Grimblast.com

My friend Zancarius(alias Ben to those that know him) has found something online that might help break up some nights of boredom.  He found a fix for the old Tribes 2 game that allows us to finally play that game again online.  The game used a crappy concept of requiring some auth server to be able to play it online.  When that auth server went offline, it made the game totally useless.  They didn’t patch out that auth server check for the cd key so the game had no way of being played online.  Enter TribesNext.  Seems a guy came up with a ruby based fix to allow us to play Tribes 2 again.  And if you didn’t have it before, now you can download it and play it for free with his fix.

I haven’t had the opportunity to try all of this yet since I’m work but this all sounds promising since I always liked Tribes in the past.  Had some great multiplayer matches in that game but their company went down the wrong road and tanked the series and themselves.  I can’t run a linux server with this fix but I can run a server under wine since the windows server should work just fine.  I might post back later about what progress I/Ben have with this.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the game Pacman.  The only way I found out was from a coworker that went to search something up on google.com.  They had changed their logo to a pacman ish logo.  I found that it had a mouseover which mentioned the anniversary and if you click it, you can actually play pacman in the logo with your arrow keys.  Now that is cool!

That’s right, May 5th was my birthday but I don’t actually feel another year older.  I do feel wiser though.  Wise enough to know to take vacation from work on my birthday, haha!  It was a nice vacation and birthday.  No stress to deal with and I actually felt good about it.  For the past few years, I can only remember how stressful my birthdays have been since I’ve always worried about other stuff that I didn’t have to worry about.  Go figure!  Maybe with age I’m starting to worry less about things.  I have a habit of putting the weight of a problem on my shoulders and it can be unhealthy at times.

I have vacation coming up next week and everyone advises that I go out of the area for a little bit.  I’m torn as to what I want to do.  Course, due to my ill timing it seems I’ll be flying solo no matter what I choose to do.  It’s sort of depressing but so is the life of me.  Grin and bare it!  I’ve got a few ideas from coworkers but not sure which I’ll settle on.  I should just compile a list and look each up and see if I can afford a trip there or not and then plan it out the rest of the way.  We shall see though.  I have an entire week to make up my mind yet!

Windows 7 has all kinds of neat perks and tricks that anyone can take advantage of if they know where to look or do to use them.  Since beta, a friend of mine had wrote a few blog posts about Windows 7 and ways to tweak or use it.  You can find him and his rantings here.  I would have linked to every article but it’s better if you actually browse through his site since he has quite a few useful articles on all sorts of things.

The boys over at maximumpc.com have also done something similar about windows 7.  There’s quite a few pages to what they posted but its all good info.  If you haven’t checked these 2 sites out and you have windows 7, then I guess you need to haul click-butt over to them now!

I haven’t had much to post about lately.  It’s been so busy with work and company that I just haven’t had the time for much else.  Next week I should have something to put up on here.  Until then, hang in there!

Well, last Friday I purchased an enchilada lunch plate that was for a little league charity fund raiser and ended up with food poisoning.  It didn’t kick in until 8 or so hours later.  That was one ugly twist of the stomach and body aches all over.  I had to work Saturday and that’s when my symptoms kicked in.  Man, lets just say the toilet gods shined on me since I was the only guy in the building Saturday.  I made so many trips it looked like I was doing drills!  Needless to say, that killed my gut’s appetite for mexican food for awhile.

Looks like my new FPS love is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  It’s very well done.  I like the realism the game has as well as the competitiveness in the multiplayer side of it.  The queuing system in it reminds me of halo’s multiplayer lobbies.  I pretty much suck at it but hey, the only way to learn how to do it is play against those greater than you.  Gotta eventually catch on!  Or just get beat down a lot.  Either way, the game is pretty fun.  Worth trying out at least once if you’ve not played any call of duty games.

PS: PC version for the win.  That’s right, I stab at thee console jockeys!

I forgot how useful Fraps was.  I just recently reinstalled it and took some awesome, no frame rate loss screen shots of a game of that lacked a screen shot feature.  Quite the nice solution.  I used fraps sometime back when I was making boss fight videos for my World of Warcraft guild.  I did a lot of recording then.  I might pick up on that with these other games I’ve been screwing around on.  Need to spice up the website with some visual stuff!

As fate would have it, I have decided to experiment with facebook.  I have created an account as a means of communicating with some friends that chose to create an account for keeping in touch.  That was an odd line.  Anyways, I’ve never been one for social engineering sites and I didn’t jump on the bandwagon when it passed on by but I’ll take this opportunity to see what I’ll like and dislike about facebook.  Who knows, I might grow to like it or loathe it.