Sunday, March 11, 2007

A good experience

I tend to be a little biased when it comes to video cards. I always thought nVidia was just better. But now I'm seeing this isn't true. The card I bought is exponentially better than any nVidia card I've ever used, up to and including the integrated GPU on my HP's motherboard. I just can't wait to take it upstairs and start Media Center on the TV and show my mom how cool it really is to have WinXP MCE. :)

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Saturday, March 10, 2007

I know you're jealous.

I went to CompUAS today with my dad because they were closing with savings up to a amazingly huge 30%.

I got a graphics card at 10% off. My problem was that I was about $10 short in the end, so my dad lent me the money to get it. :) He's so cool.

Why will you be jealous of me? I have a dual-monitor setup finally! It's very nice to have the stuff I don't change much on a monitor off to the side so that I can do other things on the one in front of me. Now I have to get used to remembering where I left iTunes and Windows Live Messenger.

The card I got is marginally good. It's the ATI Radeon X 1300 PRO model. It's got two monitor capability, so that's why I have two, and it's got 256MB onboard memory. It's crossfire capable (ATI's version of nVidia's SLI), even if I can't use it. It's valued at $129.99.

I had to move the flat panel to the DVI port with the adapter because it kept flickering when in dual-monitor mode because the DVI port has priority. Since the flat panel is the one I will look at most and the one games will be playing on, I want it to not flicker. So now it's identifying itself as Monitor 2.

So yeah. I'm going to go try to figure out why my sister can't get into the other accounts on this computer.... I think she broke the one we use just to play games.

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Thursday, March 8, 2007

Well, it's Thursday by just a few minutes here...

I wrote more yesterday (Wed.). I need to stop. It's getting to the point where it's unhealthy... it's interfering with my school and other various parts of my life. My teachers are applauding it until I stop turning in work....

My story is now on eight pages, and I'm still typing stuff I wrote today. I approximate there will be 10 by the time I finish this batch, and then there'll probably be even more because I have school again today! (Thursday) Whee!

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Monday, March 5, 2007

   What do you get...

...when you put a vision of myself I saw nights ago and the story I'm writing in a blender?

Me making a cameo appearance as a drunkard in my own story!

Yes, I wrote more yet. And I appear in my own story for just a few sentences as the main character looks back into a room she was brought through to see someone else. This room is like a hangout for this one group. It's pretty darn hilarious that I play a drunkard in my own story!

"That post" is finally in the archives. *relieved*

I'm going to tell my friend to tell Jessie that I think she's full of it with the Hematite thing. I did research, and I was also aided my my friend, Kitsune, but neither of us found anything that didn't require some degrees of twisting and/or interpretation to match what I was told. I think it's crap, and I'm ready to defend myself in saying such.

I think I already said this here, but I find it interesting that Jessie only asks about gemstones/magick...

---

EDIT: My story now spans 7 pages and is comprised of exatly 4,274 words. I'm at the 4.250K point! WHOOOHOO!!!

EDIT: I had a presentation in PowerPoint that I had to turn in today. I had it on my little USB flash drive. I ended up cutting rather than copying from the source, and someone deleted it off the server. So I lost my presentation thing. So now I have to make it up again. I had no copies on my computer or on the flash drive... *sigh*

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Saturday, March 3, 2007

Whee!

I didn't do a stitch of writing, and it's already 3AM here! What exactly did I do?

I got IIS on my computer upstairs a couple of days ago. (Okay, yesterday, but whatever.) I decided, hey, it'd be cool to host my story here while I develop the plot a bit more. Free reign experimentation with PHP and MySQL and such. I had forgotten how much of a pain setting up PHP with IIS is without using the CGI executeable. I gave IIS sveral slaps upside its MS-programmed head before I found out how to fix it. So now, here's the cool part: \\HSRESQ is a full-fledged WIMP server! (I know, that sounds hilarious. Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP is the acronym) It's great to be able to experiment with the various things I can do with these nifty tools before I actually submit them to the web. My only concern is that I'll have to export tables from MySQL and back into MySQL on my webhost's server when I finish experimenting. Who knows? Maybe I'll even get \\HSRESQ to serve it EVERYWHERE!!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!! I doubt it, since Cox has limits on how much bandwidth we can use per month, even if it is ridiculously high. Not that it'd be high traffic, but if they notice a lot of HTTP_GET requests coming to us, they might be curious... I just had to post that to throw an evil laugh in there. :)

So, other than convert my personal computer (that I don't use much anymore) into a WIMP(y) server, I played DDR and realized I still suck at it. I played EA's Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 and, again, realized I still suck. Then I started using the Remote Desktop Connection to set up my computer.

Our fridge is nearly empty. It's hilarious. We had hamburgers, corn, and some onion, tomato, and cucumber salad-y thing. Our dishwasher also went from consuming water to consuming food, automatic to manual. Our dishwasher went kaput. My dad says the part to fix it costs half as much as a new one altogether, so we might be getting a new dishwasher.

Speaking of new, rumor around this basement today was that my dad was looking at family cell phone plans with Moto RAZRs as the phones. :):):):) I want another cell phone again... mine is old, dead, and had a terrible service provider.

Well, like most posts, I end this late. But I have another grammar question. In fact, two.

Grammar Question: What is the proper way to write a characters thoughts in a story?
Grammar Question: What is the difference between saying "she lays" and "she lies" when speaking of someone being in the horizontal position?

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Friday, March 2, 2007

   Writing again!

I KNOW I mentioned the story I'm writing, since I posted the first chapter, but that has since become incorrect. I made some edits! I replaced MOST of the ten-codes with their english equivalents, however I left two, one of which I hope you know, and one of which I hope no one will look up until a little after that part of the story.

Well, in my gym class, we went bowling the past few days. Yesterday, I brought my notebook into the "pit" area while we were bowling. There weren't many lanes allocated to my class, so there was a little more of a wait between frames. I wrote something of two pages of notebook paper in that small 40-minute or so span. When I typed it, I made some minor revisions, but the paper is pretty accurate, which is surprising, considering how far from the paper version I had the photographer story has gone.

I finally hit the 3,000 word mark too! About 4 and a half pages I have so far, and already I have four divisions. Obviously, I either need to revise my divisions, or there will just be short chapters and more of them. I actually have a title for the three actual chapters, but I choose not to give one to the prologue. That's a first for me too, having a prologue. This story is a world of firsts to me. For example, since I am actively writing this piece, it may actually end sometime in the next year! But...

...*whispers* there's gonna be a sequel, unless I end it badly. I'm trying to keep it hush-hush for right now, since I am only about two weeks into development.

To compare speed, I started the photographer story in May of last year as my "writing journal." I dropped it over that summer, too. I then lately picked it up again and wrote about a page or two and changed part of the plot. This one is six pages and 3,935 words. My most recent one, written thusfar in one continuous stream over two weeks, is five pages and 3,012 words. That is a faster development time, by far! I can't wait to finish more of it so I can post the site I'm composing for this story to the internet. I won't do it until I'm confident that I'll actually keep writing in a continuous stream like I have been. I don't want to catch someone's interest only to lose them because they have nothing to read. :)

As for the blog that had, until just recently, slipped my mind, I haven't touched it in a long time. I've either been being and idiot or writing, so I didn't really have any time to develop that other blog place. :(

Jessie told me through my friend that there's something special about Hematite. It's a good reason for her lo like it and a good reason for me to avoid it, even though I don't believe in magick. (Before anyone asks, says, or tells me, that's not a typo.)

*slinks away "ugh"-ing from his headache from the computer monitor.*

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Wednesday, February 28, 2007

It's raining...

It's raining on my computer right now. I have Beryl installed over Ubuntu Edgy. It's a trip. There's all sorts of weird things you can make it do. It's great fun.

It's late again. (The first time I typed that I typed "latte." I wish.) I should probably go to bed again... It seems like I just got up...

Read this and comment. Please?

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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

   ?!?

Well, you all know about Jessie, right? Well, it appears that now I'm useful to her. She thinks that she is "that way." I have no idea what the basis of her claims to this are, but I was told from a friend of mine who is also her friend that I am not hated any longer and that she has questions for me to answer. The only one I've been asked so far is what kind of gemstones I'm attracted to. I've always loved deep greens like emeralds and funky, icky browns, though I wouldn't wear the browns, I often find myself bored when my dad looks for jewelry for my mom and end up looking for something green or brown-ish. So I guess I "attracted" to earthy colors... I did tell this friend to mention that I see a symbolic link between myself and the Alexandrite, the birthstone in my class ring. That's what's with the mood icon of todays post.

So yes, Jessie claims to be like me and is attempting to either try to invalidate me or use me as a knowledge base. Either way, I'm not sure that the results are positive, since I haven't heard her reasons for her claims. It's sort of ridiculous, I think. I think she wants me to contradict myself some time in the near future and she will get all in-my-face about it. I just have a premonition. They're usually wrong, but it never hurt to try.

Of course, for more on this, see my MSN/Windows Live space thingy.

And pretty, pretty please read my story and comment on it. :)

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Monday, February 26, 2007

Duhhhhh...

I'm writing something in a quite different style tonight. I don't have a lot of time tonight since there's school tomorrow. However, I do have a printout of the "Guide to Writing Your Intro Post" that I can use at school and still do this.

Even though I didn't post this here originally, (See my MSN/Windows Live Space for the original) I will relate it here. I am becoming active on a forum again. They ask for (read: require) an introduction if you are new or have been inactive for more than three months or so. I've been inactive for about seven months! This means I get to re-experience the joys of writing the intro post and the post-post "grilling" for any discrepancies that I made in my post and any details I neglected to include. As you can tell, this is a very tightly controlled group, and the slightest mistake can be scary. So I've begun from scratch, using only what comes to memory and mentioning such if I think I'm missing something. It's a real joy for someone with a memory like mine. You know, rather volatile. Things seem to just randomly fall out of my memory and are sometimes lost forever when they do. So I have to either start referencing my journal from those times or try to make myself remember. Not an easy task for me to re-intro myself there.

Speaking of remembering, I still haven't been dreaming, and if I have, I haven't even remembered that I did dream, nor any of the details of it. I miss my imagination's playground. It was fun to see what kind of wacky crap my mind produces subconsciously to reason things out. I guess things just make too much sense to me.

And a bit of nerdiness: I tried to add a subdomain to a subdomain on my website. It kept adding it to the root domain instead of the subdomain! So what I did was added a subdomain that looks like a totally new one just named something.something. So it's really like a sibling of "something" rather than a child object. It works though. I tried it, and the regular subdomain and the workaround subdomain work like a charm. I had emailed Adam in the middle of figuring this out, and I just got his response a little while ago. He says 'tis a limitaion of the administration panel software the server runs under. Beat this, cPanel! XD =P =P =P =P

For all who wish to, I have the first fragment of my story below. I have no idea how long this story is going to be, nor whether it will be posted here in its entirety, but we'll see in the future. Read if you so desire.

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   Fleeing the Scene

"We have a 10-31 south of the terrace. Suspect is fleeing on foot." A figure dashes agilely through the crowd surrounding this most recent murder scene. "Suspect heading north.10-4." The wind rushes around the body of the fleeing figure. Red, blue, and white lights reflect off of the figure, exposing its dull grays, browns, blacks, and bright whites. These colors are only visible for a short time as the sparse photons are dragged with the figure, creating a glowing aura.
"Victim is in bad shape, might make it. Requesting EMTs." The figure continues running. Police begin to follow. They wave their flashlights around the dark trying to catch the figure in the light, but fail as the figures dodges the beams and remains in the shadow of night. Adeptly as it moves, it falls under the light. Every one of the half dozen police chasing the figure stop and gape in astonishment. The figure, not making a single stop, falls to all fours and blazes away. "County, officers on foot have lost visual contact with suspect, requesting assistance north of the mall. All units please be advised, suspect last seen fleeing on foot north of the mall. Stop all traffic headed that direction. We’re gonna to catch this freak."
The figure, having returned to an upright position, looks into the skies as it hears helicopters and sees the search lights, one in the east and one in the west. Police follow from the south. The figure keeps running, leaving a drip or partial footprint of the victims blood infrequently.
"County, we have a 10-41, possibly our 10-40. Requesting permission to pursue. 10-4, beginning pursuit." A patrol car speeds out of a parking lot with its lights off and begins following the figure, which again drops to all fours. The officers shine the cars spotlights and hi-beams on their suspect, but once the figure’s grays, browns, blacks, and whites show, the cruiser squeals out of control and comes back onto the road. "County, our 10-40 is a 10-11. 10-9? Our 10-40 is a 10-11. Suspect has blood on it and is evading us. Requesting permission to shoot to disable. 10-4."
The police officer in the passenger’s seat expends countless bullets attempting to hit the figure that isn’t so hidden anymore in the leg or thigh, but is always just off the mark. The driver taps the other officer on the shoulder and whispers to him, "We have a chance to catch this freak. See it? Chase it into there."
A dead end. They think the figure will stop, not knowing where to go. What they don’t know is that the figure knows the city better than anyone else. The officer continues shooting at the figure, trying to direct it straight into the retaining wall up ahead. Approaching the wall, the figure takes one big leap and clears the wall. Astonished, the police screech to a hault. "We’ve lost him! He’s heading north-north-west just north of the dead end on Tiffany Ave. Get choppers on this freak now!"
The figure lies panting in the tall grass just past the retaining wall it cleared. It rolls on its back and looks up so it can tell when the coast is clear. Helicopters buzz overhead, waving the grass over the figure, which then recedes and returns. Spotlights flash everywhere from overhead, allowing very slim chances of escape. The figure decides to make a break for it.

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