Rock The Kasblog

Howdy,

I’ve got most of the parts for the new server, just waiting on a couple hard drives. Not going with an atom processor frankly cause the extra cheap versions don’t have enough power to run all of the hard drives I want, and the ones that do, don’t really save me any power. So, I’m gonna go with a newer motherboard & chip, and step down to a 300w power supply. The new box will have dual 1TB and 1.5TB drives (both mirrored) and a 300GB root drive. Web users shouldn’t notice much difference, but ftp users will have a -lot- more available

I’ve got a nice big rant about my experiences with my video card & blu-ray playback, which some of you have heard before. I’ll make that a separate post, cause it’ll be long

Movies:

Been to see a few movies since the last post, and they’ve all be awesome.

The first was Harry Potter, which, while still nowhere near as good as the book, and having skipped some things I think they shouldn’t have, was still very very good. The quality continues to improve with each of the movies, I’m lookin forward to the last two quite a lot. 8/10

Secondly, I went to GI Joe, which I loved. It’s not gonna win any awards, but it was everything a GI Joe movie should be. Non-stop action and great special effects. It wasn’t even as corny as I thought it’d be. 7/10

Third was District 9, which was amazingly well done. Possibly my favourite movie of the year so far. Acting was great, the story was great, and the cinematography was really well done. Extra impressive considering a lot of the actors had never acted before, and they had no big-name actors at all.

Laters!

- Kas

Howdy!

Didn’t realize it’d been so long. I really need to update this more often I’m going to try and do something at least weekly to keep things rolling, so if you notice i’m overdue, whack me upside the head or something

There’s a crapload of new pictures in the gallery, from various shenanigans I’ve been up to this year, some new pics of my cat (got a kitten last fall for those of you who didn’t know), and some other stuff.

I’m also planning some upgrades to the server. I’m looking at getting a nice low-powered machine with an Atom processor in it to cut down on the price of running this thing 24/7, and to give me better support for new hard drives. This will also likely involve me upgrading the OS as well, I’d be leaving Slackware and moving to an Ubuntu-based server. While this would give me much more flexibility, I’d miss Slackware a lot, it has been a good solid server platform for me for over 10 years now. I’m still undecided about switching.

As part of the server upgrades, I’d be adding about 3TB of storage space to it as well, and possibly setting up a secure distributed storage system as an alternative to FTP, which’d be hella awesome

Reviews:

• Bought RockBand 2 recently, and I must say, it kicks some serious ass. It has renewed my interest in playing these games, having a lot of fun again. GH Metallica is pretty awesome as well.
• Also bought an XBox 360 for a very good price, it’s been pretty solid so far, despite my reservations about it as a platform. There are some annoyances with the cables & stuff, but nothing too serious so far.
• I can’t think of all the movies I’ve seen since my last post, but a few:
  • Dragonball: Requiem: holy geezus what a bad movie, almost entertainingly bad.
  • The Watchmen: Anyone who’s a fan of the comic should totally see this movie. It was awesome.
  • Land of the Lost: Eh, not bad, but not great. It had a few funny moments, worth a rental if you like Will Farrel
  • Star Trek: Again, anyone who’s a fan of Star Trek should see this, even people I know who don’t like Star Trek much thoroughly enjoyed it, great casting
  • The Dark Knight: Awesome, just totally awesome

Anyway, back to work I go!

Toodles

- Kas

Howdy,

Been a bit, but I’ve been busy, so hey

I’ve moved, for those not already aware, new place is awesome, much larger than the old, has dishwasher, etc. It’s very nice. Pics of it pre-move are up in the gallery.

There’s also new pics from Welshtown Lake and Shelburne, took a week-long trip up there last week, and it was awesome, though it seemed to be gorgeous during the day and then cloud over just before sunset, so I only got one good night of sunset pictures. I know I take too many, but hey, I loves em

Been coding for Asgards Honor again too, got through the boring bits finally, so now I’m into the interesting stuff like plotting the deaths of the not-so-innocent.

That’s it for now, I’ll try and get a review of Batman up sometime this weekend, going to the IMAX show tomorrow

- Kas

Some new pics in the photos section, went hiking on the weekend, nice 5 hour jaunt through the forest. Got nice and burned on the arms & hands. Good times!

- K

So yah, for those who haven’t noticed, there’s a _lot_ more stuff in the photo gallery, I’ve posted just about everything from my archives that I’m likely to post. The rest typically contains people other than myself who I won’t post pics of unless they specifically tell me it’s ok. If you’re one of those people, and don’t mind sharing your face (name un-attached), let me know and I’ll post those as well.

I’ve seen a bunch of movies, most just mediocre, with the exception of a notable two, Sweeney Todd and Beowulf. Sweeney Todd is marvelously well done, if a little gruesome. Don’t go if you’re squeamish at all, but man, what a great movie. Beowulf was amazingly gorgeous, the animation is unreal, and the story is pretty decently done too.

I started the game Portal up on friday just to see how it would run on my machine (like glass), and got so hooked within 5 minutes that I ended up finishing the game about 3 hours later. Man, whoever designed the story to that game deserves an award. I haven’t had a game get into my head like that in a very long time. Great game, I’m kinda sad it was as short, but now I wanna try it multiplayer, as I think the portaling would be an awesome addition to deathmatching.

Still massively hooked on Guitar Hero III, tho the addiction has been slacking off lately. I finished the game in medium with 5 stars on almost every song, only have about 4 left in the bonus section that aren’t. Hard skill level is great for a while, but then at set 7, it just goes retarded. I can’t even start most of the songs in it.

Anyhoo, back to the grind, hopefully it won’t be 4 months for another update

- K

Howdy

Been a while, but I’m still here. Just been too damn busy

So, I’ve been drinking this new scotch recommended by a friend of mine (thanks, Rave), and it’s friggin awesome. Not something you wanna drink every day, but for those occasional nights where you want something a little stronger and flavorful, it’s perfect. MacCallan Cask Strength, little pricey, but damn. A picture is available here.

Review: 30 Days of Night (9/10)
Well, this is possibly the best vampire flick I’ve ever seen. The vampires are cold, vicious and relentless. Even Josh Hartnett, who I normally don’t like, did a great job. Note: If you’re looking for the romantic vampires like that of Anne Rice fame, this is *not* the film for you.

Other Movies:
Resident Evil: Extinction (5/10): Better than the 2nd, but still pretty bad.
Superbad (8/10): Friggin hilarious
Bourne Ultimatim (8/10): Awesome, just as fun as the first two.

Enjoy!

Irony at it’s best. Placed an order online a couple days ago, they send me a confirmation notice saying my order has shipped. In the email, they enthusiastically ask me to take 5 minutes to fill out their survey on how my experience on their site was. Normally I don’t fill these out, but I’ve been particularly happy with the ease and useability of the site, so I decide to do it. I click on the link. ERROR! Page not found. I just had to laugh at that one. Up to that point, I was actually quite pleased with their site. They’ve fixed it now, after I let them know it was broken, but it still makes me giggle

- K

Been to a lot of movies lately, it seems. Silly summer movie rush! They should save some of these things for the fall/winter so we’re not so overwhelmed

Transformers: I went into this expecting just a horrible attempt to regurgitate the original Transformers series in a slightly prettier form so as to woo new children into buying the cool transforming toys. The movie turned out to actually be pretty good. It was more of a reimagining of the original series, making it more realistic (tho still pretty far fetched), less campy, and more adult. With the exception of a few spots where they got really cheesy with the dialect, I was pretty damn pleased with it. Anal-retentive fans of the original series may not like it as much, but really, why go see it at all if you are? It’s _not_ going to be the same as your childhood memories, no matter how much you want it to be, nor should it be. Quit whining and learn to like something that’s slightly outside of your predetermined vision.
8/10

Knocked Up: This, on the whole, wasn’t that great a film, but the secondary characters make it really worth seeing, if not in theatre, on DVD or something. They’re really damn funny. The main characters aren’t anything special, rather boring and flat, really, but geesus, their friends are just priceless. Other than that, tho, meh.
6/10

Harry Potter: Went to see this in IMAX with the fancy 3d scenes, which were pretty damn cool. The movie was quite good, once again, I enjoyed this one over the predecessor, likely because the books are more and more adult-oriented as they progress, and likewise the movies have been as well. I’m told by the people that have read the books tho, that they changed a lot of things, and some of them are pretty central points, so I dunno how good it would be if you’re a book fan, but they seem to have enjoyed it nonetheless. One of these days I’ll get around to reading the books.
7/10

I haven’t really liked any of the die hard movies since the first one, they’ve all been kindof contrived rehashed versions of the first one and I wasn’t terribly entertained. This new one, however, is now my favorite of the bunch. They should have skipped releasing the Superman Returns movie and just given Bruce a cape and told him to just go. The storyline isn’t oscar-winning or anything, but that’s not what you go to die-hard movies for. The storyline is merely a means to justify the obscene levels of violence I think I should go back and watch the others with this in mind, I haven’t seen them in a long time.

If you like any of the other Die Hard movies, you’ll love this one.

8/10

Why, oh why, can’t they come up with a modern file system that works on all three of the popular modern operating systems? It seems you can deal with any two of them without too much blowing up, but even then, the results are less than stellar. NTFS is basically useless outside of windows except for reading. HFS+ is useless outside of OSX, and ext3 is buggy at best outside of Linux. Why is this so hard a feat? Fat32 works just fine in all three, but it has limitations that become _very_ significant when you’re dealing with large drives & large files.

It’s not just file systems either. We’ve had the same absurd battles over CD writing technology, DVD writing technology, and now it’s happening again with the high-def disks. We basically have to wait around until some savior company comes out with an ‘all formats’ burner/player, and even then, the things are incomprehensively expensive for the first year. This childish bickering of companies needs to end. Consumers would be happier, and they’d save a lot of money if they just put aside their stupid rivalries and worked together on a single format.

“Why can’t we all just get along?” - Rodney King

Anyway, going to Transformers on Tuesday. Can’t possibly be as bad as the craptastic four.

- K