Living With a Nerd

I managed to catch Shutter Island over the weekend (full review here.)  While it certainly wasn’t Scorsese’s best, it was more than worth the price of admission.  I hope to catch a viewing of The Crazies this weekend, although up until a couple of hours ago I was completely unaware that it is a remake of a 1973 Romero film.  I’ve since moved it up to the top spot on my Netflix queue, so I’ll get a chance to see the original before I see the remake…a required tradition when it comes to remakes nowadays.  Look for a review next week.

In other news, previous plans to charge for my music have been completely scrapped, at least for now.  While I’m quite proud of the tracks I’ve put together, I don’t think they are of high enough quality to charge for them.  Since I’m doing this primarily to provide people with enjoyable experiences instead of a way to get rich, I have no problem giving it all away.  Who knows, if I get popular enough maybe one day I’ll release an album and actually charge for it.  For now, the music page remains unchanged, but sometime in the next few days I will update it to include previously unreleased tracks.  The other advantage of releasing the tracks for free is that it lifts any arbitrary release date I put on myself, thus reducing the stress associated with production.  Since I won’t be charging for it, I can make it exactly how I want without any worry regarding whether it has monetary worth.

I think I lost the Reason file for Circumstellar Disk, so unless I can locate it, the unfinished version currently on the music page will become the finished version.  I may use that as an excuse to put together a small drone project, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I discovered Stars of the Lid.  Drone ambient is relatively easy to make, yet is still very creatively satisfying for me.  Regardless, there are still at least two tracks to finish on The Transient Unknown (IC-443 and Solar Winds).  After that I plan on doing Lost on the Way to the Laundry, which (I’m hoping) will be a dubstep/ambient hybrid, although that could change radically when the time comes to actually do it.

Once there is more content than just The Transient Unknown, I will likely switch from a single page to a seperate Wordpress website specifically for the music stuff.  It will still be located at livingwithanerd.com/music, but making it its own Wordpress site will allow me to keep everything more organized.  For now though, I’m going to stick with the single-page design.

Things have been crazy around here lately.  Work has been consuming a large portion of my mental capacity, which is why there haven’t been any new articles in quite a while.  I’m going to put some serious time into writing this weekend, to get things back on track.  It’s been a relief not worrying about the website, but it’s time to bring things back to normal.  Starting Monday, our normal posting schedule will resume. 

With her tax return, Brittnie decided to pick up Guitar Hero 5 and an extra guitar for me.  I had only played Guitar Hero a couple of times before, and have never owned a rhythm game, just like Brittnie.  For once, we had a game where our skills were about equal.  In the 5 days since we got it, it’s pretty much all we’ve done at home.  We have both progressed fairly quickly, with myself already getting 95% on “Sweating Bullets” from Megadeth on medium, while Brittnie is getting quite comfortable playing bass for any song on medium (she always plays bass, I play guitar.)  It feels almost like I’m late to the party since I never really got into the whole rhythm game thing when it was big, but whatever…we are enjoying ourselves quite a lot.  The last time we gamed this much together every night in a row was right after we got our Wii.  She picked up World Tour two days ago because of all the classic rock on there, so that has been super fun.  I noticed that World Tour is easier than Guitar Hero 5, although the leap in graphics between World Tour and 5 is immense.  Haven’t unlocked the Tool songs yet, but we are actively working towards doing so.

Hopefully, I’ll get out to the movies this weekend and see either Wolfman or Shutter Island.  Look for a review in the coming days!

No doubt you have heard about the insane snow we have had for the past week here in Maryland.  A storm last weekend dropped around 30″ on us, and a storm just three days ago dropped an additional 18″ on us.  Right now, our back yard looks like a snow swimming pool…the snow is only about 6 inches below the top of our fence(!).  Luckily, it should be above freezing for most of the next week, so hopefully a lot of it will melt.  It was awesome getting some time off from work though:-)

I’m about half way through Bioshock 2.  My opinion keeps shifting from “meh” to “more time in Rapture!  Huzzah!”  I’m still not quite sure what I think…on the one hand, it’s been cool to learn more about the Big Daddies and the various backroom deals that went on while Rapture was still a functioning city, but on the other hand the whole thing feels unnecessary and at times forced.  The new hacking mini-game is far and away the best change to the formula, but I’m not sure playing as a Big Daddy was the right move…it feels wrong that I’m a Big Daddy but can be killed by a splicer pummeling me with a wrench.  In the first Bioshock, if you just stood there whacking a Big Daddy in the skull you would be turned into hamburger.  I realize you are a “prototype” and not as well armored, but still…you’re in a freakin’ diving suit.  A wrench shouldn’t do anything to you.  I’ll reserve final judgement for when I finish the game, as I’ve heard the storyline kicks into overdrive in the final couple of hours, but for now I think I’m on the “why did they do this again?” side.

In other news, I just ordered a set of Audio-Technica ATH-AD700s.  I can’t wait to see how they sound with gaming, and the extra wide soundstage reported by many owners has me excited to see how they present The Transient Unknown.  From what I’ve read, they are a bit lacking in the bass department until they get burned in a bit, so I’m going to put together a playlist to run through them for a while.  I’m still going to actually use them during the burn-in period so I can hear them change, but I’m making sure to keep my expectations low at first.  I’ll likely go for a Nuforce uDAC in a month or two, but for now the control pod on my Logitech Z4 2.1s will have to do.

Special thanks to the members over at the Head-Fi forums and the [H]ard|Forum for helping me in my purchasing decision.  Keep an eye on livingwithanerd.com for an initial review on the AD700’s and a follow-up review once I have broken them in.  The main page has been neglected this week due to just general insanity going on around here…I hope to get things relatively back to normal next week, although I can’t promise that.  At the very least, the next entry in our Healthy Gamer series will make an appearance on Monday.

Mass Effect 2 is almost everything I hoped for.  There were a couple of major changes that I kinda wish they hadn’t done, but overall it’s good stuff.  You can check our full review of it here.

As of right now, I’m running a 250 gig hard drive as my primary system drive, with two 500 gig SATAII Seagates running in RAID 0 to hold my archives.  My only backup drive is a 750 gig maxtor SATAII stuffed into a Rosewill RX-358-S BLK enclosure.  Well, that is about to change.  I just recently ordered a Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS to replace the two 500 gig drives.  Since the WD 1.5 TB drive is going to be standalone, I ::knock on wood:: shouldn’t encounter any of the problems people are having when running them in RAID.  I decided to go with the Green edition since they are supposed to generate less heat than the others…the power savings are nice, but will hardly make a dent in the power consumption of my system.

So now what am I to do with these two 500 gig drives?  Stuff them in an enclosure and use them for backup, of course!  I also picked up a Kingwin DK-32U-S enclosure.  So, with the two 500 gig drives running in JBOD along with the aformentioned 750 gig drive I’ll FINALLY have enough space to back up EVERYTHING.  It’s pretty exciting, I can’t wait! 

Next steps for upgrades include getting another Asus VH236H (and giving Brittnie my Dell 2005FPW, currently used as a secondary monitor), upgrading my CPU, Motherboard, and RAM, and…well, that would be it for a while, actually.  I would LOVE to replace my system drive with an SSD, but the cost isn’t worth it to me.  My system isn’t nearly high-end enough for the hard drive to have that big of a difference.  Still, even if I don’t go SSD, I will likely replace the system drive soon.