Grimblast.com

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!

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.

So with the new year I’m thinking of adding some more things to my website to screw around with.  I’m going to keep it a surprise until I get it working.  It may make me do more posting on my page so here’s hoping for more stuff from Grim Daddy!

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.

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.

Note to self: I need to add a picture gallery to this site.