2,000 gigabytes of stuff, 4 gigabytes per disk, well, you do the math.

Not Again!, Not Fucking Again!

The frustration is indescribable in words, when the blue screen of death flashes in front of your very eyes, the click of the hard drive combined with the whirl of the CPU fans restarting, and when the OS you were using, was installed anew, 10 fucking minutes kind of new.

I made a big mistake, a week ago when I reformatted. I was too confident.
I didn't put in spybot, adaware, or a firewall until I've updated all the drivers and gotten all the gimmicks and programs i needed off the web. Within 3 days, the single ad-popping spyware had infiltrated my system with so many problems, Symatec anti-virus gave me too many warnings, enough to slow my computer to a crawl.

Reboot, F8 to safe mode, drag the few megabytes of new data off the C disk before I wipe it again, and bam.
30 minutes later, a fresh new OS, albeit fake.

Without the seal of authenticity Microsoft so lovingly wants, I found that I couldn't install MSN messenger without it telling me that the update MSN messenger, a Microsoft product, had downloaded a file that does not have a trusted digital seal.
W.T.F?

The good news was, I only had to fret about the situation for 5 minutes.

After 5 Minutes, my computer flashed me with the BSoD, it was like getting raped in the face by the antlers of Santa's personal Christmas reindeer's, all of them.



So, unaware of the severity of the situation, and several more try and die attempts, I've mentally declared that particular "formatted partition" had been fucked.

Now, I'm glad, and sad, that i've been doing extremely poor house cleaning with my hard drives. Not having deleted my old OS which I chose to abandon weeks ago seemed like the smarted decision so far. Although, the nearly 2 tera bytes of data, left unsorted and possibly lost to oblivion if the hard drives decides to physically fail, is very, very dire news.

2,000 gigabytes of stuff, 4 gigabytes per disk, well, you do the math.

It's been since the 56K, when downloading went a bit at a time, (that's 1/8th of a byte), and every picture, mp3, or text file you downloaded was precious. It took me 7 hours and 45 minutes to download the demo for Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, 125 megabytes, over a 56k modem, and I enjoyed every bloody minute of that demo after it had finished, although it was a piece of crap. The download was just too precious to not love to death.


I've never ever deleted anything without burning it down, therefore reducing my computer area into piles and piles of old folders of burnt CD's and DVD's. That habbit has died down last year, but the downloading didn't stop. Since then i've diligently organized, burnt, labled, and stuck on pretty little ($14 a pack) sticker lables onto each DVD.

And Now, I'm sitting in a dark room, CPU fans whirling and DVD drive spinning, I can't find a pencil, and I'm all out of sticker lables. But still making up for the long over due house cleaning that was but only inevitable.

oh, another one's done, about 496 more to go.

Movie Weekend

Over the past two days, I had my movie fills that I've been craving for a few weeks.
At a small theater somewhere in Santa Monica, me and some friend's decided to watch "No Country for Old Men" before it went off the theaters. And knowing little about the movie besides it being praised by critics, and has no recognizable star's, I went in.

No Country for Old Men was rather mind blowing. A mix of subtlety, twisted humor, and well, old men. The suspense and the chain of events of the movie kept my heart at my throat, all without using cheap scare tactics of popping monsters in your face. Just watching the characters and the plot unfold shows you how much time and effort the director and script writers put into this masterpiece. It's filled with awsomeness.

And just because of the premise, I went to watch "I am Legend" at a local theater. Now, watching movies based solely on the premise of the movie, a single survivor, (Will Smith no less) in a huge abandoned city of New York, seemed like a pretty bad idea. But I was rather pleased with the outcome. While the movie was filled with in-your-face scary surprise scenes to keep your heart racing, Will Smith does a decent job of holding the movie together. I am Legend portrays a person who has nothing else but his dog Samantha to keep him company for three years in a dangerous city, I couldn't help but be reminded of "Shadow of Colossus" for the PS2. The bond between man and beast is quite beautiful.

While I am Legend is a great movie to check out with your friends, just because the premise is pretty cool, I would still suggest finding time to watch No Country for Old Men, if your the philosophical type, and love to analyze the subtle events that happen in said movie, it is, and I repeat, filled with awsomeness.

Fresh Rebeginning

Four years ago, when I got my "college computer", as most college students did, but in my case, things didn't seem to go so well.

I broke 1 graphics card, 2 power supplies, went through 3 monitor's, 4 DVD burners, and among the 5 or so hardrives I had over the years, fucked up my partition and reformatted at least 20 times.

Times were rough, even when I went to my friend's house, I told them to keep digital shit away from me to prevent spontaneous combustion from my proximity.

After 2 years, I fucking had it, and bought almost everything anew. And I haven't swapped out a piece of hardware since.

Since now.

Few days ago I just stuck in a new graphics card to fire-up the impossible-to-render-at-maximum-settings game: Crysis.

Today, I finally decided to reformat my computer, well, technically, just boot up with another OS in a different drive.

I had forgotten how fucking fun it was to install all the crap we use on a day to day basis (read:sarcasm), that windows XP just so conveniently do not supply. what the hell does an operating system do, if you can't operate shit with it?

Over the years, it seems that Microsoft is trying harder and harder to defer the installation of their product without a Windows certification, things like service packs, updates, the nifty aplocale program(play Japanese games without rebooting), Windows Media Player, and even MSN messenger.

Although everything can be circumvented relatively easily with a quick online search for cached older versions, bypasses or cracks. It really does come in handy when you eventually get your hands on a real copy of Windows, which to date, I have not, ever...

I sure hope Vista is up to snuff to handle the next few years of its life cycle.


Speaking of Crysis, I've really been under the radar for the past months, I'l be updating more on my humble little gaming and anime paths of destruction. We'll see how this takes us.

My mentality on, and for, blogging has really changed, especially after graduation, and after not having to write a personal site, actually, it probably changed WHILE I spent all my efforts on UCSB's anime club website... well, I suppose those new guys really didn't catch up on how that stuff works... how unfortunate...

Anyway, right now, life is filling with, and has been filled with, a lot of time, before I finally landed a job offer, that time was incredibly guilt ridden, but now its just idle time. Really hasn't been wasted time however, with the incredible lineup of games this past 2 months that I got to spend with: Bioshock, Eternal Sonata, Ace Combat 6, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Crysis, the Orange Box, and I wasted a whole god damn week beating Puzzle Quest to the ground, now that was not fun, after I realized that reality had just swished by.

Well well, I suppose blogging skills can get mighty rusty too...
Till I write again.

I Want