Living With a Nerd

I didn’t do much gaming this weekend, but there was a media marathon overload over the past 72 hours.  Over the weekend, we watched/went and saw: Sherlock Holmes, Pandorum, Burn After Reading, discs four five and six of Ergo Proxy, about three hours of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and about two hours of Clone High.  Numerous South Park episodes from the 4th and 5th seasons were also watched.  I continued with reading Cerebus, and on Brittnie’s recommendation started reading The Host written by Stephenie Meyer (yes, that Stephanie Meyer).  I have been pleasently suprised so far…although I couldn’t stand even just the 5 minutes of Twilight that I heard while Brittnie was going through the audio books (she hated them too, thank the goddess), The Host is a well written and entertaining story.  I’m only about 70 pages in, but I’m interested enough to finish it out.

The most exciting media happenings out of the weekend was that my copy of Warren Ellis’ first novel Crooked Little Vein showed up on our doorstep.  Ellis’ stories are always really twisted, and his writing style magnificent.  I can’t wait to dive into it…there will 100% for sure be a review of it on the main site after I finish it.

I finally took the plunge.  I wiped the hard drive that had Windows XP SP3 32bit on my gaming system, and installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit…and wow, what a big difference!  The whole PC feels like it is way faster.  I’m not sure if that is just how it “feels” or if it actually is, but I DO know that according to dslreports.com both my download and upload speeds have increased by about 300k.  Since I never did Vista, it is taking me some time to get used to where everything is in Windows 7, but suffice it to say it is awesome.  As an added bonus, I didn’t have to install a single driver for any of my hardware…I was even able to pick up and connect to my wireless network during the setup process!  I’m still a bit of a noob when it comes to Windows 7, but it is showing a lot of promise.

A few months ago, I put the album on hiatus.  Morale about the project was low, I couldn’t come up with anything that satisfied me creatively, and for a few weeks straight I was scrapping everything I put together.  Rather than continue to get more and more frustrated, I just set it all aside for a later date.  That later date is now.  Listening to old favourites of mine like Saafi Brothers and Redshift while finding some new artists and listening to a bunch of Hearts of Space episodes has reignited the spark back in me.  I don’t have any definite plans yet, I’m just going to get myself back in front of the MIDI controller and see what happens.  I’ve spent the past few days amassing a sizable collection of freeware ReFills for Reason, so I’m hoping to find some interesting stuff to either use or tweak from that.

My production skills haven’t really increased, but I have been trying to listen to ambient differently.  Rather than just relaxing and chilling out, I’ve been trying to pick apart the tracks; identify the individual sounds, work out what someone did to get them to sound the way they do, and even try to picture the producer putting the track together.  I hope to eventually release The Transient Unknown on magnatune, but it’s quite possible I’ll just make this a freebie and give it away.  Either way, the four tracks I have up on the website will ALWAYS be available at no cost.  I really enjoy those tracks, and I want other people to enjoy them too.  Since I’m not planning on making a living out of this and realistically don’t expect to make any money, giving some of the tracks away for free just feels like the right thing to do.

So I recently found out that a proper sequel to Divine Divinity was released just a couple of days ago here in North America (and a few months ago over in Europe.)  I didn’t put much time into Divine, but I did play the hell out of its spin-off, Beyond Divinity.  Not the greatest games in the world, but entertaining enough to check out the sequel.  According to Wikipedia, it uses the Gamebryo engine, the same engine used in Oblivion/Fallout 3.  Considering the progression between those two games, I am very interested and even a bit excited to see how they have further tweaked the engine.  I’m glad to see that Emergent Game Technologies, the current company that owns the middleware, licensed its usage to such a small Belgian developer like Larian Studios.  I’m even happier to see that Larian have kept development in-house, considering they made the first two entries as well.

In other news, 2010 seems like it is going to be the year of the tablet.  A convertible tablet (one where a screen docks onto a keyboard with a more powerful set of hardware) seems like the perfect thing for Brittnie, considering her job.  Right now it looks like Lenovo is the only one with such a device almost ready to go, but I’m sure there will be others.  Being able to record grades or prepare lessons on it in laptop mode, then just grabbing the screen and walking around the classroom seems perfect.  She could just use one of the tablet notebooks out now that have a screen that swivels, but then she is carrying an entire laptop around…quite a different animal when you have a classroom full of special needs kids all vying for your attention at the same time.

Brittnie’s desk has now been reorganized, giving her full use of the desktop and maximizing the use of her new speakers.  I don’t have any pictures of what it looked like before, but rest assured it looks much better now:

I figured with how much music she listens to, Brittnie deserved better speakers than the horrible ones she was using.  She didn’t have much room, and I wanted her to get the best sound she could in a small package (and for under $100), so I decided on the Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II.  They aren’t the best, but for their price and their size it’s hard to beat them.  They have excellent stereo imaging, and likely their best trait (aside from their classy looks) is their complete lack of localization…unless you concentrate and stare directly at them, you can’t really tell where the music is coming from.  I figured they would sound decent, but their output really does defy their small stature.  The bass/treble controls, as well as the headphone and aux-in jacks on the front are icing on the cake.