There hasn't really been any big developments that I can think of in the past month or so, except for the progress I've made in my collection of video games. Near the end of January, I finally got around to buying and playing Half Life, and found it very enjoyable. So much so, in fact, that I finished it in a week. I had started it Monday night or so, and by the weekend, I was ready to buy the Orange Box. Thus armed as I was, I fought my way through Half Life 2, and loved it even more, despite the fact that I missed being able to execute the scientists as I was wont to do inside Black Mesa. Of course, complicating things slightly were the few errors that would pop up every so often. With the help of my trusty ally, the intarwebs, I was able to prevail, and finished that game in about a week and a half.
Next, it was time for me to take on my next foe, Episode 1. It seemed that this time, the errors were not to be so easily defeated, and that I might be relegated to playing on my laptop (which has a slightly inferior GPU than my desktop). The performance, was of course inferior on my laptop due to this fact, and the slightly slower cpu (2 as opposed to 2.2 GHz), since the Source engine does not, as far as I know, take advantage of multiple cores. Just when I thought all hope lost, the intarwebs rescued me once more, and I just finished off the first episode about 30 minutes ago.
Next up is Episode 2, which should bring me up to date with the series, at long last. Of course, as the title might suggest, Portal did not slip by me either. My first time through it only lasted 4 hours before succumbing to my might. The second time, I was able to defeat it in only 2.5 hours, and my next attempt will be going through with the commentary on, and I might attempt to earn a few achievements as well. And who knows, maybe some day I'll actually beat Narbacular Drop.
The rest of my time has pretty much been taken up by classes, homework, and teaching, although more the former than the latter. This semester my teaching is pretty nice, two classes, the graduate Math Physics, and an undergrad Gen Phys to which only 4 students show. The graduate class is fairly easy for the time being as well, since the class is on C programming, and none of the students have finished any of the programs yet.
Even with the coursework that I've had, I find time to visit Mel every weekend, which is a very nice thing. Also, this past Monday evening, I created my own pet, a sourdough starter. Tonight will be the third day I've had it, and it looks like its pretty much ready to go make me some bread. I'll end up feeding it tonight, then throwing it in the fridge for the weekend, and then attempt some baking on Monday, or Wednesday of this coming week.
Well, I'm off to free up hard drive space and install Episode 2. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, hopefully I'll actually start updating this more often from now on.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
I'm doing Science, and I'm still alive
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
I know, I know
Yeah, I know it's been a long time and I said that I would keep this going. I just kind of forgot about it, and would never get around to updating when I did remember it. So mebbe I can actually keep somewhat regular updates going, wouldn't that be a treat.
So my lappy has been having issues with the copy of Symantec I get from Temple, in that it has been showing that I have tons of viruses about once a day. These viruses - called simply 'Trojan Horse' - only show up after my definitions are updated. For example, I usually leave my computers on at night, I have Symantec do a full system scan around 4 AM, and then I update the defs around 6 AM. A few minutes after 6, it shows up as having found some viruses. All of the files that are found infected are named DWH*.tmp. and they are always in my user/blahblahblah/temp directory. I even tried restoring one of the files so I could upload it to an online virus scanner, but the file never appeared where it said it should, and less than a minute later, Norton said that it was there and that it had quarantined it. I found some power point presentation where some pklace was having similar problems and Symantec Service said that the issue was a set of corrupt virus definitions. So, today I finally got around to uninstalling and reinstalling Symantec and Liveupdate, and we will see in the morning if that fixed it.
The only other thing that is really bugging me with my lappy is that the nvidia drivers don't want to change the scaling option for the screen. It's set to stretch the image a program wants full screen, but not with the native resolution. Whenever I tell it to change to no scaling and hit apply, the screen goes really dark, and doesnt lighten back to normal until I reboot, at which point the scaling option has reset itself. Hopefully newer drivers will fix this.
I think that's about all for tonight, I'll see about being more regular with updates and whatnot from here on out.