Grimblast.com

Well, after some guys at the office mentioned about going to Blizzcon this year, I figured I’d go as well since we could all car pool there.  As of 11:01am this morning, I got my tickets for Blizzcon so looks like I’ll need to make plans for the trip in October since that’s when they are having the convention.  It’s pretty exciting to think about since I’ve always wanted to go.  I’ll have to gear up my camera for pictures and what not so I can possibly share them here.

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!

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!

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.

This is a test to see how my old forum avatar looks in my blog site.  I’m not the most artistic person in the world but I personally liked this old pic.  I rendered it years ago with a not so great program but it got the job done.  Plus this gave me the opportunity to post some kind of picture/eye candy.  I haven’t posted a picture in months so I had to break the monotony of my all text posts.  Who knows, I might actually get that gallery up that I wanted to fire up.  What it will contain remains to be seen!    Hah!

With my reinstallation of Windows 7 and Steam I started to encounter a silly problem.  When I would try to run Steam it was trying to say that:

Running Steam in Windows compatibility mode is not recommended. Please remove any Windows compatibility settings for all users under file properties for Steam.exe and restart Steam. Press ‘Cancel’ to premanently ignore this warning and continue.

I checked my properties and found out that I wasn’t running in compatibility mode and yet Windows believed I was.  I did some searching on the internet and one of the first few hits I got had the answer to this little dilemma.  The site was slow to come up for me but it had what I was looking for.  Apparently, there is a registry entry involved which causes this to happen.  I’ll quote that site in the event they disappear or just don’t load up in a timely fashion.

To fix the issue:

1. Hit start->run->regedit
2. Go to key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
3. Look for a entry with your path to steam.exe
4. Delete that entry
5. If you dont find it there try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

Hope this helps out any that encounter this particular  issue.  As always, if you poke around in your registry and don’t know what you’re doing, I take no responsibility for your breaking of things.

I hear the airshow out on the base near me is pretty nice and some people are having fun.  I’m stuck at work working all day Saturday so I get to miss out entirely.  Aggrevating that it’s actually something I’m interested in and I have to work the one day they are having the event.    For those that would like to see what you can online, here is a link to go over.  Some pretty bad ass hardware on display too.

Looks like games are for the mice!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/mouse-virtual-reality/

What a crazy concept but yet another odd and geeky read!

Here’s another wacky comic by gamespy.  I think it covers the basics of what it takes to be a video game villain.  Some of them are pretty accurate as to how you take out some bosses in games now days but still funny!  I wonder if this could be used to determine how Rambo takes out the villains in all of his movies, hmm.

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/102/1029366p1.html

So, during some random browsing around, I found a blog that had an interesting tid bit of info about how to improve your ping times.  I remember reading and doing this before but since then, I’ve been using Windows 7.  I’m curious if things have changed registry wise so I’m willing to potentially break something to see what kind of improvement I get in Windows 7.  There are some drawbacks to what it does but it’s worth trying once. 

http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-nagle-algorithm.html

If any of you readers out there were interested in trying it yourselves, please, be my guest but I take no responsibility in what you might break, hah!  At the moment I’m at work but I will post my results after I’ve had the opportunity to do it.