Not just another NPC - (ds-x2 ver.)

I finally got around to playing Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - demo, in Linux. The demo/game itself was great, though a bit short. I pointed out to my friend the graphical drivers freaked out on me a lot when I tried to use higher resolution but it turns out running Compiz in the background at the same time was probably a major contributor to this. Oh well, it still looked great in 800×600. Penny Arcade’s artist ( “Gabe” ) has gotten progressively better over the years. To the point were you could marvel at some of his more artistic pieces. In fact right now they’re pulling off some weird 80s ping-pong movie and it looks amazing. True webcomic revolutionaries at work. The fact that they now have a game is further proof of their influence. Anyways, I’m tempted to buy the full game, but I want to start building a vinyl collection this summer instead (while maintaining a steady savings - did I mention I’ll have a job soon? ).

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do before E3 hits. Did you know Activision isn’t even attending this year? WTF is that about? Or are they back in it now? Shit, this is what I’m talking about. I’ve got a lot of reading(/watching (the 1UP show)) to do! Sometimes I grace something with the source of gonintendo.com and shutter. There were a couple of times I would be ahead of them, but now it’s just scary. Could I ever catch up to these people? Match their persistence? That RMC guy is one crazy M.F.-er. Alright, I shall scour the internet, tonight! I will hopefully be back on my shit before July… and get some daily DJ practice in somehow.

I woke up last Sunday totally oblivious to any game-happenings as I’ve been for the last couple of weeks in an effort to focus on school. Then later on my mom asks me to drive her to Target and I’m thinking: “Hm… wasn’t there something I wanted to buy soon-ish?” Then it hit me!

Though honestly I didn’t expect to just leisurely walk right in at 2PM on day one and buy a copy of the biggest Wii release of the year. No, just like Advance Wars: DOR I lacked a pre-order and chances were slim. I merely got lucky with Advance wars, surely I wouldn’t be able to repeat such luck. Then again I seem to be pretty good at this and sure enough they had two copies left. Woot! But I wasn’t going to open it… no it was going to be a work incentive instead.

Unfortunately I am one of the few amongst my group of friends with a Wii. Yea… so I get this during school:

“Hey man lets go to your house after school and play brawl! We can pick up lunch on our way too! My treat!”

“Hey can I come over to your house after school and play brawl?”

“Lets go to your house and play brawl after school! I’ll even drive you… but you’ll have to tell me where to go since I don’t exactly know where you live…”

Well, at least I had fun. Many people complain the pace has slowed down too much, but with a couple of hours one can easily adjust. Overall the game is worthy of being called a sequel to SSB: Melee and I don’t see myself going back anytime soon. For some of us though, fond memories of Melee may be hard to ignore. I guess you could say Brawl takes a bit of an open mind to fully enjoy. That seems to be a trend with Nintendo lately.

Now for something completely unrelated…

Best Buy is a terrible store, they overcharge for everything. One of my grandparents though keeps giving me Best Buy gift cards and I can’t really complain. It’s very thoughtful and I have to give her (grandma) credit for trying to give me a gift appealing to my technology-flavored tastes. Long story short I find myself in best buy looking at speakers and I know what to look for. Sort of. I try to stay away from generic-self-powered-speakers. I figure if I can’t do that then I try to go with a good brand I can trust. Well thanks to the best buy gift card I broke both of those rules easily. Yes, this was an impulse buy! Ironically(?) it matches up with my other impulse buy from last year! Yep, I have had that EMU-1212m for about a 9 months now. Sitting here hooked up to nothing but my lousy headphones. I figured it’s time to let this baby sing with some proper speakers!

I had never heard of this brand “klipsch”… but I’m happy with them.

Oh man these speakers rock! Even better than the Bose speakers my parents have set up in our “entertainment center” downstairs. They probably paid a lot more for those back in the day too. It took me awhile to find room for the sub-woofer - it’s bigger than it looks. Or maybe it’s just heavier than it looks because it’s made out of MDF. Which - funny fact - is the same material many North American arcade cabinets are made out of… and it’s fucking heavy.

This upcoming week is the end of 3rd quarter for my high school. The pressure’s on! Wish me luck…

Sorry about falling off the face of the earth. I do that every now and then.

Picture inspired by Konbini life.

Last Wednesday I picked up Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, as planned. I cut it pretty close though, I bought the last copy at my local Gamecrazy. I ended up not preordering because… well… I had a feeling I could get away with it. Upon noticing the HUGE amounts of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass throughout the store’s collection I asked the guy at Gamecrazy just how many copies of Advance Wars they had received in total. They received 10, but 8 were preorders. Lucky me! For once being a “Senior” and getting out of school early proves useful.

Well, besides the fact I can go home and make my lunch. I love doing that.
In fact, I think I’ll have to blog about my love for sandwiches one day.
…man I love sandwiches.

Rewinding time even further, about two weeks ago, my dad walks in the door with a crap load of SCSI devices. He went all out: PCI controller, cables, “terminators”, various SCSI pin adapters, two SCSI hard drives, and some truly bizarre removable media drives. Unfortunately my computer is stuffed as it is(I’m totally out of molex connections), so I was only able to - with a lot of work - fit in one SCSI Hard drive. With some help of an XP disk I was able to get it formatted at about 17GB. Before that I looked at it with Linux and I could’ve sworn it was 40GB. Oh well, the important part is that I’ve set it up for paging like I planned.

Boo ya! (…I’m never saying that again)

If you look closely at that high resolution picture you can see the SCSI drive with a badass picture of a Barracuda. Oh yea, it’s a Seagate Barracuda drive. *thumbs up*

I’m not sure whether with has improved my performance in steam/HL2/games or not. At first it still crashed here-and-there and then… stopped. It has been running flawlessly ever since. So finally: Half life 2. Playable. Woot! I got all the way to where you get the gravity gun. Good times. The fan-boat action went on a lot longer than I expected. For awhile I was beginning to think they should have named it “Half Life 2: The fan boat adventures”. Ok that was a bad joke. But just think of the awesome boxart! I’ll spare you a photoshopping of that.

One thing I’ve been forgetting to mention is that the Nintendo Forums came back. …It’s not pretty. With the sale of Nintendo Power to Future Publishing, it seems the community aspect of the forums has been sold off with it. So now the Nintendo forums are nothing more than a Tech Support forum. Ironically they still kept it linked to “My Nintendo” account though. Even more ironic is that I actually wrote the first guide to Wi-Fi and networking on the original forums. Granted, back then I didn’t know everything I know now but it was basic enough to introduce many Nsiders with Wi-Fi for the first time. Wow that was almost four years ago…

Ending on a funny note. I was checking the 5 day weather on the Wii’s weather channel when I noticed it was predicting snow for Sacramento! It never snows in the Northern California valley, even if it’s freezing outside and rainy.

What a week, I knew it was getting down to the wire, but wow.

What the hell are you thinking?!

…Is what my English teacher said to me Wednesday(or was it Tuseday?).
You see I was behind in my work… very behind. So I took drastic measures to avoid…
*shiver *
…night school.
I planned what was basically a project-a-day plan where I would stay up all night working on a project to turn in the next day. Now you’re probably thinking the same thing she did. Yea I know it’s crazy, but it had to be done! My crazy situation also provided me with some material for my work. For example, this sonnet by yours truly:

Courier new is my font of choice
For creative writing it is preferred
You could say it gives me my voice
Otherwise my work would be deferred

I write too much about my homework
These poems must be very boring to read
I get it done though, that is one perk
After all these assignments are of dire need

Next year I know to do my work as it comes
Bite the bullet and get it done
These assignment points total to great sums
I really hate to do them all as one

Finally I’m on the last line
Too bad it is six hours past nine

Yep, I dipped pretty low on all some of these.

After I accomplished that amazing task of cranking out crap-tastic-hopefully-pass-worthy material, I was swept off to the bay area on Saturday to repeat what we basically did with Thanksgiving. It’s weird knowing there’s a new Nintendo office within 4 miles the whole time. Which reminds me, I took a picture of the top of the US Sega HQ coming back from thanksgiving.
…er… that’s right, I’m not on my computer. I can’t post it. Aw and I was going to set up a flicr account too. Newegg got my card and a replacement is in transit though. It should be here in a couple days, probably the day after Christmas. I’ll do an update once it arrives too, I’ll blog about whatever I get and post some pictures or something.

Ten bucks says I get a Wii. Just a feeling.

I hate it when someone says “oh snap”, it’s like they’re trying to be cool and at the same time conform by not say anything offensive. Just say “oh shit” people, it’s not that hard and no one really cares except for maybe the school principle himself. Well I used it as my title for this week’s blog entry simply because it’s a nice play on words with the latest in the world of NPC.

Rewind to friday when I was minding my own business, with my computer practically idle when I suddenly heard a loud “SNAP”. First thought was: Blown capacitors! Second thought: Sound card! Third thought: FUUUUUUUUCK! Forth thought: Turn it off!

After inspection it was indeed a blown capacitor, but not my sound card. No instead it was my graphics card. *whew*
…
*thinks about that for a moment*
…
FUUUUCK!

Luckily it is still under the standard RMA with Newegg. Just by a couple of weeks. Not 100% sure what caused it, but lets just say I know how I might be able to prevent anything from happening to my replacement. The wait is going to kill me, I’ve got a couple files I need for school. I’m going to have to take out the Hard drive and copy them to another computer(you know how many times I’ve done that this year?). Currently using my dad’s Celeron-based computer running win2000, it may be my main computer for the week.

At the very least, I’ve figured how to gain access to most of my music without actually having my computer on. Just go to last.fm–>listen–>select username–>type and search NPC82. Or i could just embed it.

Edit to DS-X2 readers: I can’t seem to get the embedding to work here, I probably need some wordpress plugins or something. sorry.

I’m always surprised at the collection of music available with last.fm radio. Only downside is that buffering sucks sometimes.

I really want “The orange box”. Hell I need the orange box(LAN next next fri in the works). It’s bad enough I’m falling behind the times(no next gen system!), but when I miss a release of three great games, for the price of one, on a platform I own(PC), it’s just sad. Sad it will be, since I’ll have to pass it up. Yes that’s right, I have to save up my money(read: very limited) for that blasted holiday. Sure I could spend it now all on myself and give nothing. However, capitalism class economics class(which I have been very busy with this week) has taught me to look at my opportunity cost. The way X-mass works is you give… and then receive. So the loss of spending all my money on myself and not others? Potential gifts baby! Gifts that would most likely exceed the amount of money that I have now - a value not worth even posting(though I’ve never actually withdrew money from my bank before… I might want to practice that one day lol). There you have it, NPC has a plan to get with the times! Woo hoo! I just won’t have the orange box until December or so…

Remember last august? Inane-talks birthday? Yea I lied, it’s actually tomorrow, here in November. I have a strange habit of mixing up the two months, and I’m aware how absurd that sounds but I’m just clumsy like that.

We’ve even got an Inane 2.0 thing going on since we moved from PHP to SMF. Funny thing is the new template was originally somewhat lighter but members said it was too bright for viewing at night (of all things) so we changed it. We’re looking to expand our membership everyday so feel free to join!

School has been kind of surreal lately, I think it has something to do with me being a Senior. Well… except what happened on Thursday. I was walking to my first class thinking about you-know-who, when all of a sudden she walked around a corner right in front of me! Freaky! We both kind of frightened each other and gave this “gasp!” look to each other. I don’t know what to make of it, I must admit I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Though I’m adopting the “Good things come to those who wait” philosophy for now. I figure the balls in her court now, it’s her decision to like me or not, I’ve done my part. “Though doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?” you might ask. I know her friends fairly well and I’m thinking about doing some investigative work by asking a few questions. Plain curiosity is forcing me too anyway. I have a feeling it’s someone not from my area because I never see her with anyone but friends.

Oh and I posted a story I wrote in English on my main blog. I think it may be too geeky for many people to understand.

I did a lot computer work the later half of this week, ending with today(hopefully). Long story how it started, but I took advantage of the situation and am now successfully dual-booting Ubuntu! This is what? The third time I’ve had to back-up and reinstall this year? I’m just totally immune to it now, really the piece(s) of data I value most would have to be my Firefox profile. For those of you who may not be knowledgeable about the inner-workings of Firefox, all your cookies, history, bookmarks, ect. are saved to a profile. You can actually manage more than one, but since I’m the only person who uses this(my) computer I’ve never bothered experimenting with that. So as long as I have that backed-up I don’t really care about what programs I loose(being that all other types of files can be easily backed up and retrieved - even some programs!). Besides that I’ve been very busy with school as usual. My Mom(ok, I’m aware how teenage I sound right now) has been ragging on me constantly to: “stop fixing your computer and get back to work”. But I can’t really work on her stupid laptop… with that lousy keyboard… uhg. Then I remembered she just so happened to have brought me another KVM switch that day(in addition to the one before), and I got to work!

Her work, Verizon wireless, gave it to her for free
- in case you were wondering

This was only temporary until I got back from school the next day and finished backing up my Hard drive(pictured). After that I was able to ditch the nightmare of multiple KMV switches and format the crap out of my hard drive. And format the crap out of it I did. Lets see if you can follow this:
-Formatted and installed windows
-Partitioned and installed Ubuntu
-Windows didn’t like booting from the partition
-Killed the grub trying to fix windows boot, and got some disk read error at post screen
-Reformatted yet again and installed windows on it’s partition
-Set up windows and booted onto the Ubuntu live CD
-Fixed the grub and got both booting - YAY!

Ok It’ not that hard, but it was a pain. I booted off of the XP disc at lest 8 or 9 times during the span of this whole ordeal. Ubuntu live CD though is quite nice, might I add.

*insert picture of hot girl here*
“Man, I’d like to boot off her live CD!”

I had to do that. Sorry.
I blame the delayed daylight saving time(kicks in tonight, finally).

Ubuntu is awesome, download it!