Geek Stuff

My verdict is that it’s a good game, but I’m kind of bored of it.

I don’t tend to retain interest in computer games for long these days, which is probably a good skill to have. It’s a good enough game, but now I’ve finished the campaign and found that the game is open-ended and I will probably never truly finish it, my interest has waned considerably. I’m not very good at it by any stretch, but I don’t really feel that drive to “succeed”, because I know the game is designed in a way that I won’t.

It is a pretty cool game though; the whole digital restrictions thing has been spun in such a way that it seems more like a social network than a copy protection system. From what I understand, the battle.net system is going to eventually be fully inter-operable, probably a little something like Steam. Knowing Blizzard and their success at devouring souls with World of Warcraft, I don’t imagine for a minute that it is going to be unsuccessful. As an avid opponent of “digital restrictions management” I found it tasteful enough (except for once when it wouldn’t let me log in to play the game.) Indeed Richard Stallman has long pointed out that “cloud computing” is a highly subversive way of foisting lock-in, but when served like this tastes soooo good.

With my new laptop arriving on Monday I will most likely wipe this Windows disk (it’s an SSD I bought for the laptop anyway,) and think nothing more of it. It’s been a fun week of computer games though.

So I ended up buying a new CPU which was incompatible with my motherboard. It fitted in okay, but the speed of the FSB was wrong, which meant my computer basically sat there and wouldn’t do much.

To that end I had to buy a new mobo and RAM, and in effect ended up putting together an almost completely new system. I’m pretty pissed off with it actually, because if I’d have know I was going to have to do this, I would have spent a little more and got way more bang for my dollar. In any case, what’s done is done, and my system speed is quite reasonable.

I worked the public holiday today, which was unusual but fine. There were very few people at work and aside the phone running off the hook, it was pretty quiet. I got a fair bit done which isn’t unusual, but feels good anyway. Tom and I went for a fateful lunchtime trip to Pinkenba to get pies, but returned with empty hands and no pies.

Turns out the Dell notebook I was looking at, agonising over, and eventually going to buy has today jumped $500 in price. It was an attractive  price to start with, but now by comparison it seems like a total waste of money. It’s not that good a machine, but it hit a sweet spot in the lower price bracket.

Now I don’t want it, and I’m not sure what to do. It seems that the two big qualities I’m looking for in a laptop are possibly a bit unrealistic.

1. Solid-state disk,
2. Reasonable display.

The advent of the catchphrase “high definition” has stymied laptop displays, and it seems the standard resolution has become x by 720 as a result. Even on higher end products it’s disappointing to note that there’s been absolutely no progress on  screen definition over the last, what, five years? Sweeping generalisations aside, I have given up on finding a laptop with a workable screen resolution because they just don’t exist.

The disk is less important because I can always replace it, but buying a laptop with both optical and magnetic storage I will never use angsts me terribly. If I’m going to buy a laptop only to swap bits out, it kind of defeats the purpose.

In five years time I suspect this won’t be such a problem, but until then it looks like I’m going to be settling for hardware that I don’t need or want and won’t be happy with. That said, I do crave portability and want to get my grubby hands on a mobile computery something pretty damn soon. The question is “what”?