Though I’m probably keeping all the old articles (including the junk Quickyfeed posts), I’m trying for a Blog Reboot here.

The idea is to actually start posting to the blog about things I’m doing, playing, or watching; or about actual topics!  Amazing that!  I’ve already got a few ideas cooking about things I’ve been working on, so unless I really lose The Drive, I’ll be posting somewhat more regularly.

If you’ve ever seen the blog before, you will probably notice a new theme – Pixeled – which I’ll probably tweak a bit later.  I haven’t tried it in a great many browsers so if you run into issues let me know.  I also switched to IntenseDebate for commenting because they totally rock!

If you’re new to the blog, either through FriendFeed/Twitter or some other site, welcome and enjoy the stay.  If you never noticed that FriendFeed widget on the right – that’s mostly replaced my short one-off posts and the ‘QuickyFeed’ posts since its so easy to post quick stuff there.

So yeah, we’ll see how it goes this time.  This type of post is the typical clichéd ‘OMG I need to post more’ post, in a way, I know, I know.

Update: Fixed the problem. I had to drop the table before restoring it – it doesnt look like their restore process automatically does that. Oh well.

In any case, I’ll still be around.

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.

I’m currently trying to figure out the theme compatibility issues, so if you see some wierd behavior, blame it on that.