WarFlail's Archives - February 1999

Go to WarFlail's Archives - March 1999

Today was my wife's birthday. To celebrate, we are flying to Sydney tomorrow for a long weekend vacation (well, it's a long weekend in Perth, anyway). Purely by coincidence, tomorrow night also happens to be the 1999 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade - no wonder we had difficulty finding accommodation for this weekend! It should be a great experience - a real eye-opener...

I have been totally absorbed with Baldur's Gate this past week. It is exactly how a fantasy roleplay game should play on the computer, IMO. The best thing is, after I finish the single-player adventure, I have multiplay to look forward to! Onward!

I went over to a friend's place for a game of Chivalry & Sorcery 3rd ed., set in the world of Hârn. It was an impromptu game, certainly not quite what the GM was expecting (I think he wanted a band of knights in the party but instead he got a couple of thieving serfs and a forester!) but it was great fun all the same.

Kung Hei Fat Choi! Happy Chinese New Year - I'm glad the Year of the Tiger has ended. Hopefully, the Rabbit will bring some good luck with it and help boost the Asia Pacific economies.

Here in Perth, Western Australia, we were treated to a magnificent annular solar eclipse at about 3:28pm. An annular solar eclipse is different from a solar eclipse in that the moon is further away from the Earth so when it crosses in front of the sun, a "ring of fire" effect can be seen. Anyway, it was really eerie this afternoon - all shadows started getting a weird crescent-shaped fuzziness about them and everything started to seem somewhat surreal. A unique way to start the Chinese New Year, eh!

Klan Inferno challenged Demon Horde of Balgashang to a Quake II Death Match war. The showdown was today on Wantree's server, 4 players per team. Well, I should say up front that we lost, by quite a lot, actually. But let's put that into context: Klan Inferno has been getting a fair amount of DM experience recently, whereas DHoB never plays DM (we prefer AQ2), so our players had a hard time adjusting to DM-style play, which is tactically very different from AQ2-style play. Anyway, head on over to the Clan War Results page to see just how badly we were beaten. Regardless of the result, we all had good fun and nobody was a lamer or camper. Thanks for the game, F-Zero and team - I hope you accept our challenge for a payback match on Action Quake2! :-)

Welcome to our newest clan member, Luff (Luffaneggar to you - show some respect)! He is a veteran AQ2 player whose skills DHoB could really use. Luff was considering starting his own AQ2 clan but until he does, he has agreed to join us in the meantime. Excellent! :-)

Since my monitor was causing me so much grief, I went out this morning and bought a new one, with a view to repairing the old monitor and giving it to my wife. As much as I like the ViewSonic monitors (particularly the PT775, PT771 and GT775), the prices were a bit steep so I settled for a CTX PR711, a 17" monitor that uses a Sony Trinitron 0.25mm Aperture Grille CRT, for A$740 from EM Computers.

I finally decided to update the BIOS of my two-year old Asus TX97 motherboard - until now I had stayed with the original buggy software out of sheer laziness. I'm glad I did it, though! After the update, I attempted to overclock my Intel P166MMX CPU again (I tried over a year ago with the old BIOS software and had absolutely no success with it) and this time it worked without a hitch. So now, my system is effectively a P200MMX, simply from changing a single jumper! Okay, so that's still woefully insignificant next to today's powerhouse Pentium II 450MHz systems, but it works out to be an extra 5-6 fps faster in Quake II for me, which is not bad at all for a freebie.

I would be doing a better job of updating this website if my #@%&ing monitor didn't keep shutting down on me! The monitor is an old 17" CTX 1765 and I've had it since October 1995. I must admit that it has been pretty reliable for the past 3+ years but over the past few months it has had an annoying tendency to simply black out, LED and all. Ever since I returned, though, the frequency of these blackouts has increased to the point that it happens at least three or four times per day. I think the hot weather has been taking its toll on the old monitor. On the positive side, this is the perfect excuse to justify buying that nice, new 17" ViewSonic monitor I've been wanting to get... :-)

I have returned from my two-week business trip. Did you miss me? Heh - I didn't think so. :-) Actually, I was back towards the end of last week but my monitor kept blacking out all the time - probably from all that ridiculously hot weather we've been getting in Perth recently - thereby preventing me from doing very much on the computer.

Go to WarFlail's Archives - January 1999

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