Posts Tagged ‘altima network’

Ninjas and Stuff

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

Well! That RAM upgrade certainly did do wonders for Dinah. It’s invisible in terms of effect on day-to-day usage (browsing the internets and such) but what it did to is make her WoW installation playable! Before I could barely wade through to attend to Auction House and mailbox and guild chat, but feeding the ninja laptop an extra 2 GB (well, actually 4 since I had to replace both slots) was just what she needed. She’s definitely raid-viable now, and is better than Yggdrasil in that I don’t have to deal with FPS-killing “senior moments.” She does run a little hot but that appears to be the extent of the stress on her as she otherwise goes back to room temperature-ish once I close out. Go go awesome ninja MacBook!

(Bonus awesome: the mac client for Vent is compatible with my guild’s server, and I’ve been told I have much better sound quality. Hot.)

Still waiting on my video card before I can assemble Blastoise. Originally sourced through an Amazon subseller, that order got canned because the subseller got some bad card in their shipment and opted to kill and refund everyone’s orders rather than risk sending out a bad card. Smart move for everyone, mildly inconvenient for me because I wanted to have Blastoise built and running before Thursday’s raid (but since testing Dinah earlier today, I’m sure the ninja will be able to handle things in Blastoise’s place, and as far as keyboard/mouse setup goes she’s not as awkward as Yggdrasil)

His case is here, and yesterday I did the final extraction of the parts being carried over (Blu Ray optical drive and flash memory reader). I wanted to temporarily reuse Blastoise’s old 9800GTX so I could start the rebuild now and drop in the newer card when it arrives, but… uh… I must have done a really good job seating that video card, because no matter how many things I unclamped/unscrewed and pried out of the way, that thing was NOT coming out. Oh well.

I ended up reordering the N560GTX from NewEgg. (I’d considered asking mother to pop into Best Buy during her errands but the one here is totally cleaned out of ’em. Bah!) I had thought that the card would be coming from farther away (East Coast) but it’s originating from… freaking West Covina.
On UPS 3rd Day.
Can we say “Overnight by Technicality?” XD
I will laugh if it DOESN’T hit tomorrow (though if it does, circumstances will work against me and the UPS truck will arrive after the raid starts. :P)

On Upgrade and Job Change Analogies

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Part 1 of Blastoise’s gear came today (mobo, CPU, RAM, SSD and PSU) arrived today… and there was something extra in there: RAM for Dinah! Amazingly, it’s far easier (as in, doesn’t stub up my hands so much) to upgrade RAM on a MacBook than it is on a Windows laptop. Go ninja go ninja go~

Dinah now packs 4GB, the limit of what she can handle. How much more awesome that makes her remains to be seen, but for what it’s worth, said RAM was super-cheap. Really, it costs me more to order my pizza on raid nights. :P

Next up is Blastoise’s case. Yes, this sexy-ass thing. I don’t say this often about, well, anything, but I would totally hit that. All the more fitting that Blastoise gets to wear it. It’s practically his Maximillian. >:D It just left the Arizona warehouse this morning, and odds are it will probably hit tomorrow. That just leaves his video card and then I can make with the building. :3 Let’s just hope the video card doesn’t take too long to get here, or else Yggdrasil will have to step in for Thursday’s raid– as I saw on Sunday, old man Iggy can hold his weight, but he sometimes has a senior moment in which his framerate just goes to crap for a few minutes. (It IS, however, hilarious to imagine Iggy borrowing Blastoise’s helmet and spear to fight in his place. XD)

Now, something for the builders among us and/or who buy into this computers-as-characters: How does it register for you when you do a rebuild or a large-scale upgrade? To make it easier, let’s phrase this in RPG terms:

Is it like FF4, when Cecil becomes a paladin? Basically, a level reset but with better stats and stat growth. (I suppose Disgaea’s transmigration system falls under this, too.)

Or is it more like FF1, where you keep your levels but you get a huge stat infusion and improved stat growth henceforth?

I would think the latter is more plausible if you reuse many parts from the previous body, but the former would apply if you don’t reuse anything (or only use, like, one or two things).

Games. I has them. After seeing Skyrim spammed all over the internets and podcast streams, it was my brother who finally sold me on it when he brought the PS3 version over for Thanksgiving. I caved and looted the PC version, slapping it on Yggdrasil first (but I imagine it will look ten billion kinds of sexy on Blastoise). In a drastic change from my usual practice for RPGs with build-your-own-avatars, I rolled Hynderia (who made her first appearance in my character pile as a Draenei Warrior in WoW and was intended to stand in for Hikaru as the latter would have been impossible to adapt for WoW). Females represent, dood! I mean, all the gameplay I’ve seen has been one ginormous sausage party save for the scantily-clad NPC ally chick, let’s get some armored ladies in here. >:D

I also finally popped in Disgaea 4. And, uh… you know you’re in for a boatload of win if the first thing you hear is Troy Baker (as Valvatorez, who veers closer to the Ghaleon end of the scale rather than Snow) joygasming over a sardine. XD
The “HD” sprites are made of awesome, too, though with my crappy glasses I can’t tell all that much. (Yeah, that’s how badly I need a new pair.) As usual, my generics are clones of Across/RT doods where possible. :D

Add me on the PSN (Ayarane) if you want to laugh at my tiny Trophy connection or something… if your username isn’t something immediately recognizable, just make sure you indicate who you are or you get ignored as a random creeper.

On a more frivolous final note… I don’t have a title/prefix to use for Blastoise’s next form. Maybe I’ll just go with a version number. This is his 4th body, so…

Blastoise is Dead

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

Um… what the crap? Something just WTFtorpedoed Blastoise. W32/Blaster worm. (Dude, isn’t that super old?) Apparently it was that hardcore that it just… grew out of my recycle bin, bypassed AVG and gave poor Blastoise an epic headshot, enough to shut off everything he had running and for Windows Security Center to activate and throw an epic tantrum.

I wasn’t doing anything weird, either. Just playing WoW (levelling Kophilionel via LFD, specifically) and watching Gurren Lagann while waiting for the dungeon finder to do its thing. Then when I went to check TweetDeck, Blastoise froze up and… yeah.

Mother is NOT helping. When I sent down the alert to scan all active Windows machines immediately, she claims I did something to open up Blastoise. Yeah, um, no. I take reasonable measures to protect the network and my machines while avoiding unnecessary redundancies; Blastoise and Iggy run their virus scanners daily, and I’ve pretty much stopped torrenting as of late. Sometimes you can be as careful as you can, cross your T’s and dot your I’s and freak accidents like this happen anyway. Why doesn’t she get it? Of course, she HAD to bring up my one failed repair job as an excuse to make me second-guess my ability to build things… really? I do her the due diligence of warning her about a virus attack and she throws it back at me like that? Screw that noise.

(For the record, everyone else is in the clear. I don’t know if what Blastoise got was network-aware and could have jumped to other machines, but that’s not going to happen now.)

*sigh*

Blastoise is not coming back in his current body. Yes, there’s the “reinstall Windows” option but, if you’ve been reading previous posts, he’s up for a rebuild this month (specifically, looting his new parts on/after Black Friday) so it’s not worthwhile to reload him only to do it AGAIN in a new body a little over a week after. Mother is completely baffled as to why I’m not running around like a headless chicken all the same, as she would do in a similar situation. -_-

Now, as awful as all this sounds, it could have been way, way worse. Blow-ups like this is exactly why Yggdrasil exists– dood has the mission-critical stuff like Instant Ramen and the Ragnarok TWILIGHT work folders backed up (PLUS they’re additionally mirrored via Dropbox and Ayarane Project).

UPDATE: It’s not Blaster, but rather a fake antivirus disguised as a Blaster infection. Freaking virus writers. It doesn’t make Blastoise any less dead, but that’s what took him out. Well, aren’t I glad I use one of the top 10 antivirus.I thought it was weird since Blaster supposedly can’t infect Windows 7 machines…

Transmigrating Turtles part… something

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Hello November. Yeah, it’s time to rebuild Blastoise!

But… I’m going to delay it until right after Thanksgiving, because OMG BLACK FRIDAY/CYBER MONDAY sales and such. The sum of the parts I need is about $1200 right now (a little higher than what I would like, and the inclusion of a new case is mostly what pushed the total above $1000), so I figure if I wait until the holiday sales kick in, that plus the inevitable releases of the latest minor iteration of parts should (theoretically) take the edge off. At worst? I’ll have piled up a little more rewards points to generate Amazon eCerts. :P

In other news: while I did mostly space out for Halloween (mainly because I was doing that Super Mario World-themed pic for NSFW), I did get a big bag of Reese’s PB Pumpkins. :9 Thus I am not candy-less!

I’m also nearing completion on my “.hack//REPLAY” YouTube project. Long ago I was the first on YouTube to capture the Phase boss battles from the original .hack games in any capacity, and it seems I’ll be the first to capture a (95%+ unedited) full playthrough that ISN’T a) chopped up into 10-minute blocks and b) of questionable video quality. Holy crap I love my capture box and it was totally worth the wait and additional cables to get it working properly. :D
Am I doing a similar series for G.U.? I dunno. Putting aside that it’d be 50% me nerdraging at “Tinkerbell” Atoli… well, for one thing, I’ve been putting off playing Disgaea 4 so I could finish capturing/uploading REPLAY, so if I do a REPLAY version of G.U. it probably won’t be for awhile.

Ramen: Considering Blastoise’s imminent rebuild, November may be split Lazrigees Academy/Avatar month. Dinah never got an armor upgrade even though it’ll have been a year since she went MacBook. >_>;

A PC Named Blastoise

Monday, October 10th, 2011

Because you think that, after looting a MacBook and an iPhone, I’ve completely turned to the Dark Apple side, right? Hell no. With desktop machines, it’s build or GTFO! Much as I whine about those damn front panel wires and my hatred of Intel motherboards, I like building way too much to give that up.

I’ve picked out most of his new parts– pretty much everything except the video card. Leaving off a separate sound card because onboard doesn’t suck so much anymore. It looks to be a bit of a splurge (about $870 in parts before the video card), but… dude, this is Blastoise, the flagship of Altima Network and my box of awesome. He’s worth it. >:D

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 ($210)
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V Pro ($195)
Mmmm, USB 3.0 and a crapload of USB ports… and I get to keep my Firewire… *Homer drool*
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 16GB ($105)
Video: ???
HDD:
System: Crucial 128GB SSD ($192)
Secondary: WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA ($70)
Optical: LG Super Multi Blue ($0, Reused from previous body)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast TX750M ($110)

Ah… the video card. This would be a no-brainer, except… remember that Blastoise is running dual monitors. Even though games are bound to his primary rather than stretched across both (which would be weird and fugly), doesn’t his card have to split the payload between both, or have I been duped by nerd crazytalk all this time? >_>;
Though most of the time my gaming is WoW/City of Heroes, I have been tip-toeing into, you know, “modern” games that would prefer I have something better than a mid-range GPU, so BIGGER IS BETTER LOLZ and such. This would also explain why I’m going to shove 16GB of RAM in there right off the bat. (Man, remember way back when 1GB was a lot?)

I said before that I would really like to reuse my case, but… I don’t see it happening. Eyeballing the motherboard, it looks to be taller than the one Blastoise is packing. I’ll crack him open to check before I order up the parts, but odds are I’ll have to get a bigger case. Booo!