greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Quick Vista Tech Tip

    If you’re trying to install Windows Vista’s service pack number one, you absolutely positively must have the prerequisite little patches installed first.

    Mind you, it’s impossible to tell from the Windows Update display which of the little patches are the prerequisites. They all talk about “performance improvement” and “stability enhancement” and blah blah blee, but none of them say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t install this update then your Vista SP1 installer will simply fail. Silently. Leaving you wondering what the hell you did wrong.”

    Cute, Microsoft. Very cute.

    Of course, once the 16 little updates are installed and you reboot… then SP1 actually appears in the updater display. Gee. I’m sure glad that I downloaded the standalone installer, all 450 megabytes of it.

    The kicker? “Service Pack 1 includes all previously released Windows Vista updates.” So… I had to install all of those updates even though I’m getting all of those updates all over again? Stellar.

    I’d better be able to get my games working once this is all over or else I’m going to be a cranky little grey duck.

  • New Gear, Unexpectedly

    Factor The First: Lil’ & Geoffrey’s computer DFO‘d in a bizarre and decidedly terminal fashion. Their budget wasn’t ideal for a full replacement rig, but there was no guarantee that going on a part-by-part replacement binge would solve the problem.

    Factor The Second: My “stimulus” check from Uncle Dubya, however misguided a gesture it may be, is still money in my pocket. It’s hard to turn down money in my pocket.

    Factor The Third: The so-called “gaming computer” was getting a bit long in the tooth, though with upgrades over the years I’ve kept it nearly up to the desired spec. (Basically: “Can it play City of Heroes and Heroes of Might and Magic?”)

    Throw these three factors together with a flash of inspiration on the part of your humble journal writer and you end up with a solution which everybody can more-or-less afford. They get my old gaming rig, and I use the (quite reasonable) money I charged for it and some of the “stimulus” money to buy parts for a whole new gaming rig. Mind you, it’s not as powerful or neat-o-keen as the big HP workstation that I picked up last year… but it’s not meant to be. Its job is to play a couple of games when I have company over. With its Core 2 Duo and the 2 GB of RAM and the modest (but modern) video card, I’m quite certain that it’ll do the job nicely.

    Amusing side note: I walked out the door early Sunday afternoon with a black Antec Sonata case in my arms. I walked back in the door Sunday evening with the newer version black Antec Sonata case in my arms. Hopefully I won’t have any annoying problems with this Antec purchase…

    Now all I have to do is finish putting the thing together and slap an operating system on it. Well, I have ’til the weekend. Plenty of time.

  • First Weekend Of May 2008

    Hey, it’s a weekend catch-up post! We haven’t done one of these in a while…

    Friday: Lil’ shouldn’t be allowed into Best Buy unsupervised. I don’t count, as I’m not a very good supervisor. Then again, I did get the BSG miniseries DVD out of it (since she doesn’t need it anymore). I’m also a couple of books into the Eric Flint “1632” franchise; it’s not too shabby, all things considered, though I imagine that my interest will wane after another massive volume or so.

    Saturday (daytime): Erica and I watched Alex do improv theater games in a park in the rain for an hour or so. Amusing it was, but eventually it got cold and we got bored so off to Burgerville we went. It’s appalling how much BV charges for a “large” cup of orange juice. Oy.

    Saturday (night IRON MAN): Kyla and I decided to do the dinner-and-a-movie thing. Oh, what an excellent movie! I’ll spare you the full review (since, let’s see, nearly everyone on the Internet has reviewed the thing already) but suffice to say that it’s a solid, entertaining, surprisingly restrained, well acted, beautifully produced superhero movie which benefits from a touch of gritty realism but without the bloody mayhem or out-of-place sex scenes (the only one in the movie is very short and played entirely for laughs). Even the scenery chewing is kept to reasonable limits. The funny bits were genuinely funny! I know, I’m as amazed as you are. Robert Downey, Jr completely owns the role of Tony Stark. The other actors range from “quite good” to “better than expected,” though it’s not a movie with a large main cast. I think the worst special effect in the movie is Jeff Bridges’ skullcap. (Turns out that it wasn’t a skullcap after all; his head somehow managed to look wrong nonetheless. Oh well, minor quibble.) In short: Unless you hate action movies, you should see Iron Man. (As for the “after-credits” thing… all I can say is, better Sam The Man than David Hasselhoff.)

    Saturday (late night): “Doctor Who,” end of the first two-parter in the 4th series of the “new Who.” We love Donna, we love Martha Version 2.0, we don’t necessarily love setting the atmosphere on fire, and the next-episode preview left me wondering what new kinds of drugs the “Who” producers have got their grubby hands on now. The love child of a Timelord and Baby Spice? Really, now.

    Sunday: Game day. Well, after we foraged for grub, anyway. In the “City Of” world, my lead villain dinged 40 and opened up her patron powers while my top Defender finally became a “real” Kin by acquiring Fulcrum Shift. Hellooooo, massive buff/debuff! Later, with “the boys,” I snuck in a win at Power Grid followed by a modest but respectable showing at Quiddler. Not bad for competing against five smart blokes, wot?

  • Nice try, scamming bastards.

    I suppose I was overdue for someone to try scamming me.

    I just got off the phone with a thickly-accented person who claimed to be from the “Domain Notification Service,” or the “Domain Registration Notification Service,” or something like that. (Phone number: 800-224-8606 for the record.) He wanted to update the contact information for one of my registered domains. My first tip-off is that he got the domain wrong, but that could’ve been a fluke. Unfortunately for the loser in question, I’m the sort of paranoid fellow who insists on getting full name and company identification from anyone who cold-calls me digging for information. I pointed out, in increasingly strong terms, that I will not divulge any information to someone who doesn’t sound even remotely like they’re associated with my domain registrar.

    He insisted that it was vital that I “update” the contact information through him. “No,” I said. My registrar provides services to do exactly that, in a reasonably secure online fashion no less. We went round and around through this pointless loop a couple of times before I wearied of the stupidity entirely and said, “You do not represent my domain registrar and we have nothing further to say to one another,” at which point I hung up… and headed straight for Google.

    It would seem that my instincts were spot-on: Scam Alert! Domain Registry Support. Had I continued the call and divulged any information, I’d probably find myself saddled with a .US domain and (of course) the associated bill. Thanks, but no thanks, you shady bastards.

    So, keep in mind always that if someone calls, faxes or mails you and claims to be acting on behalf of your domain registrar, do whatever it takes to establish their bona fides. Better safe than sorry, always.

  • Compy Swappy And Other Geeky Detritus

    Operating under the assumption that a change is as good as a rest, I’ve swapped the computers in my room. Now the computer I spend 99% of my time on is situated at the desk which features actual legroom. Oh, and the monitor is now much, much closer to my face so I’m not leaning across the desk all the time just so I can read.

    Mind you, I’ll still use the other desk when I have company over for computer gaming. This means, yes, that guests will now be enjoying the badass compy instead of the slightly gimpy “gaming” compy.

    I should have done this months ago.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try out Unreal Tournament.

    Afterward I plan to work on a 3.5 gigabyte collection of my favorite songs so I can load up my Insignia Pilot portable player. This way I’ll be able to just switch it on, tell it to play everything, turn on “random” mode and hear a whole bunch of songs I like all the way to work and back. The previous plan (selecting some of my favorite albums and swapping them out from time to time because there isn’t enough room for all of them) left me agonizing over what to listen to each time I fired up the player, and skipping songs because very few albums are completely perfect, and hopping from album to album periodically, and… yeah. Screw it. Nothing but songs I love, as many as I can fit in, and I should be golden.

    First, though: UT. Yeah.

  • Wavatars in, Tags out

    Thanks to Gravatar’s new support for Shamus Young’s Wavatars, and thanks to the Easy Gravatar plugin, not only are Gravatars back but each commentator gets an auto-generated Wavatar (which they can, of course, replace by registering a user icon choice with Gravatar).

    I should whip up a colophon page listing all of the neat bits from hither and yon that go into making this journal work. Some day. Yep.

    In other news, the tags have all gone away because I got sick and tired of fiddling with them. I didn’t actually delete them but, other than in the handful of postings in which I used them, they won’t appear anywhere at all. (Even in those posts they’re barely noticeable.) (EDIT: Oh look, there’s a mass delete function for tags built into WordPress 2.5! They’re gone for good now!) It’s for the best, really: I went batty at times with trying to figure out what existing tags fit a given post and having to create new tags all the time because none of the existing tags fit. Forget it. If tags are what the cool kids are doing, I’m okay being uncool. The last thing I need is something else slowing down my posting output!

    Of course, crossposts to LJ continue to be automatically tagged… with the category from WordPress. Go figure.

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