It’s bad enough that they’re charging $50 for what appears to be just a mod for BF2. But just in case my wound wasn’t salty enough, there is this.

The video card I purchased for my new monster is the VisionTek XTASY RADEON X850XT. I had never really heard of VisionTek before I bought this card but they had it at Fry’s for about 100 dollars cheaper than other X850XT cards by different companies. So I grabbed it. A review I read online said they were able to use this card to play Half-Life 2 at 1600×1200, all the eye candy turned all the way up, and still average over 100 frames per second. Sounds good to me. It took me a while to get my computer setup this weekend so I didn’t even get games installed until Sunday night. But when I did… wow. This was a sweet card. I don’t think I was getting 100 FPS but with everything turned all the way up, I was hovering around 60 FPS in Counter Strike: Source. Very cool. I also spent some time playing Half-Life 2. I’m not sure what my FPS were in that but I never saw any video lag. Wow, listen to me. I can’t seem to find a single thing wrong with this card. Well enough of my gushing for VisionTek. Let’s get to the screen shots. Click the image to see it full size.

That’s right. This is pure shit. After only 2 days of playing games, this card locks up and crashes. The pictures above were some of the better times when I could actually navigate my computer. Now the fan on the card spins erratically and it always looks like crap. I have uninstalled the drivers, reinstalled the drivers, booted into safe mode (when the drivers aren’t used, only default Windows VGA drivers) and it still looks like this. So it went back into its box to go live at Fry’s again. I told them to send it back to the vendor and not put it back on the shelf with sticker and a 5 dollar discount. I’m going to a different store tomorrow to pick up the ASUS version of the same card. It’s about 100 dollars more but at least I’ve heard of ASUS.
I’m really hoping it’s just a problem with the card manufacturer (and not the ATI chip), otherwise it will be back to nVidia for me, this time for good.

Sarah and I got up this morning to go vote before work. We went to some government office in Redwood City. It was pretty cool because it was just after 8 in the morning so there wasn’t anybody there, no lines, quick and easy. Then we got home, I got in my car to drive to work and the stupid thing wouldn’t start. I turn the key and all I hear are stupid little clicking and buzzing noises. Yay… seriously, yay. Luckily I was able to take Sarah’s car so I wasn’t any later than I already was for going to vote. And before any of you chime in with that “You have a job now, why don’t you buy a new car?” crap, I’ll tell you right now that I can’t. My student loan payments are going to kick in soon and they are not pretty. Besides, I hate car payments. And on top of that, I hate driving.

As it turns out, I don’t think my electric bill will be as cheap as I thought next month. I looked more closely at my bill and noticed that the meter reading didn’t change for some reason. And the $2.96 that I was charged was for a baseline minimum charge for electric service.
I guess I jumped the gun. Oh well. I still love it here though.

Well the trip to Sacramento wasn’t that bad. The drive took about 2 hours to get there this morning. However, the drive back took 3 hours because of traffic. It turned out to be really hot there, about as hot as it is in Austin right now but without all the humidity. Regardless, I’m glad it’s over. I don’t like having to be anywhere at 6:15 in the morning, except for in bed.
On another more annoying note, I had had my car here for about 2 days total. Our apartment only comes with one parking space but that’s fine because there’s plenty room on the street. So I got up the third morning I had my car and there was a cute little yellow courtesy notice on my windshield from the Menlo Park police. As it turns out, you cannot park your car on the street from 2:00 am to 5:00 am, the magical 3-hour window of time when it is the worst possible time to have a car on a street in Menlo Park. For those who are unable to read and understand all the legal mumbo-jumbo in that courtesy notice, I will summarize:

Hello and welcome to Menlo Park. We would like it if you would please pay us money to park your car anywhere in our city. In order to make this easier for you, we have created a law to ensure that you have no choice but to pay us. Thank you. And again, welcome to Menlo Park.

Fortunately, I am one of the lucky few who are allowed to purchase a parking permit for the curb in front of my apartment complex. Unfortunately, in order for me to be able to buy a parking permit at $90 per year, my car has to be registered in the state of California. In order to be registered here, it has to pass the Smog Check. I seriously doubt the poor little Flantra stands any chance of passing that test without a good chunk of expensive repair work. Therefore, the whole registration thing isn’t going to happen anytime soon. At least not until I get a few paychecks.
So… I had to get an additional parking spot in my complex. It’s $30 a month, way more than the $90 a year, but until I get registered, that’s where it will have to go. Welcome to the Governator’s state. And again, welcome to Menlo Park.

At the end of every day, you get everybody’s favorite star, our very own center of the solar system, playing a friendly game of irradiate and destroy your retinas.

Apparently IE hates having to display this site with only one post. Maybe my HTML and CSS suck but FireFox doesn’t seem to have any problem displaying this site, regardless of how many posts there are.

Oh well… the problem, if you can really call it that, is that if the element conatining the posts doesn’t push the footer down below the bottom edge of the two side columns, then IE just randomly refuses to draw entire chunks of the page. I noticed when testing the layout over the last couple of days that after there are enough posts to push the footer down, IE starts behaving a bit better.