The big thing in games right now, at least until Halo 3 comes out, is Bioshock. This was pitched as the spiritual successor to System Shock 2, a good game in its own right. (As an aside, I never did finish SS2 due to a bug at the very end of the game that prevented me from killing the boss. System Shock 1 sits atop my Pile of Shame, after I picked it up super-cheap at the flea market.)

Bioshock is good. Really good. And yet for me, it's failed to achieve the obsessive state that I get into with games which just really jive with me. The obsession that means once I get to work in the morning, all I can do is think about playing the game. Then I go home at lunch and play for an hour before pulling myself away from the computer, going back to work, and thinking about the game until it's time to return home. It may be that I'm just not capable of reaching that state with a first-person shooter any more.

It's a still a really good game and I look foward to finishing it.

Another extended period of inactivity. Since March, I've been the senior developer at work, which comes with additional responsibilities and stresses. I think this has me feeling tired and drained, which is why my normally meager creative juices are even further dampened. It's not that nothing has happened lately, it's just that it's hard to get the energy to type it out.

A week ago my wife and I came back from Seattle, where I attended the Penny-Arcade Expo (PAX). This is kind of E3 for consumers, except more E3 than E3 is now since it got gutted (and rightfully so, I think). The highlight of PAX for me was meeting fellow Gamers With Jobs regulars. Shout-outs to johnnypolite, the Walt, Podunk, Gaald, Fed, wordsmythe, and all the others who attended. Next time, let's do it somewhere a little less noisy, deal?

This has been a hot hot summer. Very hot. Many weeks with days around 100 degrees. Way too many. Did I mention that a leak in my Jeep's A/C system has left it without any freon? It's hard to find people who work on older R12 systems anymore and even if they do, the actual freon itself is really expensive. I've been toughing it out except the sweltering days just keep on coming. So do I try to get it repaired as-is, get it converted to R134 and fixed, or sell the Jeep and find something else? Still not sure.

Oh, and the meaning of "5 tons of flax"? Nothing. It's a phrase that by definition doesn't really mean anything, which is why I picked it for this post.

My machine, nicknamed 44Magnum for the original behemoth tower case it originally had, is once again live. The replacement Biostar motherboard arrived and worked! Well, mostly worked. Perversely, it would not even post as long as I had the new 1GB stick of RAM in it (a Corsair ValueSelect). Seems that the two are not entirely compatible, a discovery I made after reading some of the board's reviews on NewEgg.

Frustration! To make matters worse, after installing Windows XP and then Service Pack 2, the computer took almost 2 full minutes to boot into XP. What's going on? After post, there was a black screen for 15 to 25 seconds. Then the typical Windows ASCII progress bar would appear at the bottom of the screen. But for some reason, the first 5 or so bars took maybe 10 seconds each to advance. Once they were done, the rest filled in virtually no time. Then to top it off, I could not get the LAN to work at all (oops, turns out this was because our router needed the machine's new mac address).

It was all too much. I went to all the local computer parts stores in a vain search for a replacement 478 socket board. And 2 of the 3 I visited were closed. The last, TigerDirect, no longer stocked socket 478. ARGH. I resolved then that I would return the Biostar board and retire the P4 chip.

Instead I looked at my other options for compatibility. I had the new PC3200 1GB stick and my ATI AGP X1650 was only a couple of months old (it was a birthday present). The only other thing that came up was the AMD socket 754 architecture. (There are some 939 boards that have AGP and take 184-pin memory, but they are impossible to find.) With an Athlon 64 3200+, I'd have a machine more or less on par with my original Dell.

The new board came from TigerDirect (an ECS nForce 3). The new processor came from NewEgg (an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, the 3400+ was out of stock). The new case and memory I already had. I put everything together and breathed a ragged sigh of relief.

I ended up swapping out my old primary hard disk because it was accumulating a surprising number of bad sectors. 32MB of bad sectors at last count, out of 160GB. (Actually, I'm just assuming this is a high number. It seems high.) Was this a result of the original Dell board IDE controller going bad or simply a natural deteroriation of this particular drive? Was the Dell with after-market IDE controller actually stable with the exception of this one hard drive? Could I have avoided this whole month of downtime (and all these expenses) by just replacing that one drive? I don't know. I might find out eventually.

Anyway, after some data and drive shuffling, I got the final XP install done. I'm slowly reinstalling the old games and apps I had from before (many won't run without the proper registry entries). My standby benchmark, 3DMark2001, reports that the new 3200+ configuration is a fraction slower than the P4 2.8GHz setup, but only barely. I do now have a bit more memory (1256MB) which should help a bit with some things.

Having this machine back up and running removes a big stressor from my life. Now I can resume my normal relaxation recreations that I was sorely missing (such as BF2142 and BF2), as well as do more work on my personal projects.

I think I can safely say that my sense of taste has fully (or at least close enough to fully) returned. Sense of saltiness and bitterness were the first to recover. The ability to taste sweetness was last and was a long time in coming.

Back in January, I wrote "I'll eat all those vile-tasting 'healthy' foods that I generally avoid." Ironically I think I found myself doing the opposite. Desperate to taste again, I continued to eat junk food, more than normal. I couldn't taste it and I think deep down each one was a hopeful "Maybe this time...." I managed to reverse what up until January had been a slow but steady weight loss, gaining about 7 pounds. Fortunately everything has settled again and I'm on track for losing that weight again. Plus I find it hard to watch the movie 300 and not feel inspired to get in better shape.