Minimum System Requirements

I spent more than two hours driving around Raleigh today trying to waste money. That's how much Raleigh sucks. You have to work like hell just to throw money away. I was looking for some cheap DVDs or CDs or maybe a game or two, but I didn't want to drive the dozen-year-old Explorer way the hell out to the Wolfchase area or downtown while the Probe is having growing pains (more on that in a bit). I tried the Cat's Music and Blockbuster out there before getting desperate and driving to Kmart, where I found lots and lots of fullscreen editions of The Hulk and even more obnoxious, screaming kids. Oh, boy. Finally I ended up at Wal-Mart, where I bought Half-Life/Team Fortress Classic and an Ultimate Doom/Doom II/Final Doom bundle for a combined 25 bucks.

The best part is how the Doom95 front-end on this CD will not, no matter what I try, recognize that I have a mouse. I mean, I do have a mouse, and DOS Doom recognizes it, and the old copy of Doom95 on my original Doom II disc from 1994 worked on this PC when I installed it last winter. I even switched mouse drivers a couple times and checked the documentation, which, in classic id Software style, cheerfully recommends playing the game with the fucking keyboard. Anyway, I ended up installing ZDoom into three different directories and using that as my launcher. Problem solved.

So about the Probe. The other day my mom decides to go get the oil changed after I found out it'd been over 10,000 miles since the last one, and guess what? The "Check Engine" light came on before she even got out of the driveway! You know about the Check Engine light, don't you? It means, roughly, "Something's wrong, and I'm not going to tell you what it is". It might as well say, " Uh Oh." So after I added two quarts of oil, because it was that goddamned low, a $60 diagnostic said the spark plugs weren't getting enough juice. Replacing the spark plug wires didn't put out the light, and another diagnostic said that there's probably a faulty sensor. So, basically, the computer that controls the Check Engine light is setting off the Check Engine light. Oh, hooray.