tigerdirect. That is if you can export to Iraq. Well my question really is, “American’s all know that the Internet is diggin’ it.” Do Iraqis know it though? I realize that Raid has Internet, though is he one of the fortunate few? I don’t know, Iraq is not a 3rd world country. Anyone who wants something can buy it. But I keep hearing how American’s are about 6 years a head of everyone else (as in 1st world countries) in terms of technology because Americans have all the wealth in the world. I can only say this….I don’t see it that way. Although I have all the games and television channels I can possibly watch, I can’t just buy anything.

Look at farming, less then 1% of American’s farm and we stop using DCT (weed/insect killer) 20 years ago. We advanced to genetically engineered crops. For what ever foods we can’t grow outside, we do it in high tech green houses. We can feed everyone in our country 10 times over. Maybe now, it’s closer to 11 times. Canada can do that, though I don’t know any other country that can do that. Iraq is desert as far as the eye can see. They have to import all their food.

Iraq now has a democratic government which will begin to run on it’s own starting today. Iraq is not going to change their flag. Iraq can make a lot of money giving away it’s oil. I don’t agree with our tax dollars help rebuilding Baghdad though. And why when we try to help, do Iraqis think they can loot the Red Cross? Did Germany help rebuild Warsaw, Belgium after World War II? Warsaw was rebuilt by US funds. And who rebuilt Pearl Harbor? US did. Did we ask the UN to fund rebuilding the World Trade Center? No, instead we made it a memorial. With all that money thrown around, somebody’s going to think we are all aristocrats, larger than life figures. Like me, I spent a lot of money on building / updating PCs, and I have no income. Am I a larger than life figure? I still ask my parents for money. I can’t even play Final Fantasy XI because my parents don’t want to though in 144 dollars a year, because it’s a waste of money. I tell you the thing I hate most about home is not having somewhere to work and not having a credit card so I can buy things online and subscribe to online games. But that’s just me.

For some more interesting news is I finally made it on the Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction ladder board.

The text that I circled is my character! It took me 2 weeks to go from 80 - 99. TheWierdSpearII can take out a cow with 3 strikes of her bow. But since I graducated hell difficulty, I just went for those Cow levels which give me the most experience for the time I put in. Now if I could keep my account up forever I'd be really happy. And thanks Gamefaqs.com for giving me a good reference to use, it was very helpful. I got a good start in the 1.09d patch so hell wouldn't be as hard as it would of been. Also I got to in the Aurrit Summit in all three difficluties in Act 5. So I gained 8 or 10 levels because I went dominated at 20, then 40, then 60 for full benefits.

renegade viking 5.0 here now

See my new webpage template! I am very proud of it! Go to www.Renegadeviking.cjb.net See you there!

I am apart of a new gaming IM service called Xfire [ www.xfire.com ] My account is "renegadeviking". Please download the 520K program and I will game with you.

I can play: Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction, Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament 2004, or Diablo: Hellfire online. But you can suggest Quake 3 Arena, Half-life or Unreal Tournament 2003. The easiest way to get to me is using the Modblog instant messenger. Thankyou!

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/

Spring Break Episode III - Seeing David again

Just as I was in the middle of writing this message I saved my mom’s life today by calling 911!!! I won’t get into the details since that will be rude.

Jolly good people! And good morning, I have now brought you in my final chapter of Spring Break 2004. Bob went to Arizona last week & probably on vacation. He’s back now. I didn’t speak to him.

David came over 2 days ago. He’s my cousin that I never see. I downloaded 45 GB from his hard drive via his USB connection. He had 53 feature length movies, 20 Family Guys, 14 Space Ghost Coast to Coasts (not all full episodes), MASH, CSI, and Simpsons. And an astonishing 2.5 GIGS of country music videos. He’s big on country. Each video averaged 40 MB. David works on helicopters mechanical aspects not electrical. David was good at playing Mario Kart Double Dash to my surprise! I burned 16 movies to CD already. We were trying to figure out how to network my computers. Both network cards looked good so it didn’t make sense to me how they were not commutating. My hub was hooked up too. O-well. It would have been fun. He doesn’t want to go anywhere or play any of the console game I want him to play.

And trance was playing at Walmart in the electronic’s section. I was freaking out because the song playing was ATB – Don’t Stop or was it Paul Van Dyk – Another Way? I listen to that song a lot and Walmart never showcased any trance track from what I know of. They’re trying to play trance Best Buy too. Best Buy was playing ahahahah remix from Zombie Nation. Stranger then Britney Spears, I tell yeah! American’s historically strayed away from it.

I have tried out Spellforce. IGN.com was absolutely right about it. Whenever you change your videocard settings to 2x anti analyzing, it will freeze. Well it looks like I’ll be playing Neverwinter Nights until Dungeon Siege 2 comesHowever, I got software acceleration and it played but had a terrible frame rate. Originally, I got spellforce because it had some half naked women on it, looked better than Neverwinter Nights, and the multiplayer is free. Now I’ll set back and name all the games that make you pay: Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, Horizons, and Anarchy Online. I hate to pay more for my games!!!!! I will someday because everyone’s doing it now-a-days.

I got Anarchy Online: Shadowlands for 20 bucks. Anarchy Online is the 2001 RPG of the Year by PC Gamer. At the time it was the best looking role playing game available for PC. It’s a space RPG set 200,000 years in the future. I read on the box that it included full versions of Anarchy Online, Notum Wars booster pack. Though I wasn’t thinking because on the bottom left corner it says, “Internet Connection Required. Additional online fees per month.” That sucks!

While I was in the Woodbury, MN, I got Redhat Professional Workstation, it came out after Redhat Linux 9.0. I think the $110 Operating System will help in school because our class uses Redhat 8, and I would get Redhat’s latest enhancements. I find it interesting that Redhat 8 comes with the student handbook as a free bonus. I will drop this class though, because I got too many 0s. The situation looks grim.

Spring Break Episode II - The Attack of the Ads!

Date: 3/18/04 at 1:29PM

Hello again. David, my cousin from the Navy, couldn’t make it over this week. He is got home on his spring break from Pensacola, Florida. He use to come over all the time until 2001. We played Dreamcast, N64. It was the good ol times. We had played games like Perfect Dark, Mario Kart, Crazy Taxi, and Rush 2049. Last time I saw him was in November 2003 right before he left. I think we both saw Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. David has MSN so we talk through that a lot. But the past week, he hasn’t been online. It just accord to me that we would be home.

Anyways, I was playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online, and web ads keep popping up. It got so bad that I had to reload the OS. I mean didn't I do this 3 weeks ago? What makes me f*cking mad is the popups slow down my connection and happen when I'm using the connection. The game's connection speed wasn't too bad. It ran at a solid 30 frames per second. I waited 3 months, I finally get it, and a few popups are distroying my fun!

Here are some spoilers for gamers. As you can see AMD Athlon 64 FX 53 out performs Pentium 4 EE. I'm going to wait until Athlon 64 FX 55 comes out and than I'm going to get my parents to purchase it for me. AMD stop making the Athlon 64 FX 51 so it'll drop in price quiet sinificently. I"m going to wait until I get 40 frames per second better on my games before I get my new processor for my custom PC. I don't know whether I'm going to get a new pc with all new hardware. Or just buy memory, motherboard/processor and stick the old processor in my Compaq. Getting a new PC from Tigerdirect will definally cut the cost for hardware installation by a professional. But your also paying for things you already have like a videocard, harddrive, DVDRWs, cases, modems and such.



http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-fx53_1.html

Anyways, I did nothing this week during Spring Break. It’s been “reel” fun. On Tuesday, I got Alice, a dark platformer, made by Rogue Entertainment. Played that game on Tuesday night until 5 in the morning. The graphics were good, maybe a little less polygonized than I’m use too, but that’s okay. Than yesterday, I bought Unreal Tournament 2004. I couldn’t have gone in Monday because Best Buy was sold out. I was also looking at cd players for my Jeep. I want one with MP3 support, but I can’t afford one, I had 140 dollars total. And a nice MP3 Player ran about $170 which is very cheap. I was looking at Sony or Panasonic or Kenwood though, top of the line stereos. The guy tried telling me what a MP3 was…I said to him, God sakes, if I didn’t know what a MP3 was, I would be kinda computer illiterate, which I ain’t.” I told him those exact words. I was trying to prevent him from asking, “Are you downloading MP3s illegally?” I would have said, “Doesn’t everyone these days….” I also got a game called Spellforce: Order of the Dawn. It’s a new RPG released this year. The quote “A splendid mix of Warcraft and Dungeon Siege” caught my eye. And the specs to run the game were pretty high, and I like high specs. I read off IGN.com that the game is a little buggy later. I usually don’t come to Best Buy this unprepared. I know I heard of Asheron's Call somewhere. IGN.com gave Asheron’s Call 2 a 9.2 out of 10. It’s the other RPG developed by Microsoft. Well there’s Freelancer, but I tend to hate space RPGs, even though Knights of the Old Republic was my 2nd favorite game until I bought UT2004. My PC performance doesn’t seem to affect Unreal Tournament 2004 at all. It’s been sluggish such as ag between opening Directories. I already checked for viruses. Only one exception, someone using Subseven tryied to hack into my PC this morning (around 1am), but Norton Firewall blocked him or her. I have played with Subseven myself once, but I could only get it work on my PC. It’s an older trojan horse, which is illegal spyware allowing the hacker to view directories, upload files to your computer like viruses, and give the victim popup messages, like the infamous “We know you’re name is ___.” Subseven or “Sub7”, to my knowledge was last released in 2000, but isn't a very powerful trojan horse in 2004 because every firewall in the world can block it practically. Some other things Subseven can do is open webpages in Internet Explorer, open CDROM drives, illegally “watch” instant messenger conversations, and talk to the victim through it, and watch other people activities in a LAN situation who don’t have firewall protection.

Tune in for Spring Break Episode III. Coming soon to a blog near you!