Stuff that fries your potatoes with olive oil of HAPPY.

[LunarKeys]

I just got back from vacation.

WHEW.

Spent three days in Reno at the Atlantis Fun Center. They had:

- IIDX DJ TROOPERS with custom songs thrown on so it was basically Troopers + Empress. I threw sixty freaking dollars on this thing and spent the better part of one of the days on it.
- Pump It Up NX2. SEXY. <3 Amazing, managed to pass Witch Doctor (CZ), Chimera (HD), and Energizer (CZ). Flippin' amazing machine. In awesome condition, well-maintained.
- STEPMANIA Yeah modified DDR cabinet with a hojillion songs. Managed to pass Guillaume Tell (original from KBMP) and most of Beautiful Synergy. Also played One More Lovely and managed to spam for like thirty seconds before dying on the pad.
- Pop'n Music FEVER (didn't play, was too busy with IIDX)
- DDR Supernova (lol wut)
- Initial D 4 - AWESOME. The game is amazing and beautiful to even watch, let alone play. About the only thing I'd have liked more would have been an F-Zero AX cabinet but who cares this thing is AWESOME.
- Time Crisis 3 + 4 - Smashed my old record on 3 and finished the game on one credit for the first time. Down to three credits on finishing 4. Whoo!

So yeah, vacation was AMAZING and about the only thing that was bad about it is that there's no longer any ITG because the other arcade sold theirs off and replaced it with a PIU Zero but WHO CARES I'm not even typing using proper punctuation anymore.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I bought both original Odd World games off of Steam yesterday and I've been playing them to death. I'm trying to do a near perfect run and about EVERY secrete area will get me killed about 10 times in a row. I can see why I never bothered doing all of this as a kid, shit's hard.

I already have this error that now gives me a black box on the upper left section of the screen and I can't get rid of it, and their's no video options so I'm probably going to be forced to re-download the game...

[annon]

Classes are canceled today because of a blizzard.

[Bobbias]

Blizzard? lmao. Up here it's actually finally looking like spring

[annon]

Yeah, it's weird. We didn't get our first snow until December, and now we're getting a blizzard in late March. It's like the earth wobbled or something. Weirder is that it was 50 and sunny yesterday.

[Eggman]

It was 70 two weeks ago. Today it was 25, windy and snowing. And apparently the west edge of Minnesota is going to have its worst flood season ever.

So yeah, weird weather.

[Bobbias]

Well, around here we had a couple times where the temperatures went from like, -10 to about 20 (14 to 68) in 1-2 days.

[annon]

So a couple of weeks ago I turned a piece-of-shit paper in for my political science class. I did it in one night, barely met the length requirement, and basically spewed irrelevant BS on the last page. I was going to withdraw because I thought I'd get a really bad grade, but I missed the withdrawal date.

Today, I got my grade back. 88. Wtf awesome.

I have two guesses as to why I scored so high: The TA was far from sober when grading, or the papers were graded alphabetically by last name, and roughly 300 other shitty papers came before mine so the TA had lowered his/her standards by the time they got to mine.

[Bobbias]

Haha, that's awesome. I need to save my ass in communications (or English, for the rest of you people :/ no idea why they decided to call it that in my college.) I took an online course, which is usually a  good idea for me, but I've been concentrating on all my other courses (you know, the ones that matter....) and basically, I'll fail it if I don't do something soon to save myself (as in, asking to teacher to help save my own ass :/)

And no, the majority of this post does not fry my potatoes in awesome..

[Spectere]

I bought a new sound card today.  It's a Creative X-Fi Titanium and it's awesome.  It's also the first PCI-Express card that I own that isn't a video card.

I mainly wound up getting it because my onboard sound card had a fuckton of noise.  Here's an example of the level of line noise that I get with both cards whenever I try to record:



To the left is my onboard Realtek HD audio device and to the right is the X-Fi.  Both levels have been amplified +36 dB.  The SNR on this card is just incredible.

The Creative ASIO driver is also amazing.  I was able to do mess around with a bunch of synths with only 2ms of latency.  Wow.

Long story short: the Ian is pleased.

[Bobbias]

Wow, that is absolutely amazing. How high is the SNR on that?

How much did that cost you anyway?

Thanks to being a sound nerd, I now have enormous envy for you...

[Spectere]

The SNR is 109 dB.  I could have gotten an X-Fi with a 115 dB SNR (the Elite Pro) but I didn't want to spend $100+ more for that insignificant of a jump.  Right now the only audible noise I get is a very soft amplifier hiss.  My old SB Live! had a different SNR depending on whether the speakers were plugged into the rear port.  The rear port used a better DAC than the front port (for...some reason?) but I'm not sure exactly what the numbers were.

The thing that impresses me the most about the X-Fi so far is the resampling engine.  It's an amazing improvement over the Live! and Audigy lines.

This is the moment when I ask myself (again) why I didn't just get a decent sound card after I put this system together.  Okay, I asked myself...for some reason I then proceeded to slap myself in the face.  Ouch.

The card cost $140, I believe.  Somewhere in that range, anyway.  It's less than I paid for my old SBLive! Platinum way back when I bought that (1999?).  No breakaway box, front I/O box, or anything fancy like that, but it does support them if I wanted to pick one up in the future.  I think the next thing on the docket is a new set of 5.1 speakers with a digital I/O.  I was thinking of saving up for these, but we'll see.  I definitely don't want to get a set that has anything worse than what I have now (Logitech Z-2200 2.1, 8" 120W RMS subwoofer, 2 x 40W RMS satellites).

[Jupi]

I have a job interview on Tuesday.  Whoo, potential money.

[Spectere]

I have a job interview on Tuesday.  Whoo, potential money.

Yay!  Let us know how it goes.

[Jupi]

Will do.  :3

What's real lovely about this place is that it's about a ten minute walk from my house.  (To the people that have been to my general area - it's right next to the Denny's up the hill from my house.)

So chyeaaaah boi. 


And Mexicans.  I'll be surrounded by Mexicans.