Vivek’s Blog

I think my laptop is trying to tell me something. I re-installed Windows a few weeks back because my laptop was running slow and I had too much junk on my HDD. Everything was hunky-dory until I re-installed UT2004. I haven’t played much off late but until say February or so, I used to run the game at 1680×1050 with most effects at High. It would run perfectly fine at around 45fps. Right before the Windows reinstall, I noticed a slowdown in UT. I thought, well, the reinstall will take care of it. Nope.

It was on my external drive and even at 800×600 with everything turned low, it was stuttering. I moved the installation to my internal drive but that didn’t seem to make any difference. So I uninstalled the Omega Drivers I had been using and put in the old Dell drivers. Still nothing significant. Finally, I took out my PCMCIA sound card and played with onboard audio. That did seem to make a difference. I thought all right, maybe I need to update the Audigy drivers. And after updating, I was able to run 1280×800 with most settings at High and all was fine in Deathmatch/Mutant/CTF. But the moment I started an Assault game, the slowdown returned. I realize that the Assault mode has a lot of stuff going on at any given time but it was perfectly all right a few months ago.

What finally got to me is that today I installed Quake 4 and it was lagging even at the lowest quality settings [640x480, Low Quality: Default]. By contrast, the copy of Quake 2 that comes with the Special Edition ran flawlessly at 1024×768 High Quality [as I'd hoped]. It’s strange - at the same time last year, I was running F.E.A.R. at 800×600 with settings at medium or medium-high and it ran without any lag [OK maybe the occasional jerky frame but nothing distracting]. This is the same machine that ran DOOM 3 at 800×600/Medium settings without problems up until June/July ‘05.

Dell has stopped releasing drivers for my card and the last one is from late 2005. I started using the Omega Drivers since they utilize the newest Catalyst releases straight from ATi. And actually, there was a slight performance improvement in FarCry with them - heck even FarCry ran well at 1024×768/Medium-High just a few months ago.

Is my laptop drive nearing the end of it’s life-cycle? Are the processor and graphics card stressed out? I know RAM is not an issue because right now I run games with 750MB+ free memory. I know it’s not the external drive causing problems because there no noticeable difference when I moved the install to the internal drive [Quake 4 is on the internal too; F.E.A.R., FarCry are on the external]. I will probably loose faith in my laptop’s ability to run games if FarCry and F.E.A.R. don’t run as well. With Extraction Point on the way, I hope I can fix whatever is causing a problem here. Also, I’d like to get back to playing UT2004 on the LAN with my friends here and Assault and Onslaught Modes are our favorites.

Computer hardware progresses at a rate far too rapid for the average consumer to keep up. Intense competition fuels growth - even though we don’t really need it. I love video games but they are in a way responsible for pushing hardware to produce higher polygon counts in shorter periods of time. Sure, new games look pretty but should you have to make a $300 upgrade just to be able to play a $50 game? A lot users end up playing old games anyway simply because the latest games won’t run on their year-old hardware. I was a firm believer in PC Gaming but over the past couple of years, I’ve gravitated more towards consoles - the no upgrade idea is extremely attractive. Sure, I still love the keyboard-mouse combo for FPSes but a controller is not too shabby once you get accustomed to it. But it’s far easier to shell out a couple of thousand dollars for a high-end PC than it is to pay $400-600 for a new gaming console. After all, the console can only play games or browse the internet in a limited way. A good idea is to get a good console and cheap computer that you can upgrade maybe once every 4-5 years just for everything other than gaming. But you will miss out on quality PC games that way. And not everyone can afford a high-end gaming system on a yearly upgrade cycle and a new console. It’s just not fair either way.

Well, on the bright side, I get my DS on Tuesday so there’s something that I don’t need to worry about games not working. Maybe if the 360 drops its price, I can get one with my roommate and then I can play the newest games in 720p. Oh well, back to reading.

As of right now, I have finished redesigning my blog. It took a while and numerous trial and error sessions to finally get everything to look good. The default theme for my blog now is Neo Sapien although I have retained my old one [Quentin] and another theme I thought was interesting: Durable. Of course, I have greatly modified the look but I made no change to the original PHP code. All I did was add some things to a few files.

If you haven’t noticed, there are plenty of ads. I do need to pay for hosting every year, you know. And I think I’ve done poorly over the past year or so with ad-revenue although it seems to have imp;roved since I put all those ads in there.

The logo was made in two parts. First, I used Apophysis to generate a fractal with the triangular shape in the center. Then, I ran it through Photoshop and fiddled around with color and stuff and then cropped the file. Then, I just added the text, a blue shadow, and the white border. The background in the header took some effort. I used a 1×135 file [the theme had a 1x288 file on repeat but I cut down the size] zoomed 1600% and first colored it black. Then I added some blue. After that, I had that thin blue line through the center. Finally, I just added a fancy blue shape towards the top and bottom for that zig-zag line effect.

I also changed the background to black and moved the top menu to under the header image. I modified the text colors and fonts and put that Archives drop-down option to save space. As a last change, I added a page called “Videos” which will feature a couple of videos that I found interesting - courtesy YouTube of course. I’ll change them every now and then. I also removed the Archives page since it was redundant. I am also testing out (at leisure) a new gallery software which I may or may not implement.

So that’s it folks - the new site is complete and I’m back to posting blog entries. Expect some interesting posts in the next couple of weeks - I just pre-ordered a new Nintendo DS Lite (Black/Onyx) and have been listening to a bunch of new music which I will write about.

This past Wednesday, I went to see a baseball game - The New York Mets hosted the St. Louis Cardinals. This happens to be my first ever live baseball game and I was psyched. I had seen the Shea Stadium from the road when I was going to La Guardia Airport once, but to see it up close was terrific. As we were walking towards our entrance gate, we saw Mick Foley (a.k.a. Mankind from the WWE) walking in the crowd. He was limping a bit - probably because of his bloody SummerSlam match with Ric Flair. The attendance that day was almost 50k and the crowd was enthusiastic. Our seats were almost near the top but were right above the home plate so we could see all the action clearly. Depth perception was way off as time and again a hit looked like going for a home run only to end up as a foul or an out.

The Cardinals batted first and scored nothing in their first innings. The Mets responded with 4 runs in their first. As the game went on, the Mets built up a 10-4 lead and it looked like game-over for the Cards. However, they put up a brave fight and clawed their way back to make it 10-8.

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Samuel L. Jackson. A BIG Plane. Hundreds of Snakes. Put the three together. Snakes on a Plane. 1 hour and 45 minutes of pure, unadulterated, uncompromising, _____ [insert more adjectives here] action and fun await those who dare to go see SoaP. The title is the most obvious movie title ever but the opening couple of minutes are completely misleading. The makers spend a decent amount of time on setting the whole thing up and that is good. None of the characters seems forced although they end up putting in every imaginable personality on there - angry Brit, newly-weds, guy afraid of flying, Hilton-esque bitch with puppy in tow, germophobe rapper with his boys, two kids flying alone - you name it, you got it. And the movie is unapologetic - women, kids, old people, young people, naked people, pilot, air hostess - everyone gets bit and most die. The snakes are shown going after every human part imaginable, male and female. It was a good thing that the makers decided to go all out and get an R rating rather than the PG-13 they were initially aiming for. Without the R, we would’ve missed two great scenes:

1. The scene where the first people get bit

2. The scene where Sam “the man” Jackson delivers THAT line

All right so here’s the story in brief: A dude witnesses the murder of a prosecutor by a gangster identified as Eddie Kim. Eddie sees him get away on his bike and sends his henchmen to kill the aforementioned dude. Jackson saves the dude and takes him into FBI protective custody in an attempt to get him to testify against Eddie Kim. In oder to testify, he must fly to Los Angeles from Honolulu. Left with no other choice, Eddie hatches a plot to take down an entire 747. How? No bombs or crash landings or any of that horse crap. He puts goddamn SNAKES ON A PLANE!!! A few hundred of them and uses a pheromone which makes the snakes go crazy or as Sam the man says, snakes on crack. A few minutes after take-off, the snakes start slithering out as a hatch door was left open. After the first few deaths, there’s a bit of a lull as the snakes start getting into the cabin. A pilot dies, plane instrumentation goes screwy with those snakes going all over it. And then with a jolt, oxygen masks are released and more snakes fall into the cabin. What ensues is best described as mayhem caused when you put hundreds of SNAKES ON A PLANE!!! From here on it’s a regular procession of deaths and gruesome snake bites as Sam the man desperately tries to keep everything under control. Beyond that, the movie behaves like any other action adventure. Sam the man saves the day and all is hunky-dory.

If you go in looking for anything other than a fun time, you will come back disappointed. Leave your brains at the door and just sit back and watch the mayhem. It’s as cheesy as it gets and the movie intentionally forces all those action movie cliches down your throat - you’ll see what I’m talking about. While not as grossing out as something like Saw II, this movie still provides a few pukey moments. Special effects are adequate and unless you are really PICKY about your SNAKES, they get the job done. After all, the movie had an initial budget of just $30 million [they went back and reshot some scenes since they were looking for the R rating anyway] which it should collect at the box-office this weekend itself. I’d say even if it makes around $70-80 million total, it will be a box-office success.

Ultimately, it’s about snakes being unleashed 30, 000 feet above ground and how Jackson kicks some snake-ass (do snakes have asses?) to save the day. If you have a stick up your ass like a lot of movie critics do, then please avoid the movie - that stick will begin to get very painful after almost two hours of sitting down. The movie does exactly what it promised and does it well. I didn’t look at my watch at all once the movie began - not many movies do that for me.

I uploaded a bunch of new themes to try out.  While I’m not done yet, I already like 2-3 and might end up staying with them.  Currently, the default theme is “Rounded” and I’ve added a theme switcher to all themes.  You can cycle through all the available themes and let me know which ones are good.  If a particular theme has no switcher and you get stuck with it, let me know.  I might have missed one or two