About a week ago our old Memorex External DVD burner bit the dust. You can see it in my workspace snapshot. So we’ve been unable to do our regular backups. Finally, today our new burner arrived. We got another Memorex (they just seem to work), it is the newer model of the same burner. I am actually in the middle of burning a backup, and have already burned 4 other DVDs. Setup took a second, just plugged in power, plugged in the USB to my Mac. If I had a longer Firewire cable I would have used that. Anywho, here is the new beaut.
This is a Memorex Double Layer 16×16 Dual Format DVD Burner and so far so good. We don’t use the software provided as it comes with Nero 6 for WIndows, and with us being on Macs we have no need for it. I just use Disco and Disk Utility (comes with OS X in the Utility folder in Applications).
We chose this burner because of the multitude of formats it can burn as well as having both Firewire and USB. The reason this is important to us is that we have two PPC Macs and they can only boot from Firewire drives. The new Intel Macs can boot from both USB and Firewire, but we like to make sure we have a backup drive all our Macs can use.
I can’t express how fed up I am with trying to add support for Internet Explorer in web sites/apps. Every time I come up with an innovative or cool feature that people will love, I have to scrap it, or cripple it because it won’t work using IE. If you are using Internet Explorer, please take a minute to read on about the torture you are directly causing me… Once you feel like you have an idea of my frustration, please multiply this by a few million web developers and designers to fully realize what goes on every day “behind the scenes” because people like you aren’t using a standards compliant browser.
Continue reading ‘Stop Using Internet Explorer! FOR FUCK’S SAKE!’
I thought it was about time for a change regarding my desktop. I am not very good at sticking with a certain setup for very long. This time around I am going pretty simple. The most actively changing area right now seems to be my Dashboard. The wallpaper is The Hill by manicho. I decided to go with a “hand drawn” kind of look for my buddy list. I think it came our rather nice.
PolyVector and I upon our move to Flagstaff ditched the conventional land line and went with Skype for all our phoning needs. Seeing as everyone we would ever need to call would be long distance Skype is the cheapest method of phoning available. While the service has held up nicely one thing that gets us down on the whole thing is having to be tied down to a computer. You would think this isn’t really that big a problem, except for that fact that we are horrible conversationalists and need to pace excessively while on the phone to keep our anxiety in check. Anyway we have made a hefty purchase on a Netgear Dual Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Which thanks to the awesome Delivery Status widget will be delivered to us in about 18 days….What can I say, I like free shipping. As soon as it arrives I will do a small review on quality. I have been searching and reading reviews on Skype phones for a long time now and this particular phone seems to have the best reviews regarding sound quality and reliability.
So I am looking over my RSS feeds and I spot the new comic for this week on Slime Culture. Now I honestly didn’t exactly get the comic as I have never seen the game Joust for the NES. Thanks to PolyVector and his trust emulator, he wastes no time in getting me up to speed with this incredible non-sensical game. All i have to say is MegaNice9, another egg of genius has hatched from that brain of yours! So, for the rest of you, go read now!
During the last week of May we took a trip out to California to kick back and relax. The morning after our return we woke up to the entire contents of our power steering fluid reservoir dumped all under the car. So for the past month-ish we have been without a vehicle. Today (in fact just about 30 minutes ago) we decided to go out there and check to see what the damage was. This month has been full of things breaking and trying to get new projects underway to pay the bills, so the car was the last thing on our minds. Well, it turns out the starter is going as well. We had thought this was the case during the beginning of the year but problems starting the car were far between. Now we get the awesome clicking of the starter for about 5-10 tries before the car starts up…For the record PolyVector and I royally suck at fixing cars, so we are going to have to fork out the cash to take the car in and get it fixed. The big problem here though, is we are still very new to Flagstaff so finding a decent place (or where the place is even located) in walking distance is going to be fun.
I just wanted to shout out a HUGE thank you to MegaNice9 and Slime Culture. I have been turned into a cartoon! Way beyond my normal Amy the Hedgehog avatar, this one is the “real” me.
Once again, thanks MegaNice9! You are awesome. :)
That’s right, it’s official, I have paid off all my school debts and am free forever! Today marked the last payment of my last student loan gone through. You have no idea how ecstatic I am. I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara for one year (2001-2002) and have been paying off the loans for that single year ever since. I don’t even want to imagine if I had went the full four years plus graduate school. Makes me shudder.
For those interested I was originally going to college to study Zoology. Its always been a huge passion of mine, but college life was not for me. Instead you have me here bitching and helping PolyVector create software under Punk Software. What more could you want?
Anywho, perhaps one day I will go through the full story, but for now I think I will just forget college and go harp on MegaNice9 to make more comics. ;)
Last year sometime PolyVector and I went on a giant search for cooperative games. Believe it or not there aren’t many out there. During our search we did run across the cheesiest game perhaps we have have ever seen. It was ObsCure. It is a survival horror game similar to ResidentEvil, except it is more like a teen movie version. Despite the incredibly cheesy dialog and mid 90’s dressed characters the game still scared me. When looking around at reviews (after we had already bought the game…I know stupid…or so you think…) everyone had said it was a great game and no complaints about characters or controls, except….you won’t believe this…it made them feel like they were playing a Resident Evil game and gave it a 2-3 out of 5. I’m sorry but that’s just how these games are. They all feel similar to ResidentEvil, it’s a genre!
Anyways, the game was surprisingly challenging at times, and the puzzles weren’t too easy. Of course we ended up taking a little longer on some of them because the enemies scared us so much that we ended up running like idiots missing things we needed to pick up. And believe me going back only made it worse, but nevertheless fun. The cooperative play was perfect, you and your partner shared ammo, as well as the rest of your entire inventory. Which made it challenging at times when there was only health enough for one person, or ammo was getting low. Helped make it a bit scarier too. There were no real “levels” just a giant school you ran around in with different buildings and underground basements. Nothing creepier than battling former classmates mutated and trying to eat your brains.
I don’t want to give away too much on story and game play, that is one thing I feel a lot of reviews out there do. If you are one of those people that love to play cooperative games I would definitely say pick this up, especially if you are into the ResidentEvil type genre of games. Playing this single player would also be some fun. All I can say is I like it, and would definitely play through again to see if I could do any better (read: not run past things like a scared idiot) next time.
Took some time today to get an update out on Punk Software. We finally decided to let the world know we are working on a new project that is a Nerd Proliferator reincarnate. Can’t really share too many details, need some sort of surprise when beta testing is ready. It should be a super fun project, we are working with Slime Culture on site design, generator design, and parts design. We’re all pretty excited. The only problem lately has been a hold up on RAM, which should be here on Tuesday the latest, and getting Adobe CS3. This project is relying heavily on Flash 9 and Actionscript 3 and the betas we’ve been using just crapped out on us.
Anywho, can’t wait to start moving more on this project and hopefully some progress on RocketDock 1.3.2 can happen once the RAM arrives. Sorry this entry was so boring, nothing much has been happening around here till we get our hardware and tools.
