Journals

So you know how we used to do Map of the Month here at TWHL? Guess I missed it so I decided to flex my reviewing muscle once again. It may need a couple more attempts to get back into the full swing of things.

Anywho, here is the first of many (maybe) GoldSource mod reviews.

Feel free to link me to any mods you think could do with a good tongue lashing.

Back to school tomorrow, kinda sad that summer's over but kinda happy that I get to see my friends and some classes are actually kinda cool. (Geometry is not one of those) I've always liked history and this year is WWI/WWII era stuff which is cool. It seems that every year I get gym class right before or after a class on the other side of the school, this year I get to run from gym to "Creative Writing" literally on the opposite side of school and up a flight of stairs lol.

Welcome back!
This is your 8888th login.

RepDigit celebration login. Yay!

Rimrook's Emergency Surgery

Hey Guys, Lyssa here again,
Rimrook JUST got home form having emergency surgery to remove the Kidney stone. As you recall 3 weeks ago we rushed him to the ER and found that he had a 6mm Kidney stone. Well the condition got to the point where it got stuck in the base of the Ureter (the tube that connects the Kidney to the bladder) and was NOT moving, so the Dr told us this afternoon (around 12:30-1:00) to go to the ER Immediately and that he would have surgery this evening.

The surgery itself went VERY well but Rim is in a LOT of pain. They had to go in with camera and this apparatus to remove the stone up through his urethra. The surgery only took about 30 min. and after he was woken up we were allowed to take him home. He is NOT feeling very good tonight at all.

I have a requested if you would like to do a nice get well for him to get a nice high rez pic of a Bazooka and sign it so that when he can come to the computer again there will be a nice little get well card from you all. I KNOW how close you guys are to Rim, and he would REALLY appreciate it.

If you need to get in contact with him for any reason just leave a comment on here I will be checking this often for him. Thanks guys

~Lyssa

Yesterday I tackled a problem that has plagued game developers for decades; creating good-looking flowing water. Needless to say, I failed. Anyone good with Sprit's Aurora particle system?

Oh, I also went in a helicopter and had my first flight today, which is fairly noteworthy, but less so because I can't currently upload any pictures.

WWZ wrapped last night. The director made a moving speech and I managed to shake his hand, then regretted it almost immediately when I remembered he had directed Quantum of Solace.

Regardless, I had an insane amount of fun working on this, and I can't wait to see the finished product. Getting more working days and more money than I expected was nice too, as well as finding footage on youtube of me pushing Brad Pitt.

Now begins the oddly compelling task of finding myself in press photos...

One of our Roborovski hamsters has been getting sicker over the past week. By the time I got home this evening, she was panting on her side, so weak that she was unable to stand up or even protest when I picked her up.

I decided it was time to stop the suffering and give her some peace.

So I researched the web, and found that the most humane way to euthanize a hamster is using carbon dioxide.

Where could I get carbon dioxide? From dry ice, of course.

So I Googleed dry ice sellers, and I found out a couple of blocks away. I called, and I asked for 200 grams of dry ice. The guy told me that the minimum amount they sell is 5 pounds. I agreed to pay $5 for 5 lbs of dry ice.

He heard all sorts of uses for dry ice in the past, but euthanizing a hamster was a first. He gladly sold me the dry ice.

I already had a plan. I relocated the sick hamster into the small plastic container with a meshed lid on top, and I put a block of dry ice right on top of the mesh.

As the dry ice started melting, the now gaseous carbon dioxide dripped into the container. I could see her gasping for air. It was hard to watch, but I have seen children die before, so I knew I could handle this.

In less than two minutes, the hamster's gasping stopped completely. I waited for a bit longer, just to be sure. It felt serene. The cloud-like vapor enveloped the now still hamster. It was like she was in heaven.

So if you happen to have passed through the haiku thread recently you'll notice I mentioned a new vlog. I also mentioned how it focuses on cats. You probably don't care.

Anyway Here is a video about my cat.

Hurricane Irene. It's coming straight for CT. They have already started evacuating parts of my town and the neighboring town. So Im going to use this journal to document and update whoever cares. There's already water seeping thru the cracks in my house's foundation. There's some water in the basement. Our grid has no power. Fun fun fun.
http://img854.imageshack.us/i/imagerec.jpg/
Backyard is flooding too.
http://img18.imageshack.us/i/imagegiv.jpg/
breakfast on the grill. Yum... Grilled bacon delish.
Still safe for now... A tree fell down and hit my neighbors pool. Thank god only about a foot of water drained because it came straight down the hill and into my yard. Sucks for them but I'm safe and the rain for now has stopped (12:16pm EST) now it's just wind and the eye is approaching from what the radio says.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5anZsCYTvQY&feature=player_embedded#!

thats the route i take to work. flooded....
thats not me by the way just a video i found

EDIT: It appears that it sorted itself out after an hour with the power reconnected. Which is odd, but I'm not complaining. Also, the automatic rock is bricked, which is to say the washing machine is broken. The automatic shutoff for the water didn't go, and the basement floor, once again, started to flood.

Original Post:

So, my PC is broken, I have to ration bandwidth on the family computer, and as usual, there's nothing on TV. Guess I'll be spending more time reading The Dragon Reborn today than I anticipated.

Also, before anyone has to ask, as soon as the computer is turned on, the fan goes full blast and there's no output from the monitor. And yes, I tried removing, cleaning, and reinstalling the GPU. For some reason, it didn't work this time.

Since Thursday last week, I have been waking up at 03:30 to arrive on set for 05:00 and then working until around 20:00, plus a further hour travelling back home.
I then eat a quick meal, go to bed and get up at 03:30 to begin again.

I literally have no concept of the world around me at this stage.

How the fuck satchmo copes with hours like these regularly, what with him being a doctor, I have no idea.

Anyway, just a brief shout since I haven't been around. Back on set tomorrow, but I get Sunday off before beginning the following week.

On the plus side, I'm getting paid shitloads more than I originally was going to because I'm in a more important role, hense why I'm needed every day.
I've also been physically 3D mapped which involved standing on a rotating wheel while cameras captured me in various poses in 360 degrees, followed by some sort of laser depth thing which projected a grid onto me to map the depth in my clothes and stuff. Totally crazy and awesome stuff.

Rambling now because I'm about to die from sleep deprivation. Night Night.

I passed the final driving school exam: the city driving test. Starting from tomorrow I can drive cars( under 3,5t). Yay!

DeusEx:HR looks like a piece of art, it's incredibly beautiful!
Have you guys seen the review of it on IGN?
http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/118/1189591p1.html

I will probably get this game.
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P.S.: COME AT ME BRO!

At my Grandma's in New York City, not much going on, except an earthquake. Interesting.

My newest acquisition? Asus Xonar DS 7.1
The problem? I almost regret buying it, I think I have wasted 60$ for nothing. I am quite desperate with the problems it presents. I am just going to copy paste what I posted on the Asus support forums.

[EDIT]{ I resolved the major problems.

-flashplayer doesn't crash anymore
-I now have FrontPanel access, yay! The front panel has a pre-amp, and the headset sounds a lot better. The best part is that I don't have to plug and unplug anymore, I can just switch between 5.1 and FrontPanel from the Asus panel. That's a massive plus.

Minor problems still left:

-I must activate FlexBass when I switch to 5.1 to be able to get low frequencies, I mean BASS. Without that option activated there is no trace of subwoofer activity...
-I must accomodate myself with the Asus panel, in the windows sound options I'm only controlling a "Master" volume from now on
-I have to do a ton of fine tuning to make the 5.1 system sound how I want. That's not necessarily a problem.
-sometimes windows won't boot the first time, I have to restart and select "Start Windows Normally"....
}

[/EDIT

Let me start by saying that I own Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 motherboard, the only hardware part that has been left without upgrade through the years. The onboard audio broke, and it's not chip-related but mostly connector related. They probably worn out after so much plugging and unplugging.

I decided to buy a PCI audio card, and I thought I should invest a bit more money since I'm doing this anyway, to obtain more sound fidelity.
After some research, I finally stumbled upon the Xonar DS 7.1 and thought this was the choice.

When it arrived, I was prepared for some misc failures, like a boot failuter or something. And indeed the computer failed to boot the first time, don't know what was that all about :).

Anyway, I proceeded to install the audio card. Downloaded the latest driver from the ASUS site for Win7 x64 because it's not provided on the CD. At that moment I was wearing my Plantronics Gamecom headset( modest, but I can't afford expensive things really). I noticed the improvement in sound quality. But I was to be soon disappointed. I wanted to check a song on youtube, and the flashplayer crashes. Firefox, Chrome.. doesn't matter. I tried on Vimeo: the same thing.
Soon I discovered that not even the 5.1 system works. The LF were nonexistent. Even though it was set to 5.1 in the windows playback devices panel, somehow every sound got mixed in the front channel.

Now to ensure that there will be no conflict with the 2 audio cards ( Asus and the onboard Realtek one), I completed these steps:

-I disabled the onboard audio in BIOS
-I uninstalled the Realtek drivers
-I uninstalled the Asus drivers
-I deleted every track of sound drivers with drivers sweeper and then run a registry cleaner(ASC)
-after rebooting, I reinstalled the Asus drivers
-rebooted

The results are the same. Fortunately playing games doesn't provoke a BSOD( well, I only tried a League of Legends match).

Ok here are my main 2 problems, for those of you with TL;DR

1. I can't watch flash videos(Youtube, for ex.) since I installed the Asus Xonar DS. YES I AM SURE it is ITS fault, because right before installing it I watched some videos.

2. Going to "Playback Devices", "Asus Xonar Audio Device" and clicking properties I see no Jack I/O information. Similarly, there are no level controls for each of the channel. The onboard sound card didn't have this problem.

Yes I have the Xonar DS Audio Center, but it is useless if windows doesn't itself recognize the audio features. Because of this there all kinds of problems spawning, like the desired sound functionality is next to impossible to achieve.

I have heard that it might be the driver itself responsible, and there are modded drivers that should work but I'm afraid of doing something wrong.

Can somebody please help me?