Summation time
Apr0
The time has come for bike trips and driving with the windows down and that just makes me happy inside. I’m looking forward to a Summer full of good times and for the first time in a long time my evenings and weekends will be free like the warm Summer breeze. I am finally done school as of this April and its time to let loose. 
Zune-tastic
Apr0
I’ve had a 120gb Zune for just under a year now and its one of those kinda devices that I just couldn’t live without. I take my Zune everywhere with me, I use it when I’m walking, I hook it up to my car stereo. I’ve had an iPod before and it was alright, it got the job done but it didn’t give me any reason to love it.
As far as the Zune vs iPod argument goes the key component to it for me was the software that connects the Zune to my media collection. Where iTunes feels slow and bloated to me, the multi-threaded beauty of the Zune software shines through. It feels very automatic, and in a good way. Once you set things how you like there is pretty much no maintenance. No frequent panicked patches that make you restart your system and no software constantly running in the background searching for such patches. Oh and get this, it looks better than iTunes! Have you seen the album cover wall?
It creates a dynamic background of album covers from your music collection. When available it also will download photos and album art style images and fade between those while intermittently displaying bits of information about the song.
Overall there isn’t much I could ask for from Microsoft when it comes to a media player. I don’t really use the Wifi features all that much as there isn’t all that much you can do with it but wirelessly sync your Zune and trade songs with other zune owners. I think that part needs a bit more streamlining.
But if you are in the market for a new media device this is the one.
Snowtastic
Mar0
I managed to get away from the blur of life this last week for a couple days. My escape led me on a 1017km trip skiing. It had been awhile, at least 4 years or so by my reckoning. Really truly one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in quite some time.
ATI 4870 1GB
Mar0
To start off the ATI 4870 1GB is simply an amazing card right out of the box. Upgrading from a nVidia 8800GT I wasn’t expecting a gigantic leap in performance in games. But low and behold the amazing power of this new series of ATI graphics cards bringing old red back from the dead. The absolutely insane memory bandwidth with 1gb of DDR 5 memory is just overwelmingly advantageous in comparison to nVidia’s DDR3.
I haven’t purchased a nVidia 280 to compare it to in benchmarks but my friend Ense7en has and lets just say the experiance hasn’t been smooth. All excited to get his new card he was one of thousands of dissapointed customers that got half dead cards that ran at over 105 degrees celcious and then forcibly down clocked themselves. This of course led to constant crashes in games and much lowered performance. After a month or so I believe he finally got himself a working card. Being a bit of green skinned nVidia fan boy he’ll tell you how awesome his 280 and what awesome performance he gets. And then I’ll remind you that he paid more than me and doesn’t have some massive performance lead on my system. No, by the contrary we run neck and neck for performance. Not to mention games like Grid and Call of Duty 4 where I destroy him with 20% higher frame rates. Click on image below on the left for detailed peformance in Grid running at high settings.
Some might point out games like Crysis where the GTX 280 runs the ATI 4870 off the road. And I’ll point out that games like Crysis were designed and tested using nVidia and optomized to run on nVidia machines. The big nVidia logos plastered all over your favorite games mean that the green giant has sent piles of cash to the developer to encourage them that way. So try as they might to dominate the market nVidia is about to take a loss of market share to this new breed of fire breathing ATI cards because the price vs performance is definately leaning towards the 4870. Not to mention that I hear nVidia’s recent price slashing has cut their profits to almost nothing on the higher powered skus.
Crysis performance graph: 
Picture of my 4870 1gb (made by GeCube sold as Diamond):
** Correction: Ense7en would like it to be stated that he is not an nVidia fan, he only buys their cards because he thinks they are better.
HTC Touch
Mar0
After hearing so much doom and gloom surrounding mobile OS’s I was pleased to find Windows Mobile 6 is reasonably fast and has an overall easy to use interface. It works well on a touch screen device and the on screen keyboard options seem to suit all my different text entry situations where I might need a number pad or a full out keyboard.
But lets get one thing straight, a good touch keyboard is still no replacement for a full qwerty keyboard. The home screen looks nice and gives me all the needed quick info that keeps me connected throughout the day. One really bad thing about the home screen is that everything is clickable and you are liable to accidentally click on the clock a zillion times a day by accident. Some items should be a double click instead of a single click because it is so easy to bump the wrong thing. Or even if they had an option to lock the uncommonly used buttons on the UI. Overall this is still the best phone I’ve ever used and is probably better for business work than an iPhone could ever be. I can open all my Office docs manage all my email and text messaging with ease. It connects to Outlook and keeps my contacts up to date. What more do I need? Well a keyboard of course but they do offer a similar model that is slightly thicker that comes with a slide out keyboard. If you are looking for a slim touchscreen centric smart phone for office use this is a great option.
Website Updates
Mar0
Moving to a new style of website this week. The front page of slayernine.com will feature a conglomeration of RSS feeds from the various websites and groups I subscribe to and publish content to. The idea is to show updates in a similar manner to Facebook. So when I post a new video on Youtube it also posts that video or a link to it on my websites front page.
Using source code based around Magpie RSS, which you can get here:
http://magpierss.sourceforge.net
FFF – Form, Function and Fight
Mar0
These three values can be applied to just about any product whether it is a computer or a car.
Form implies the beauty, elegance and originality of its design.
Do you want to show it off to your friends because it just looks that awesome?
Function is measured as to how well it serves its primary purpose.
Does the car drive like a car? How well does it get you from point a to point b?
Fight looks at how well it competes with similar products.
Does your laptop beat out your friends laptop in performance, did you even pay less than he did?
A perfect day
Mar0
Summers day on top of a hill overlooking a lake sitting on a couch under a big tree with
some good music playing in the background. My friend and me and we would
just sit there enjoying the day, play some games and watch youtube videos. Have a sword
fight or two, a drink or three.
A lack of sleep
Jul0
So what do you call getting less than two hours worth of sleep and then trying to get work done?
…A waste of time
Another late night has come and gone leaving me up to my elbows in sleep debt. Yes debt, it kinda works like that because not getting enough sleep over a period of time catches up with you and will slowly wear at you until you have no choice but to make time to sleep. Your brain starts to micro-sleep where you drift into and out of unconciousness for mere seconds. Quite devestating if your driving down a busy freeway and somehow don’t see that idiot pulling out in front of you. Anyways, long story short I never get enough sleep. (usually around 5 hours per night)
Underdog
Jul0
Is it just me or does the internet crowd always seem to favor the little guy, the so called underdog. You see it a lot in politics with Ron Paul or even Obama. On a side note, recently Obama has seen a lot more online hate than before which I blame largely on his success and the ever closing gap between him and the presidency.
Many groups that have a hard time finding ears to listen to what they have to say and turn to the easily swayed masses on internet to raise their banners and shout their slogans. Social news media really seems tilted towards these groups because it is reliant upon user submitted content. Can’t say I really hate it, when I use it to my advantage to push my opinion down all of your collective throats.