Rock radio is still alive in Memphis.

We gave you Rock 'n Roll. You're welcome.

by AC - permalink

There's a radio station in Memphis broadcasting at 92.9 FM called 93X. Right around when they lost Howard Stern they were playing a pretty stereotypical mainstream rock playlist. Any current top-40 rock or alternative track was given six or seven rotations a day. At any given moment you could find the song currently playing on 93X running simultaneously on two or three other crappy Memphis stations. It had been the only station I could tolerate in this town for years, the station that introduced me to Deftones, and it was finally letting me down. The whole thing was just really depressing. And the fact that it was so hard to find good rock in the town that first broadcast Elvis Presley's "That's All Right, Mama" in 1954 and basically gave birth to rock 'n roll was absurd to me.

But 93X turned it around. Their playlist now is as good as any I've ever heard. Just now, as I type, they're following up "Punk Rock Girl" by Dead Milkmen with Metallica's "Master of Puppets." This weekend I've heard them play the new Tool single from 10,000 Days, but they also ran track 10 (I forget what it's called) just for the hell of it. To put that in perspective, the last Tool single, "Parabola," from Lateralus, was played on 93X so rarely that I heard it only once. Under this new format, they've already played a deep track from the new album, and by the way, they just played "Sex Type Thing" by Stone Temple Pilots. I think that was on Core.

They're still playing too much Saliva, I guess because they're from Memphis. The only Saliva track I actually like is that acoustic version of "Your Disease." Which they do still play sometimes. And do I want to hear "Lump" by the President of the United States of America, which it playing now? Yes. Yes I do. Thank you, 93X. You don't suck anymore, and I salute you for that.

Update, five minutes later: "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" by Pearl Jam. You see? That's good shit.

Computers are complicated.

I can type fast. Doesn't really help me, though.
by AC - permalink

Turns out if you look hard enough, you can still find a decent CRT for a decent price, but you're going to have to mail-order it. I think I've settled on this ViewSonic 19-incher for $220 plus shipping. I realize that if they'd had this thing during the Great War they would have used it as a runway for Sopwith Camels, but it does 1600x1200 at 77Hz, and the user reviews beat any other sub-20-inch CRT on Newegg. You can get a 19-inch, 8ms LCD for less than $300 now, but I want to be able to push as high as 1600 and as low as 1152 for various games, and you can't do that without a CRT. Plus, I can get a .21mm dot-pitch instead of .296, which is about as good as a mid-range LCD gets.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck forcing the brightness up to max in all my games so I can actually see what's going on with this damned second-hand NEC monitor. Tomorrow I'm going to drop some cash into checking, then I'm ordering that ViewSonic, or another, similar CRT. I've got to do something about this.

I'm thinking my next hardware upgrade will likely be a new vidcard. I just got this Radeon X800 XL, and I love it; it's significantly faster than the newer-generation X1600 cards. But at some point I guess I'll need a new one that's DirectX 10-compliant. That's probably about a year down the road, though. Before that I might want to swap out my CPU (AMD64 3500+) with either a 4000+ or an X2 (dual-core). The 939 socket is insanely diverse, which is one of the reasons I bought this PC in the first place.

Oh, and I need an add-on sound board, because the popping I'm getting from the onboard RealTek is absolutely maddening. And at some point I still have to get a gamepad for the flying missions in San Andreas and all the emulated 16-bit games I have. But that's it. Really. That's all I need.

Or I could sell everything and get two or three consoles and a dozen great games for 'em.

Nah. I'm off to play some Pogo games now, looping my entire CD collection in the background with musikCube. Try that on your precious PS2. For that matter, try updating your blog with your Xbox.

Update 4:26pm: By the way, when did PC game demo downloads get so completely out of hand? I remember when a demo was just over five megs. You know, because it's just a demo. The Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter demo is out now, and it's just under five hundred megs. Half a Gigabyte? For a demo? Jesus Christ, I just keep feeling older and older.

Putting off the inevitable.

Why spend money when you can wish you had? Wait, what?
by AC - permalink

I'm getting really tired of this old borrowed NEC monitor. I can't seem to do anything to get the brightness/contrast high enough, and the refresh rate is so low that the ache has moved past my eyeballs and into my soul. I mean, it supports a really astonishing array of resolutions for a 15-inch CRT, but it's just killing my brain. But I can't find a good CRT anywhere, and I hate to mail-order something so big and so fragile. But that's what it's going to come down to eventually.

At work I've been training a new guy to take over my graveyard shift so I can work the much busier 3pm to 11pm slot. I like working nights for a lot of reasons, but one of them isn't crazy motherfuckers who smash all the goddamned lobby windows with an aluminum bat, and that was the final impetus to get off that shift. The security we have is, at best, pathetic, and in that part of town you should have professionals. I make peanuts, and it's not worth getting my brains blown out over nothing. But this week's training combined with not taking a single day off, ever, and in fact never being more than two minutes late, while working a minimum of 20 minutes extra every day is starting to push me towards the schizoid side. I need a vacation. Now.

Unfortunately, I don't get paid days off at this place. What I do get is a wide range of nicely numbing first-person shooters on my hard-earned, fast-as-hell PC at home. And Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is looking so good right now I'd kill a guy (the guy who smashed the fucking windows at work) to get it. Not only is it more aligned with the original Ghost Recon than the console version, early playtests indicate than it runs well enough even with a Radeon 9800-series graphics card. I'm drooling a little just thinking about this thing.

I've also tried to set aside a little of my free time to keep up my plucking skills on my bass guitar. I've picked out most of American Idiot, my new favorite bass CD. And by the way, have you heard the new Tool single yet? Oh my god. I thought progressive rock peaked around 2001, but this plus the new Korn track plus what System of a Down is doing, and throw in Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth, has me thinking that prog might be back. I hope so. All we need now is a new Deftones album...

Serenity and San Andreas bugs.

I only watch Stargate when I blog.

by AC - permalink

I'm rapidly developing a DVD problem. I bought three used yesterday for thirty bucks, really for no reason at all. I brought Serenity and Domino to the counter, but she told me a third one would be free, so I grabbed Collateral (which was the only one I'd actually seen). Domino was cool. I don't think I actually knew what was going on by the last fifteen minutes, but it was good looking. Serenity, though, I loved. I watched it this morning, and tonight I actually sat through all the bonus features and Joss Whedon's commentary track.

I thought Firefly was a brilliant show, but I wouldn't call myself a Browncoat or anything. I mean, I realize that the entire series can be had on DVD for as little as $20, but I still don't have it. I'd rather walk into a store and buy it than order it on the web, and I've never seen it anywhere.

This is a pretty funny Startgate. Better than the infinite time loop one. Considering I've only seen maybe a dozen episodes over the entire, what, nine-year run, I kinda like this show. Shit, they just did a Kids in the Hall "I'm crushing your head!" reference. That's awesome.

So anyway, I ran into this bug in GTA San Andreas where the game won't launch. Watching the active processes, I could see gtasa.exe run for a few seconds, then go away into computer netherworld. I tried a few things, then spent two minutes online and found the answer. You have to delete gta_sa.set, which is not in the program directory. It's in GTA SA's folder under My Documents. I didn't edit it, but it seems to be the main user config file, because deleting it resets all the options to default and the game generates a new one. It wouldn't be so irritating if I knew what caused the problem and not just how to fix it.

And if I hadn't nearly reinstalled the game, which might have wiped out my progress. I'm at more than 50% now, and I'm knowingly bypassing a number of goals. Right now my progress in San Andreas is being held up by the same thing that's keeping me down in Vice City: those fucking flying missions. In SA, it's both Zero's remotes and trying to fly that goddamn Mustang in pilot school. I can get around well enough in the seaplane you can find in the lake west of Las Venturas, but that Mustang is completely uncontrollable with either the keyboard or the mouse. I'm actually thinking about buying a gamepad just for that one mission.

Well, that Stargate had a really anticlimactic ending. It just sort of stopped. But on the bright side, they threw in a Star Wars gag ("My name is Olo. Hans Olo"), and it looks like the next one will have Wayne Brady for some reason. That's good, right?

Here, have some money.

Everyone else is getting my money, you should get in on this.
by AC - permalink

It's been an expensive week. Last weekend the house next door burned halfway to the ground, melting off all the siding on the north side of this house in the process. It also tore up a lot of telephone and electrical gear and damaged some of the utility-reading gear. So there's a nice, fat insurance deductable to pay. The same night, one of the dogs somehow managed to get a nice big gash on her leg, which meant a visit to the vet and another unexpected bill.

A few days later it became apparent that the condensor portion of the central AC wasn't working anymore. Call the AC guy, get out the checkbook. Then my beautiful Philips computer monitor borked itself into the scrapyard, so now I have to buy a new one. And on my way to look for one this morning I managed to drop over $160 on routine maintenance for my truck.

For the time being, I've borrowed a cast-off spare monitor from a neighbor, and hopefully it's temporary because this thing is just universally crap. It can get up to 1152x864, so that's something. But the dot-pitch is so low, and the image so blurry that it seems like my eyes are out-of-focus and it's giving me a headache.

I'm just so pissed at my broken monitor. It's a Philips 107P 17-inch, and it can hit any resolution you throw at it, from 1600x1200 to 1360x1024. I'd be content to just get a new one, but it turns out Philips doesn't even make monitors anymore, those motherfuckers. Now I might have to toss it in the backyard and fire .22 rounds at it to make myself feel better.

My problem now is trying to find a decent CRT to replace it. I use too many resolutions for gaming to get an LCD, and I can't spend $500 for a good game-grade flat-panel. But even high-range 17-inch CRTs these days seem to max out at 1280. Just this past weekend I played through my Call of Duty games maxed out at 1600, and I absolutely refuse to downgrade with a brand-new monitor. That leaves 19-inchers, which run well north of $200 before shipping. And I really don't have the desktop space for a huge 19-inch CRT anyway. Shit.

All this sort of puts a damper on my plans to pick up a new mini Nintendo DS next month. I decided I'd cave in and get one for the new 2D Mario, plus at work we have Wi-fi and I have a lot of time to kill, so a DS plus the new Mario Kart or Metroid or Tetris would be perfect. If it's not too much more expensive than the current DS, I could still pick one up. That's assuming I don't get an arm chopped off or smash my truck into a bridge pylon or have to buy a new refridgerator or something. Which, at this rate, is right around the corner.