Serving Jury Duty Tips

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DeathMarine

I finally got called in to serve jury duty. It was so horribly BORING! It also wasn’t very “random.” I saw 2 people from my graduating class and the father of my high school football coach. Did i mention it was HORRIBLY BORING! I would have talked to them but im not the talkative type.

I was going insane. I could feel my brain slowly losing IQ points. Eventually i started getting figety. Rocking in my chair, shaking my leg and then i ended up pacing in large circles down the hall for at least 2 hours.

So if you ever get called into jury duty, ALWAYS TAKE SOMETHING TO OCCUPY YOUR TIME FOR AT LEAST 8 HOURS! In fact, take something to keep busy or entertained ANYTIME you have to do government business like DMV and Jury Duty.

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my windows 7 experience

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DeathMarine

I thought i should talk about my current windows 7 experience. Like many on the planet, i absolutely despised Windows Vista. They focused so much on useless, garbage eye candy that it make the switch from Windows XP unbearable. How could someone switch from fast and speedy windows xp to a slow and clunky vista. i wish i knew that the hell they were thinking when they thought that was a good ideas. “Let’s make people switch to a slower OS! Brilliant!” And yes i know that windows 7 is just tweaked version of vista. Those tweaks made all the difference!

I installed windows 7 on my asus striker extreme, core 2 extreme, 8 gigs of memory and 2 raptor hdds on a RAID0 128k stripe size configuration.

One thing i really hate is that i have to disconnect my 2 1TB storage drives on the motherboard because windows 7 (and vista did it too) bitches about something the hdd doesn’t meet the criteria or some crap. I dont know why it won’t just install where I SAY I WANT IT TO INSTALL. i dont need any lip from some program that thinks it knows better me. Installation seemed to take awhile but that was mostly the extraction part. after that it went through the rest of the install very quickly. Windows 7 had the drivers for nearly everything except my sound card. i actually dont care about stuff like that. all i need is for it to have network driver i need to get on the internet. after that i just go to all the manufactures site’s to get the latest drivers for my hardware.

The first think i did was remove all the theme garbage. I make my computer work and i dont need to waste cpu cycles and memory on making windows look “pretty.” I turned off system restore because i’m not an idiot. turned off windows defender because i’m not an idiot. turned off UAC because i’m not an idiot. turned off hybernation in command line since you can’t do it from the power management settings in your control panel. they really should have a wizard right at the begining that asks “are you a beginner, intermidiate, or advanced user” so when you click on “advanced user” it turns off all that crap designed for the idiot user. after turning all that crap off windows 7 was using about 800 to 900MB of memory. A VAST improvement over Vista.

i installed all my usual programs and all of them worked fine except for daemon tools. which sucks because i use that program ALOT and they will not make a windows 7 version until the official release. I have to use the program i abhor, poweriso.

i noticed they switched classic wordpad with a super crapped down version of word 2007. When stuff looked like crap on notepad because the format wasn’t right I would switch to wordpad and view it nicely but now i can’t do that with this new version of wordpad because their margins seem to screw everything up. i dont know what was wrong with the old version that they needed to “upgrade” it.

another problem that was also present in windows vista is that alot of hgames that worked with windows xp will not work on vista or windows 7 even by changing the compatibility mode.

overall it has been a pleasant experience. i do feel it performs faster than either vista or xp. i feel i could do personally better because i think the raid stripe size 128k is too big. i think i could get MUCH faster performance with a 64k stripe size but that would mean reinstalling windows 7 and i dont feel like going through the hassle of setting it up and installing all my programs again so soon. maybe in a few weeks i’ll do it and tell you guys about it.

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two new cats

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DeathMarine

We recently adopted 2 cats from Petsmart. i recommend petsmart since their adoption center is actually run by local adoption agencies and DO NOT use kitty or puppy mills. anyway, the two cats WERE named Ray and Charles, get it Ray Charles, can you guess why? One of the two cats is blind and his brother was his eyes. The poor kitties were found cold, wet, and very weak. Its probably what lead Ray to be blind. The blind one knows when it’s time to eat when he hears his brother crunching away at food and learned where the water was by hearing his brother lap up the water. Charles ( the not blind one ) ,we think, developed this loud and strange purr so his blind brother can find him.

We changed their names to Jordie (LeForge) and Dante. Jordie is black with a white under belly and Dante is pure black and silky. We have noticed that Jordie has actually regained some eye sight. nothing major but we think he can see very blurry shadows and high contrast stuff. good think his brother is all black. Jordie occasionaly meows when he feels lost or alone and we just have to answer him and he feels better and stops meowing.

at first the two cats were scared and walked around crouching very low to the ground since they were very unsure about their surrounding. We had a box in the corner of the room and they both squeezed and slept there for the first three days or so. They started to get more comfortable and started running around. They use to shy away from us when we tried to pet them but that was also over around the third day. Now they run around like crazy, climbing all over the place (mostly Dante with some very limited climbing done by Jordie). They have also been farting up a storm. It’s like a punch in the face every time because the smell just suddenly appears.

We were given Science Diet Dry Kitten food for them. Not really the best stuff but it was free. They mostly use chicken by-products as their protein source and you can actually smell the deep fried chicken skin in the food! We went ahead and bought them some Science Diet Wet Kitten food. Jordie likes the food and Dante thinks its poo. Seriously. He smells it and starts pawing around it like he would his poo in the litter box! Love the Blue Buffalo stuff though!

I’ll be making a post about cat care later. let’s just say we have learned A LOT! Here is a little spoiler. If you haven’t been feeding your cat Blue Buffalo or EVO, you are only feeding him garbage food. that included science diet!

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the cat spray farted

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DeathMarine

Just a quick little anecdote. A few months ago one of our other cats was on dizzyangeldemon’s lap getting petted. After awhile it gets up and stretches. She suddenly gets a very strong smell of cat shit and looks over at the litter box to see if anyone used it. No one has. But she was still smelling it. So she looks down and noticed a ton of little brown dots on her chest! I then noticed it too and started laughing so hard my eyes teared up! She some how was able to be laughing, crying and grossed out all at the same time! So i laughed even harder! It literally looked like a shotgun blast to her chest!

If you read this make sure you tease her about it! :P

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warhammer 40k dawn of war II

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DeathMarine

I beat the game recently and here are some of my thoughts.

Overall Dawn of War II is a great game. I liked that they changed it so you only have a few squads and you can level them up giving it a slight rpg element to this otherwise pure RTS. Unlike the previous game was like any other RTS when you collect resources and pump out troops. I liked the music. It was very operatic and manly. Like you would grow some hair on your nuts just by listening to it. I actually dont remember the music from the previous game to compare it. The sound effects were great. i never got tired of hearing that heavy bolter or my dreadnaught’s assault cannon. I would get a HUGE hard on when i used my dreadnaught’s hellfire on a huge mass of enemies. It would just unload moving from right to left to right again. and absolutely devastating EVERYTHING. Enemy’s bodies dropping and exploding everywhere! The story itself was ok. there was some confusion towards the end.

What i really disliked, i mean, HATED was the repetition of levels. you will find yourself fighting on the same level MANY times. I also disliked that i could only level up to level 20. The other squad members were stupid. the leader would go to where you clicked on the ground but sometimes the other squad members would end up going some crazy direction and end up getting killed. I also felt they could have done so much more with this game. they could have thrown in all the other races too.

How come they haven’t make a computer version of the table top game? Like a turn based game? Have all the material from the table top game put into the computer game. You would paint your own 3D model of a figure. you and an opponent would decide how many points you would use and you are given a set time to choose an army and it would all play out like the table top game.

another game i wish they would make is something like star wars: empire at war. You have the whole galaxy to play with. All the races and their territories, tons of planets to take over and protect. they should also have story lines for each race your are conquering. like the more and more you are wiping out say Eldar and taking their planets your specific story line with them progresses and until some huge climactic battle for their last planet they hold and you would do this with each race. this would make you play all the other races so you can see all the plot lines. you could probably play the game for months trying to see everything.

anyways, i highly recommend you get Dawn of War II.

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