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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: January 2011

  • It’s fun to visit the O-D-M-V!

    I received notice in the mail a few days ago indicating that my current Oregon state ID card is to expire on my forthcoming birthday. Having means, motive and opportunity now, I figured not to wait until late February to do anything about it.

    So I gathered all of the bits and bobs needed. Social Security card? Check! State-issued, non-laminated birth certificate? Check! (Hospital-issued certs won’t cut it. No, I don’t know why.) Checkbook? Check! (They don’t take plastic.) Off I went, to the Oregon DMV “Express” over at Lloyd Mall.

    The mall’s a much nicer place in the middle of a sunny school day, by the by.

    The process itself went quickly, smoothly, painlessly (unless you count the $40 spent). On the other hand, two of my favorite things ever took place during my brief sojourn:

    1. “Are you waiting in line, ma’am?” “…No.” “Oh! Sorry about that…” I must have that kind of face. Or something. Last time I got the “ma’am” treatment was at a Starbucks near work. Sigh.
    2. “Carol?” “…Not quite.” It’s like being back in school all over again, when each new teacher (and there were many thanks to all of those address changes) couldn’t get my name right.

    But hey, I’ll have a shiny new ID soon, and I won’t have to worry about this again until who-knows-when down the road…

  • City of Heroes and Windows 7

    This may not apply to many folks, but here goes:

    If you’re running Windows 7, if you have an nVidia card but it isn’t an “uber” card, and you play City of Heroes, and you decide to upgrade to the 266-series drivers… make sure you remove the PhysX and “nVidia 3D” components via Programs & Features or risk abysmal performance.

    I’ve had to run without FSAA, without Anisotropic, and with basically none of the Ultra Mode fancy stuff turned on since I converted to Windows 7 on my HP xw4400 workstation with the 9800 GT. Which struck me as a bit odd since I ran with most of the “UM” goodies enabled (at lower settings, mind you) under XP on the same hardware. (Yes, it was a fresh install. This isn’t my first rodeo, Mr. Stark.)

    Tonight a CoH patch came down, and after that applied… I got less than one frame per second. Much less. I had to find the command line arguments so I could force a lower screen resolution just to get the Options display to appear. After an hour of frustrated tinkering & researching, I was getting ready to roll back to a much older driver release. While in Programs & Features getting ready to yank them out, I noticed the other two nVidia entries in the list. On a whim I pulled just those out, and rebooted.

    And… City of Heroes ran like a dream, albeit with the reduced settings I’d been forced to adopt. So I turned on FSAA to 2x, which had previously brought the game to its knees.

    Still smooth. And after I turned Anisotropic Filtering back on. And the Ultra Mode shadows. And bloom. And depth of field. (Yes, all of those were off to get any kind of performance, previously.)

    I don’t know what the hell “nVidia 3D” is, but I suspect it doesn’t play nicely with City of Heroes, and I don’t have anything else that needs it. Good riddance. As for PhysX… if that was the culprit, I’ll live without it, thank you very much.

  • I didn’t know “Abrahamic” was a word.

    But that doesn’t stop this comedy bit from being utterly hilarious and spot-on.

  • You Do Not Fit

    We’ve all long known that I don’t “fit in,” metaphorically speaking. I’m not into the usual things guys are into… not sports, or cars, or hunting, or what-have- you. I don’t slot neatly into the Red State / Blue State spectrum. George Lucas didn’t “ruin my childhood” by making a trio of crappy movies. I shoot a webcomic based on my rubber duck collection, for pity’s sake. That’s fine, since I don’t really want to be like most of the rest of humanity. Maybe I’m a snob, but I just don’t “get it,” all of the identifying with brands that people seem to do. What I would like, however, are pants that fit.

    Supposedly I’m just barely under average height, 5’8″ tall. Too bad that doesn’t translate into a wide availability of pants. Everything’s got a 30-inch inseam or longer. Even when I find a “short” 30, or an actual 29, I have to wonder what the hell kind of body shape the pants were built for. There’s weird bunching going on that mystifies me. Or, to put it another way: Why in hell does it look like I’m smuggling a small animal in the front of my trousers?

    (Yes, yes, go ahead and crack wise. I gave you a straight line, I’d be disappointed if you chose not to use it as you see fit.)

    What I usually end up with are pants that are too wide and too long and bunch up funny, because the alternative is… what? A kilt? I don’t see my boss approving that as proper work attire, for starters.

    Were I rich, I’d just have everything custom made. Since that’s never happening… I just have to live with the fact that, like in every other part of my life, I’m the odd man out when it comes to buying clothes.

  • Where does all of that money go?

    You know, you’d think that Microsoft could afford proofreaders for their EULA boilerplate text. But…

    Sloppy, guys. Very sloppy.

  • Arbitrary Demarcations

    Let’s face it: Reality, should we choose to anthropomorphize the cosmos for the sake of argument, doesn’t give a damn about when we say a new day begins, or a new month, or a new year.

    I ended 2010 with a wearying, annoying head cold. I started 2011 with a wearying, annoying head cold. At no point anywhere near midnight of December 31st did the universe change so that the new year would be better or worse than what came before.

    This may seem blindingly obvious to you. I, however, spent the first half of my life (give or take) looking for signs, meaning in the meaningless, pointers from a higher power. That sort of thing. Even now, I approach the end of four decades on this planet and it’s still all too easy for me to get caught up in wrong-headed nonsense.

    Still and all, I hope 2011 goes well. We could all stand a bit of improved circumstances, couldn’t we?

    And I really wish that this stupid cold would go away.

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