New drive errors prompted me to finally face the fact that my dying motherboard was not reliable. Sadly, it's a non-standard Dell board in a non-standard Dell case, meaning I had to replace both board and case at the same time. I decided to retain my existing socket 478 P4 and let me tell you that it is not easy to find a 478 board these days. I ended up going with a mini-ATX Biostar board and I come to find out that my 1 GB of RAM was comprised of four 256 sticks. Mini-ATX boards only have 2 memory slots, grr. More money spent on getting a single GB stick. Also had to get a new heat sink & fan for the CPU, since Dell's was not compatible.

When the Biostar board arrives, it's Dead On Arrival, which is what I feared. Yeah, it was inexpensive, and the reason seems to be that these Biostar motherboards often arrive DOA. It was not unexpected, I was simply hoping it wouldn't be the case. Now I have to ship it back for a replacement and wait even more time for my main machine to be back up and running.

In addition, the new mid-tower case I ordered came with all eight posts that attach the front panel cleanly snapped off. Fortunately NewEgg gave me a good discount on it and I was easily able to epoxy them back on.

A lot of frustration and depression over the whole situation. Fortunately I was able to recover all of my data off the drive that went haywire.

Okay, for the 2 of you who visit this site, you undoubtedly realized that the site was down for quite a while. Pains of switching hosts, sadly. Things seem to be up and running now, so everyone's happy.

So the jackasses in Congress decided that in order to save a bit of energy, they'd screw with the civilized world and extend the fraud that is Daylight Saving Time a couple of months. Of course, there's no definitive evidence that any energy is saved at all, but why let logic and reason interfere with good legislating! In the meantime, they fuck things up because in the past 25 years quite a few things have been automated and the switch to DST being one of them.

Now I appreciate having more daylight in the evening, I do. If it was up to me, I'd stay on DST 12 months a year. At least then we wouldn't be required to do this ridiculous shift twice a year. Let's just face facts: sometimes it is dark outside. All the shuffling of clocks in the world isn't going to change that.

I finished Neversoft's GUN last night. This game is a western third- and first-person shooter sort of in the vein of Grand Theft Auto, but with a much more shallow world. It probably would have taken longer if I had focused more on the side quests (marshal missions, wanted posters, pony express). As it was, the side quests just weren't all that interesting. I was honestly surprised at how decent the main storyline was. Mature, without being too over the top, mostly reasonable reactions from the characters involved.

The gameplay on the other hand was only okay; controls just felt wrong. Too much mouse acceleration made quick turns uncontrollably fast. The general game interface was, in my opinion, a prime example of how concurrent development on PC and console negatively affects the PC version. Menu fonts were jarringly large, as if designed for the lower resolution of a television. Too many sub-menus for what should be straight foward tasks.

Graphics were mostly good. I did notice some issues with models at farther distances, such as feet and accessories not synced with the animations. Plus, distant character and animal models had overly simplified animation sequences which just plain looked bad, sometimes moving without animating at all. I'm not sure if this had anything to do with my graphics settings.

A decent game, not quite the western GTA-style sandbox some hoped it would be.