Craptop - Acer Aspire 3680

Ok, so I decided that I really enjoy having a laptop when going to school. My recently deceased Sony VIAO did this cool magic trick of 'not working', so I decided to pick up another laptop. Needless to say, ALL I'll be doing with it is surfing the net, and writing papers; MAYBE listening to music. Through Dealnews.com I found the absolute most inexpensive laptop available. Turns out it's the Acer Aspire 3680, from Best Buy. Grand total after tax was roughly $486. Not bad for a new operating system, 80gig HD, 512 RAM, WiFi, and a Celeron M 520. I haven't road tested it yet, but we'll assume the battery sucks. And I'll obviously need to adjust to using Vista. Overall, though, a good deal.

Random Website - jamesbondlifestyle.com

I found this site this morning while searching for free sunglasses on the net. It's a pretty cool deal if you ask me. Check it out.

Not a normal MMO - GuildWars: Nightfall

So, I recently got the gaming bug again. This time I picked up a copy of Guildwars: Nightfall. So far I've been really impressed. There are a variety of character classes available. The Nightfall edition lets you play two extra classes, the dervish and the paragon. I wasn't really excited with these extras since it's all new to me.

I may post more as I get into the game a bit, but this is all you get for now. I perused the GuildWars sight for a good pic to post, and here's what I found. A hottie, computer rendered, ranger chick wearing green and brown. She is this geeks dream come true. Hats off to the artist.

Sci-fi Hottie - Jewel Staite

If I ever found the proverbial genie in a bottle, I pretty sure my first wish would be include this woman:


Every time I watch Serenity, I'm reminded of how much a hottie she is. Now I'm thinkin' its time to go polish the ole lamp.

Java for Fun - Eclipse

Anyone who is starting to learn Java should download this program called Eclipse. It's an opensource "integrated development environment" written in Java, for Java. I'm using it for the class I'm taking right now in fact. Here's a screenshot I snaked off of Freshmeat.net:

Excellent Computer Art - Render.ru

I found an excellent site full of rendered art. It's a bit hard to navigate since it's all in Russian, but you can use Babblefish or Google to translate it if you're interested. It's @ http://render.ru. Here's a couple images that caught my attention:

Coffee Tryouts - Three Peckered Billy Goat

So, one of the presents I received during the holidays was a bag of Raven's Brew coffee, called Three Peckered Billy Goat. It's a good dark roast type, tasty enough. I had to buy my first coffee grinder, just to convert it over to something drinkable.. I'll be a metropolitan type before you know it.

Blood, Sweat, and Flash MP3 Players.

It took me a bit, but I was finally able to implement a flash based music player. It uses an xml type playlist format called XSPF, pronounced 'spiff'; and a flash player that can be found on Sourceforge. The hardest part was dealing with my website provider, Yahoo. They have things locked down to a point that it's difficult to manage things they way I'd like. Of course, if I had enough resources, I'd host my own website. I'll just have to make due until then. :) Here is the link.

It's really Purple, I swear!

So, I have this funny thing I do when I run out of money. I spend more than I really have. Case in point, this bad boy right here. It's the Samsung YP-T9 Deep Purple mp3 player. The picture here is of the black one as I couldn't find a decent one of the purple edition. Why did I get purple? Well, every single other device I've bought is either black, silver, or gray. It's time to mix it up a bit.

Hey Eve, it's a POS.

And here I thought it always meant something else. Anyway, big news for anyone playing in the online universe of EVE-Online. My 'in game' corporation finally got their first player owned structure. Basically something akin to a starbase. That's all I'm going to mention for now, I'll let the picture speak for itself. If you're interested in the game at all, let me know, I'll be glad to fill in the details.



Oh yeah, that's me.. on the left of the pic, by the planet. :)

Movie Audition

It's been a few days, but I figure I should post on what's going on tomorrow. This could possibly be the end-all of the wierd stuff I've done. I'm auditioning for a movie. Yup, yours truly is trying for movie stardom. We'll see how far I get. I think there is a website for the movie, but I'm not sure what it is. I did, however find this: Movie Thread There'll be more posts later on about what happened. :)

Now They Tell Me

Ok, I'm a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons, the pen and paper type. In the past year or so, they actually produced an online D&D game called, strangely enough, Dungeons & Dragons Online. Now here's the kicker. I bought the game with high hopes, but had to cancel my subscription because I did not have enough time to play the game in groups. The game was designed with teams in mind and you pretty much had to have a team to get beyond the first couple levels. Playing in groups involves a lot more time and effort than I can spare for any game, no matter how fun. So what do they do, after I've cancelled? They introduce solo play!

EVE Online

So. I seem to have a problem when it comes to doing what I should in order to better myself. For reasons unexplained, my mind can rationalize playing video games instead of studying for a statistics final for which I am ill prepared. Anyway, the game is called EVE Online. The best way for me to describe it is a power hungry space opera. Beautiful graphics and audio. I did, however, get completely blasted on my first real mission. I don't have time to try again tonight. The above picture is a screenshot from the tutorial. Check it out if you get a chance. Oh, and I promise to stop posting before 0600. I'm definitely not functioning well that early.

A Lesser Evil

While not necessarily a good idea, I find myself logging in to EBay every six months or so. Inevitably, I buy something. In this instance, I found some collectible cards for the game Magic The Gathering. A game I used to play four years ago! What am I really going to do with these things, except entomb them with the rest of my collection. I'm not really sure.