VLA THE IMPALER

January 6, 2003 General Comments Off

I’ve setup a small webpage for VLA THE IMPALER. Right now it just describes it a little and shows a few photos. Federico is bugging me to upload some Oggs sometime, so maybe I’ll get on top of that sometime. :)

GNOME 2.0

January 3, 2003 General Comments Off
    I installed GNOME 2.0 finally. It’s pretty cool. I keep getting some weird input lockups in X, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s because I also installed some new NVidia drivers, and they’re not as stable as the previous ones. Who needs stability, though, when you have hardware-accelerated RENDER X extension implemented in your video card driver, even if said implementation is horribly broken and doesn’t work?

Kitty

    My mom’s other cat, Kitty, died today. It was pretty old, and it was getting pretty sick, so I’m not too surprised to see it go.

Happy New Year

    I went to Club Clearview with Sally on New Year’s Eve, and of course it was loud enough to ruin my chances at ever having a career in music. There were five shitty bands that played mostly shitty music, except one of them was called Alligator Dave or something stupid like that, and they played all shitty music. The singer-like guy had this annoyingly high-pitched voice, and sang such songs as “Sit on my Face” and “Eat Your Beaver”. Although they sound perfectly reasonable and enjoyable, they were written by stupid people and served only to annoy the fuck out of everyone in the room.

    We were up on the rooftop when the year struck 2003, and I figured we’d see some fireworks, because that’s what they usually do. I remember when 2000 struck I was over at the apartment of some girl who’s name presently eludes me, and she lived not too far from downtown and there were some fairly impressive fireworks, so I was sort of expecting to see some fairly impressive fireworks again this year. I was sorely disappointed. This was the most pathetic firework show I think I’ve ever seen.

    There were two of those “fountain”-like things that went off, spewing fire and sparks into the air. Big deal. Then a couple rockets shot into the air and blew up into very small balls of glowing balls of firy stuff. Time passed, another stupid fountain of sparks went off, and then much time passed while everyone reflected on what a shitty firework show it was, then a really huge firework went off on the other side of the building, and it made this really huge red globe of firy stuff. That one was sort of cool, but it was several minutes after midnight and it was a lone firework. I suspect it was shot off by some other person in a very non-official sort of manner, hence the fact that it wasn’t even with the so-called firework “show”. Too bad the official “show” didn’t have anything nearly as cool.

Falstaff

    My mom got a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble for Christmas, and asked me to go buy her a couple CDs that she would like. So, I bought a recording of Verdi’s Falstaff instead. I got the fairly new DG recording with Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado, mostly because it has a really cool cover and I’ve been heavily influenced by the cardboard standup advertisement for it at An Die Musik. It’s really cool; I’ve been listening to it. Right now I’m not, though.

Splinter Cell Demo

    I got the Splinter Cell demo working. Well, mostly. It’s only one level, so I beat it. However, it still occasionally crashes. One way to crash it consistently is to play the level, then when you beat it, try to play it again. It doesn’t seem to like that for some reason.

    Heat vision doesn’t work on GeForce2 yet, either. That’s disappointing, mostly because I still have a GeForce2 in my machine. If I had something better I’d probably enjoy very much that heat vision isn’t finished on GeForce2 hardware, because I’d find a person who played Splinter Cell demo on a GeForce2 and then I’d laugh at them.

Battlefield 1942

    I got the full game of this, and it definitely rocks. It also definitely rocks slightly less than I’d like when it’s running on my computer, but that’s probably just because my computer sucks now. Once again, I’d probably enjoy this situation much better if the roles were reversed with someone else.

    It sort of doesn’t even matter who else it is. If I just met some random person whose computer sucked more than mine and who is attempting to play Battlefield 1942 on it, I would give that person such shit and mock them to the end of their days, or until they got a better machine than mine, or until the restraining order arrived.

Jobs

    Speaking of people giving shit to other people, my mom is giving me so much shit about Bree and her stupid public school teaching job that I’m about to decide never to come back to Texas again. My mom thinks I should start teaching in public school next year and either quit trying to get into an orchestra, even though I haven’t even really started trying, or do the auditions and stuff while I’m already working in public school. The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t really like little kids. I didn’t even like them when I was one of them. I don’t think I’d enjoy teaching public school at all. It would just eat up all my time and energy and prevent me from practicing and getting an orchestra job somewhere.

    Public school is like a black hole. But it doesn’t suck up light, no sir! Hope. It sucks up hope.