Deraldin

I bought some Christmas presents. Second family gathering is coming up on New Year's Day and I didn't have gifts for everyone on that side of the family yet.

It has two AC plug ins, so I assume you could plug it in to two different outlets. See the 4th picture.

I picked up Deus Ex and Psychonauts last year. Nothing really interesting this year though.

I'm tempted to pick up the Introversion games, but if I buy them from Introversion directly I can get them in a box. It'll be $20-30 more, but still, I get the boxes...

My mom wishes me to inform you that for the amount of money that you use to power your computer, you could set up a grow op in your house and instead of losing money, you could make money. Money to fund your obscene computer requirements.

more like breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack! Are you saying that 1.2KW is not enough power for Tri-SLI 280s?

Today was pretty damn tiring. I was up till 3am last night because I couldn't sleep and I had to get up at 7am to shovel snow for 4 driveways. We had about 20 centimetres last night before it warmed up and turned to rain about 6am. By the time I got out there the snow was completely water logged and really freakin' heavy. Thankfully the snowblower decided to start up this morning so that wasn't too bad. After that I went out and picked up a last minute Christmas gift for my little brother and finally got all of my gifts wrapped and put under the tree. I then spent the rest of the day trying to stay awake because I knew that if I had a nap, I'd never get to sleep tonight. Didn't work out too well because I'm actually more awake now than at any other point today. 7pm rolled around and I checked out the Boxing Day sales at NCIX online mainly to see how badly their servers got hit (pretty damn badly). Didn't intend on ordering anything, but I pointed out a few deals to my dad and he decided to throw together an entire computer. Specs are in the "Post your specs" thread in Skeeters if anyone is interested. Going to see if I can finally get to sleep now.

I just ordered a new computer for my dad thanks to a couple boxing day deals. Coolermaster Centurion 590 Seasonic M12 600W ($50 after rebate! $100 off regular) Gigabyte EP43-DS3L Intel Core 2 E8400 4GB (2x2) Mushkin PC-6400 DDR2 (CL5-4-4-12) HIS Radeon HD 4870 ($220! $90 off regular) Seagate 1.5TB HDD ($140! $70 off regular) He actually ordered the 4870 for me. It's going to be swapped out with my 4850 which will go in his computer since he really doesn't need the extra power, but it was just too good of a deal to pass up. Ordered the PSU and HDD separately because they were limited stock items, then went searching for the rest with him. The Seasonic was a damn good deal. I was going to grab one myself, but they ran out of surprise special stock before I got my dad's second order (everything but the PSU and HDD) through.

I've played one and a half CivIV games since reinstalling it last week and had late nights almost every night thanks to it. Turning on the in game clock doesn't do me any good. It just lets me know how much time I just wasted on that last "one more turn" which somehow turned into 20 turns. I'm actually thinking about using the alarm feature and I was one of those people that laughed when they heard about the developers adding it in the first place.

I disliked the ending. Ran great on my computer. Was running it at 1920x1200 with all the settings on high and there was no noticeable slowdown in any of the areas. Absolutely gorgeous game.

Looks like they still have the SecuROM virus. Any confirmation? Everything I've heard has said that they won't have SecuROM.

Started another game of Civilization. This time as the Romans. Go go Praetorians! I can't tell whether I expanded too quickly this time around or not. It's 745 AD and I've got 16 cities on the starting continent to work with. Only three or so of them are any good at the moment. I missed out on pretty much all of the early wonders, Stonehenge really comes in handy with that free monument in each city, but I was beaten to it by 3 turns. I did manage to snag the Great Lighthouse which is the only thing that kept me from dying a slow painful death with no money. 16 cities uses up a lot of money on maintenance when you don't have any economic buildings available yet. I've got about 14 workers running all over the place connecting up all my resources. I've got a crap load of spices and dyes with about 8 of each and half that in silks. I should start whoring them out for as much gold per turn as I can get. I've still got space on the peninsula behind me for 3 more cities, one of which is only going to be good for farming the sea since half it's land spaces will be desert, but a lighthouse and harbour should allow it to make a decent amount of money. I need to really ramp up my Praetorian production and exploit my advantage while I still can. Justinian is my immediate neighbour to the right of me and he's one of the smallest nations with only 7 cities. That's 14 archers though. I'm pretty sure that even with my crappy cities I should be able to out produce him and take his tiny civilization over. He's got two barbarian cities to the north of him that are currently blocking his expansion in that direction, he's got an ocean to the east and south and I'm blocking off the west. We'll have to see just what my Roman citizens can do. I'm currently leading in score with 480 while the next nearest is at 430. I have 14.49% of total world population while the next largest is 12% and I have 5.51% of the total land area to the next largest of 5%.

Civilization 4 has sucked me in again. I was up till 5am the past two nights playing. I did manage to win my second game on Noble though! Managed to pull out a come from behind space race victory. My score had my leadership potential below that of Nero.

Frogren and Hagman came back, that's what happened. Everyone chipped in last night. 7 goals from 7 players is pretty impressive.

Easy work of the Western Canadian games? The only game that I'd consider and easy win was against Edmonton. Calgary went down in overtime and Huet robbed the Canucks on some great chances in the third period tonight. And Montreal managed to pull off their first non-shootout overtime win of the season tonight. Came back from three one goal deficits and Kovalev scored the winner from his spot on the half-boards on a power play. Three goals in three games for Kovalev and 3 goals, 1 assist for Sergei Kostitsyn in two games after 9 games pointless streak. 2 goals on the powerplay tonight and 4 for 13 in the last two games, hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

It's cold, it's windy, and we got about 8 inches of snow today.

My little brother got the day off as well. Apparently the school buses were all cancelled today. While we are supposed to get a lot of snow today, it didn't start until about 9:30 so I think the bus drivers are just damn lazy. It doesn't help that they all got a day off about a week ago because the roads were too icy, yet everything in town was clear and it was only a very few county roads there were affected.

I only managed a 16.8% on that little test. I've seen bits and pieces of a lot of those movies, but I haven't actually seen many of them in the entirety.

He probably won't be paired up with them full time, but sooner or later they'll have him with the Sedins, whether it's on the power play or just some late game line juggling.

I can't wait to hear the announcers in Vancouver. He shoots, he scores! Sundin, from Sedin and Sedin!

I've never kept a card for three years. Lifetime warranty? Yeah, I'm sure the XFX TNT cards would be mighty useful today (if there were any) :D Congratulations on never needing to keep a card for more than three years. My 6 year old Radeon 9600 Pro is still going strong and is currently powering my little brother's computer. Not everyone upgrades on the same cycle and even old cards can be useful. EDIT: Three year warranty means that anything older than an X1950 is no longer covered. For nVidia, anything older than a 7900 is out of warranty.

When picking a vendor, it's not usually about what changes they make to the actual card, but rather the extras that they provide. None of the ATI vendors allow you to replace the stock cooling, overclock the card, or offer a step-up program. Provided they don't offer different warranties for nVidia/ATi cards, XFX will be the first ATi vendor to allow you to replace the stock cooling and overclock (at least in NA). XFX's lifetime warranty is also transferable if you decide to sell later on (provided you register the card with 30 days of purchase). Visiontek is the only ATi vendor that currently offers a lifetime warranty and doesn't have the best reputation when it comes to honouring that warranty. The rest of the ATi vendors offer between 1-3 years of coverage.

Hah! I've been able to do the reverse a couple times, but I've never encountered the opposite. I tend to play on large terra maps so by the time I conquer my starting continent it's almost at the end of the game and conquering the other continent would be more trouble than it's worth when I could easily complete one of the other victory conditions. I've never played a game on anything higher than Prince though. I tend to stick around Noble-Prince. I lost my current game. Losing massive numbers of macemen crippled my military. I could hold off the Ottomans but I wasn't able to push back. America finally got tired of me shooting down their extortion attempts and declared war on me. They were no where near me so I figured I give it a few decades and then ask for peace. Half a dozen turns later a fairly large stack showed up on my border and started ransacking my cities. Turns out the bastard had open boarders with the dutch and were allowed to march a stack through their territory to attack me. My border cities on that side didn't have any defenders as there were all holed up on the other side of my empire to keep the Ottomans out!

A) I think it's on Noble. Normally I play my first game on Warlord to get myself back into things before I step it up, but this time I went with Noble. I'll never get better if I keep playing on lower difficulties. I don't know why the RNG hates me this time around. I played another 30 turns or so before I got wiped out because I was never able to kill a horse archer with a maceman unless it was already injured and even then it would hurt me badly. I lost over 25 macemen and only managed to kill about 10 horse archers with all those troops. It was absolutely ridiculous. B) Heh, I don't think I created more than 5 missionaries for 4 civilizations. With the early religions, if you can get one city converted before anyone else gets to them, they'll almost immediately flip to your religion, or at least they will on the lower difficulties. My mistake was that I didn't get an open borders treaty with all my neighbours to spread my religion. If I had grabbed the open borders before the large religion penalty set in, I could have converted them and been home free until I made the first move to expand beyond the stalemate borders. 50 hammers for a lifelong (until you stab them) ally isn't that large a price to pay.

How much does the extra traffic/people affect your frame rate?