OnyxRaven Blog

Its crunch time here at work, so posts might be thin. It may not look like it, but my commitment to posting at least once a day is still almost true - we’ve got Drupal running in the office for a group collaboration site. It actually works really well, I’d recommend it to teams who have gotten large enough that communicating ideas or problems is not as easy as it should be.

In any case, I’ll still be around.

Since I know I’ve been behind on my blog posts, I thought I would give something of a summary update of my goings-on.

I bought a new car at the beginning of July, a 2006 WRX Sedan - Rally Blue. It’s just awesome. The gas milage leaves something to be desired, especially after driving my ‘94 Civic for almost 7 years. Civic = 30-40mpg (35 average, I got over 40mpg last summer on a couple of trips). WRX = 20-25mpg. Granted, the 230hp turbocharged engine might have something to do with it - as well as the way I’ve been driving it, since its new to me ;-). I’m going to look at getting the 2007 stereo installed once those come out (built-in iPod port), and my upgrades to stock parts will probably start later.

My girlfriend also bought a new (used) car, a 2002 Honda CRV - its quite nice and comfortable - it’ll be nice for longer trips for sure.

I also recently took advantage of the Dell deals that Ars Technica was providing and got myself a E510 with 2gb of ram. The Pentium D 3.2 is nice, and I upgraded to a Geforce 7600GT already, but the sound sucks, so I’m looking to upgrade that soon. The site mentioned ‘Advanced Soundblaster HD MB’ - which I took to mean that it might be an integrated soundblaster card. Not the case - its just the base C-Media AC’97 chipset with a horribly unstable set of special software drivers on top to simulate the soundblaster Audigy hardware. It was absolutely horrible. Oblivion’s sounds were all mucked up to the point it was unbearable. I uninstalled the special ‘drivers’, installed the stock AC’97 drivers and at least I can hear things now. 20$ on my purchase down the drain :-(. This replaces not one, but two machines I had previously (for sale below).

Oh, and to go with that machine I also invested in a new Dell 24″ flatscreen to replace my 2 aging 19″ monitors (for sale below). It rocks. Also got a decent deal on this one.

Lets see, what else.

I might finally be closer to moving the rest of my sites from the expensive ServerMatrix server to the cheap Dreamhost hosting. Its taken me way too long (since May or so). Just have some work to do moving databases and such, and getting themes set up again for phpBB.

Now that I’m somewhat more caught up, hopefully I can post more - get that block out of the way.

Well, I blame my first week failure on work. Its been kind of draining, so I don’t get time to do anything at work, and I don’t want to think about a computer when I get home. I’m taking the opportunity to go home early today though, so I’ll update with my latest news tidbits then.

The blog has yet again fallen into non-postage. To remedy this, I’m going to try to make a point to post at least one thing every day. If I am not posting the full text here, I’ll be posting it at GameWatchers.net, and linking it here (I’ll also have it in a sidebar shortly).