I Heart Duron

So I picked up the spare parts I needed to get that Duron box running, along with a 128MB stick of PC100 RAM, which turns out to be more than I need. It runs Quake 3 Arena at 1024x768, with every conceivable graphic detail maxed out, at a solid 70fps. Half-Life at the same rez at 100fps. That's the good news. Unfortunately, the USR 56k is pre-v2 standards, and is slow as all hell. While that's not a big deal since I'm rarely putting this box online, there's a more serious problem. It resets, and shuts off, for no reason. At first, I thought it was caused by the Herc Muse XL sound board, but now I have no idea. Add an mp3 to a Winamp playlist, and it resets. Open cdplayer.exe while a browser applet is playing sfx or music, it shuts down and won't restart. Hell, today I checked a random dialog checkbox totally unrelated to the audio subsystem and it rebooted immediately. This is on a clean Win98SE install, after a scandisk/defrag. Anyway, it games flawlessly. I'm just wondering what's going to happen after I install the GIMP and do some RAM-heavy photo editing.

Finally got around to seeing Napoleon Dynamite this afternoon. Nice little flick. After the commercial blitz the studio unleashed, there's no reason to think of this as an indie film anymore, and as a mainstream comedy, it works very well, but only if you have the right sense of humor. Kind of like Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. There are a ton of tiny little touches in Dynamite that almost knocked me off the couch, but I can see how a broad audience wouldn't get it. There's a definite Wes Anderson feel to it, and I'd say it's more entertaining than Bottle Rocket, if not as ambitious. I hear that the commentary is quite good, but I didn't have time to get into it. In any case, in terms of 2004's major comedies, it's no Anchorman, but it's worth a rent.