On re-reading The Lord of the Rings after alternative immersive experiences

This past week I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who knows me knows I am a fanatic about Tolkien's creation, Middle-earth. Shamefully (to me) this is the first time I've read the story since even the Peter Jackson movies came out. My issue has always been, I love The Lord of the Rings, but I'm historically a pretty slow reader and do actually like to read other stuff as well. In any event, I've also always been a fan of including immersive options in my enjoyment of Middle-earth.

In the 80's, Iron Crown Enterprises created Middle-Earth Role Playing. I was (am still) a Dungeons & Dragons player, so didn't really have the time (nor money) to play the game, but seeing the books in the comic book store always grabbed my attention. In hind-sight, many years later, I realize that I likely didn't have the time nor friends for it either, as the rules are pretty rugged and lofty and the few friends I had at the time for D&D don't strike me as having been interested. Anyway, this was around the time of my actually working on my initial read. I'd read The Hobbit in middle school, likely taking my time for about a year, and completed The Lord of the Rings by my sophomore or junior year. I had not seen the Rankin-Bass nor Bakshi animated versions of the source material, though my parents had bought the (very) abridged illustrated book with audio tape that went along with the animated The Hobbit.

In the mid 90's, Iron Crown came out with Middle-earth: The Wizards, a collectable card game. This was a few years after Magic the Gathering had been out, so was trying to capitalize on the craze. I did play this. With a few friends we bought a box of starter decks and a box of booster cards. One of them liked the game and played a few times with me over the course of a couple years, the others either didn't end up liking it, or who knows what, I don't even remember their names really; Trevor and Chuck I think. Over the course of the game's existence, I did end up buying a bunch of cards. I have a nice binder full and a few boxes full. I played in a tournament in Montreal even - got my butt whooped, but it was still worth the 2 hour drive - and was a member of a decent listserv for the game. Did some trading. WANTED to play more, but as with most hobbies I have ever had, most of the friends I tend to make that are close by, have no interest what-so-ever, so I still have that collection and some day perhaps I'll relearn the rules (there were lots, as there were 2 major series and 3 minor (but not small) expansions) and find someone to play. I know there is still an online community that plays via internet methods. I'm not organized enough to be able to create a playable deck without spending hours upon hours of pouring over and admiring each and every card. OC does not mean organized in my case. :(

You want immersive? The second rave I threw was called Middle-Earth: The Rave (1996)! OK, it was just a small rave, but the theme was Middle-earth. The fliers (I'll have to scour for a copy to scan or the original artwork to show) had the DJ names with (my) chosen Wizard/Character names. In one room I had the aforementioned animated features playing on a wall via projection. It was neat. Look here for T-Snake and you'll see a write up about it... I think partly from me and partly someone else???)

By this time, I'm pretty sure I'd completed another read of The Lord of the Rings. It's hard to say. I know I read Fellowship at least once more and at least Two Towers once again. Being a slow reader who loves to read is a torturous thing.

Starting around 1994 or 1995, while I was still a DJ at WRUV-FM, I did an annual broadcast of the BBC radio production of The Lord of the Rings. It is a 13 tape, approximately 12.5 hr edited version of a 26 episode version previously made. My broadcast was pretty popular, covering two days of 7 hour time blocks over a weekend, and for the 2 broadcasts preceding Peter Jackson's Fellowship movie release, it was even more so, because I was participating in a good deal of chatter on Usenet and other locations about speculation over the movies and I was giving updates over the air during the short (~3 minute) breaks between tapes. It was a fun production. Iam Holm was Frodo - in Jackson's movies, Sir. Holm played the role of Bilbo. Nice. One year I had sewn my own beanbag chair together while doing the broadcast. Oh how I miss the days of being allowed to be lazy for that much time.

So comes 2001 and the release of Peter Jackson's version of Fellowship of the Ring, followed by the next two volumes over the next two years. These represent the first of two immersion options that I write this entry for. Jackson and his wife (Fran Walsh)  (and others) did a great job turning what should have been a 24 hour movie into about 12 hours (the extended versions). Obviously there had to be a lot of things cut out and because it was a mass market movie they had to add some stuff that didn't belong, but compared to previous attempts, it was gold. If I had a blue-ray player, I'd possibly buy the BD edition for home viewing of the extended version, but for now I'll settle on the extended DVD set. That reminds me, it's time to plan another marathon event for it. For years, Howard Shore defined the soundtrack in my mind for Middle-earth.

Flash to around January 2007, Lord of the Rings Online goes into some beta form that I managed to get into. I think it was closed beta, I could check my account but it's not important. By April, it was released for real. . Without hesitation I plunked down the dough for the box game and the $199 for a lifetime subscription. I'm a gamer, but I couldn't swallow paying $14 or $9 a month for eternity... and I knew I'd play the game til it got shut down. Good call Chris... still going strong, though with some business model changes. In any event, the point is that I'm not almost weekly (I'm a casual player) almost literally in Middle-earth! I have multiple characters that travel, explore, fight in, quest within, and talk to important people from the world hosting one of the greatest stories ever told. Setting aside some less than happy feelings about Warner Brothers and the way sometimes us founder customers feel treated, I can't recommend this game more for a Tolkien fan.

If you've followed my blog at all, you also know that my son is named in part after "The King"... as Aragorn took on the name Elessar, which is also my son's middle name.

I have made it a goal to learn Sindarin or Quenya and for a while recently actually had a good deal of the Tengwar glyphs learned. Use it or loose it really.

And to top it all off, I discovered a few years ago the band Summoning, a Black/Fantasy Metal band that uses a lot of Tolkien for inspiration, lyrics and themes. If you know ME, METAL??? Well, that's a different story. This isn't your craptastic hairband junk metal.

OK, all of that to point out, I care. And now I'm re-reading the story. This time I have a very different eye. I have experienced the story from many different directions and intentions. Obviously, the most recent incarnations are what stand strongest in my mind, the live action movies and the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG if you will - LotRO). I'm only about 2/3 through Fellowship, but it's enough so far to see, or more like be reminded of, so many things that have been left out, misrepresented or changed. It's also given me renewed insight into how our memories are so easily altered by new things we see. Reading the chapter at the council of Elrond, the book takes its time to develop the fellowship itself. Most everyone is relatively calm and reasoned. Heck, even Boromir isn't "super angry man". While I'm reading it, I have the movie version pictured in my head. I started to think to myself "huh? Why isn't Gimli attempting to chop the One Ring with his battle axe??" Then, "wait, huh? Merry and Pippin weren't hidding in the shrubs too and Elrond isn't declaring the entire fellowship right away?" Oh how embarrassing. Well, not really, no one will know I forgot the REAL sequence. Oh snap, I just wrote that here... so yeah, um, never mind.. :)
Reading the forums over at lotro.com there was a thread (or more likely) that talked about leveling their characters taking too long. That annoys me since I take my time and try to enjoy everything... 4+ years with my main character and he's still not maxed out, I'm fine with that. Another commenter pointed out that's just stupid and that the game moves too fast. He rightly pointed out that travel is far too easy and far too fast. My memory failed me for travel time in book, but picturing in mind how I would travel from the Shire to Bree to Weathertop to the Bruinen Gap to Rivendell, I could indeed picture how long it would take my character running or on horse (ahem, pony - he's a hobbit) back. After reading the chapters involved in describing the trek, he was so right! Getting from Bree to Weathertop is a 10 minute pony ride or so, unhindered. I imagine if the characters walked, it could take 30 minutes. That's real time. Game time, I'm sure that's a good deal more - I just never did a translation of game time to real world time.
This comment made me wonder, imagine actually having to trek that same distance and covering that same amount of time. Most would up and quit before starting. I doubt many would play it out without a serious amount of action along the way, but still, having major neighboring game hubs be that far away would be a serious game ender. But imagine if it was REAL! Yeah, it lead me to thinking, imgine a theme park where locations were compressed, but "actors" re-enacted each scene and getting through the whole thing would/could take weeks of coming back for multi-day adventuring (time compressed), some scenes being interactive, others being a fly on the wall. (Maybe we get Bono to produce it? hehe)
I'm certain that as I continue my re-read I'll run into more things that baffle me or anger me, but I have said all along, I've only seen one movie that outdid the book (Hellraiser vs. Hellbound Heart), the rest are the best approximations given funding and people's willingness to sit for as long as it takes to tell every part of the story in the same detail. To make a game interesting, you have to do more than wander, unfortunately for lore-geeks, this means inventing creatures to fight, or embellishing existing ones (or past ones, since by the 3rd age, Smaug was the last great dragon yet the game has more drakes and dragons, and with names). No matter the quirks of the alternate versions, they all provide mental floss for re-reads of the original material, which in turn makes the experience a hell of a lot more interesting for a re-read.

Oh, and I'm of the camp that Tom Bombadil was NOT missed in the theatrical releases. He is in Lord of the Rings Online, as a quest giver, as is Goldberry in limited NPC status.

Now, when is someone going to do appropriate movies for more stories from the Silmarillian. Children of Hurin would be an awesome movie... and if done right wouldn't have kiddies in the theater. Had I the time and perseverance, I'd be more than happy to try to screenplay some of this stuff and put together a crew to produce a fan film. The Hunt for Gollum and Born of Hope are inspiring fan films.

In the end, I actually, truly hope that my son will grow to love these as well and allow me to read them to him before he can read them himself. That Rankin-Bass illustrated booklet version, I've gotten in it twice for bed time stories... that's a start. Now go read a book. But if you've already just re-read The Lord of the Rings, and feel like you need more depth but don't have time to read all the histories, Silmarillion, et al, then I'm certain you can blow plenty of time at the Encyclopedia of Arda or Tolkien Gateway or many a number of places to get your Tolkien or Middle-earth fill.

Firefox Lightweights

Yeah, been a while since last post. That'll be fixed soon.
Anyway, Firefox 3 officially came out as the final stable release a couple weeks ago. I had been waiting MADLY for it for a long time. Seriously! My Firefox 2 would consistently, after being open for a couple days use up approaching 850 MB of memory. Almost a gig. That was a year ago or so. I got fed up and instead of reinstalling my system (come on, next to moving, I rate reinstalling my systems up there as the worst activities) I bought more ram. I jumped the lappy from 1GB to 2GB. I figured that would help. It sorta did, but frankly, it just gave the old FF2 extra headroom to pillage. Eventually, by late may, it would be eating up 1.2GB or memory.

In all this time, if I wanted to play a game (mainly Lord of the Rings Online - I'm usually Torband [Hobbit Burlgar] on the Elendilmir server, I have great screenshots to post) I'd shut down Firefox altogether to free up resources.

Blah blah blah. So FF3 came out and I was excited. I had already downlaoded beta 5 or so, but installed it seperately so I could maintain FF2 and just test. First, FF3 didn't seem to have a working version of the Session Manager etxtension. Errp. Game over. I live by that extension. You'll understand when I get to my point. The truth is that I believe it did at the time work, but I didn't dig deep enough or look properly. So I waited. I practically live in my web browser, so putting a beta in place is not my way any longer. I did back in the days. I would happily install the latest Netscape and Mozilla versions and jumped on Firefox as soon as it was publicly available. Anything to not us Internet Exploder.

Now I've had Firefox 3 installed for a couple weeks and have to say I like it and I'm happy. My system does run better now and my memory use is back down to something I'd consider acceptible. I just read a review on FF3 that isn't a bad one, but doesn't glow. I don't care about that. To each his/her own, really. What cought my eyes for real though was that he was commenting on running 4 tabs. Um... what's that? 4 Tabs???? What kind of web user is that? Am I really just way the hell out there? Let me explain. I currently have 37 Firefox windows open and a total count of 144 tabs. Yes, you read that right. 144 tabs. I believe the most I've had Firefox 3 take up memory-wise has been in the 550MB range. That's still a lot, but I'm also not a moron. I expect it will take a lot, but that's less than half of previous, and frankly, previously, I'd try to stay under 34 windows and about 130 tabs. I have noticed that CPU use is a bigger bottleneck, but my system still runs better with Firefox 3 than previously.

What's the real problem? All the jackasses who design web sites with unimportant java and flash content. All the tools who have to embed multiple youtube videos into the pages. I have some of those things on sites I make, but frankly, I'm just not like all the idiots on MySpace who actually think that using every tool at your disposal on your page makes you look cooler or like you know what the hell you're doing - because ... wait for it, you don't have a friggin clue. Just because there is more bandwidth doesn't mean every visitor wants your lame-ass example of design or layout. Ahem - I'm getting off topic.

I suppose the point of this was to point out that in my opinion, if your idea of surfing the web is having a couple windows open and a few tabs, you are in no position to really talk about the efficiency of th software. The original overhead of the software is always getting higher and higher. My first PC - an IBM PS/2 Model 55 - has (I still have it) a 40 megabyte drive. That's one long mp3 song and certainly couldn't fit most operating systems - barely even any modern linux distros. The fact that his 4 tab Firefox 3 experience chokes up 150MB of ram or so when my 37 window/144 tab instance is currently using **485,292KB (485MB) shows that is scales up well and has certainly solved the memory leak issue, and frankly, that's almost good enough a reason to upgrade.

In case you're still one of those people who are still using Internet Explorer, get over it and just get Firefox 3. I gain nothing from it other than one more person not being lazy and sticking with the default browser or M$ fanboy (only a little better than an Apple fanboy) who always claims "Microsoft just makes software that works" (hahavistahahaha). Of course, I also highly advocate to those Windows (and even OSX posers) out there with an extra machine or older laptop to install linux on it and give it a serious try. Try to not put it on an already broken system, because then you'll just blame linux and that's stupid.

**the memory useage will go up, and possibly down from time to time, but I've fun it for 5 day without a restart and it didn't go above 550MB or so.

Kindlicious

So, yeah, I know, sometimes I could be like an marketing whore. Actually, that's not really the case. If I talk about a product, I must have a strong feeling about it. Usually it's games I think I even wrote some about books (and likely will plenty often later on). This time I'm just writing a little about my Kindle. If you've been under a rock for a while, or for some reason never go to Amazon's web site, you might not know what the Kindle is. The Kindle is an ebook reader. It's a new school one though. It uses e-ink, which is actually microcapsules of black particles that get rearranged to produce a sharp grayscale display. Its extremely low power requirement makes is great for displaying content that you could be staring at for hours on end, like a book.
Meh, you might know about other ebook readers, Cybook and the Sony Reader are other examples. I actually checked out the Sony Reader one night at Borders, which is what set it back into my mind to look into options. My luck usually sucks majorly, but sometimes serendipity just kicks in. The Kindle pretty much hit all the blogs and engadget type places where people drool over new technology and geek toys. I read up on it but wasn't sure. I put it out of my mind. Frankly, these devices are too damned expensive for most people to take seriously.
That said, I somehow, a few weeks ago, decided to do some more research on the Kindle. Reviews were all over the place, but because Amazon sold out pretty quickly from it's first batch in like January or February, very few people had actually touched them. In fact, I read a lot of very scathing reviews from people who never set a finger on one. I could understand the constant dissing of DRM - it makes me sick too - but dissing the usability of the device!?!? Come one people, get some lives. But when I research, I mostly read the 5 star reviews and the 1 star reviews. I like the polar opposites. I found I needed to concentrate on the 4 star reviews because there are some certain flaws with the device that kept a lot of people from giving a full 5 star rating. The 1 star reviews were mostly useful for laughs and cries.
So, the point. Yep, it's for reading books, but it also connects to the Sprint EVDO network (they call it the Whispernet). This allows for purchasing books directly from the unit, but also allows for basic web surfing. I can read my gmail, but some sites don't work right (such as Meebo.com for trying to do IM on it). This feature uses a lot more battery life, but it can be turned off with a hard switch on the back, next to the power switch.
It also play mp3 files. I think it's a cool feature, but I have an mp3 player for that. I used to want mega-multi-use gear, but have some to realize that unless you want to spend a lot of money, you get mediocre versions of each thing compiled into one device when you do that. The web on the Kindle is a little better than mediocre, but it's not the main focus - Whispernet as a content delivery method is though. Anyway, I might throw a long mp3 piece on there for background reading music, but I'm not really worried about it.

The look. It just looks good - reading the screen that is. The white shell is nothing to sing about, but it's plainness is akin to the tragedy that is Mac design. Boring. (Though Mac fanboys always claim it as a pinnacle of design - whatever, white, beige, silver-blue, whoop-de-doo.) Wherever you look for reviews, you'll see the same thing, likely, reading e-ink is easy. Just like a book it can be held at any angle and still be seen (obviously within reason). The text size can also be adjusted. I have perfect vision, so I'll be leaving it at the smallest size most of the time, but the largest size could make for coke bottle bottoms wearing people to read easily.
It remembers where you left off. I have been relatively randomly switching for book to book reading a bit here and there. When I got back to a book, It goes right back to where I left off. That is key for me. You can set up bookmarks as well. I haven't done that. You can annotate too. I haven't done that either, but I'm sue when I used more educationally inclined books, I'll mark it up some.
The device itself is almost exactly the same size as a standard DVD movie case - all dimensions. The reading screen is almost as wide and about 2/3 the height of a typical form factor paperback book. When you change font sizes, it repaginates the document. It sort of makes traditional page numbers useless, but has it's own "locations" system, which I have read is plenty fine for citation use.
If you let it sit, it'll go into a "screensaver" mode, which just shows some grayscale images. No page turnes happening, so battery life stays super low. Supposedly we should able to get a week or more from a single charge, without using Whispernet. I don't know, haven't tried to test the limits. When I take it to the White Mountains this summer, I'm hoping to have my solar USB charger fixed to being along. It will trickle charge from usb, I believe at about 1/4 the speed (says 2 hours to full charge on wall wart). You can turn the "screensaver" on and off at will, which is nice for acting like a lock screen mode so that the cats or someone else poking around doesn't accidentally activate one of the biggest complaints from users: the sensitive location of the page turn buttons. Yep, it IS relatively easy to changes pages forward by accident. Depending on how you hold it, you might need to intentionally adjust how you place your fingers or thumb in order to not hit either of the two next buttons of the single prev button, or the "back" button, which isn't "back a page" but "back a level", like back to the menu or something like that.

So, the price. Yup, $399!!! That's a lot of money. If you're the type who buys a lot of books though, it could pay for itself pretty quickly, as many books can be bought for about $9.99. However, if you like paperback novels, that's likely not much of a deal.
The good news is that you can download and convert books of all types (well... we'll see about that).
If you want to download some ebooks for free, here are some sites I've found:

1. eSnips- Pretty good searching but messy. It appears to link outside for some content, but does also seem to provide content/books that are NOT likely legal - as in, copyright violations. Frankly, I don't care. Paying for a paper book and then having to pay for the electronic version of it again annoys me. And yes, I think I should have access to mp3 versions of all the old hip hop cassettes I have.
2. wowio - I haven't spent much time, but they appear to have a cool collection of all free books and a good philosophy.
3. Manybooks - more free books
4. Project Guttenberg - a project for electronification of old texts and such by a large community of transcribers.
5. Baen Free Library - a for profit publisher that realizes that offering some free and complete content will build faith in, fans of and support for writers and their publishers. Read the introduction on the main library page (the link) - it's a lot like how I feel about the music business, though I feel it should go even farther.
6. ... eh, you can do a search from here on. That list alone will net you serious results. Bit Torrent land has some stuff too, but beware, there's a LOT of PDFs, and converting PDFs to a format the Kindle will read is a craps shoot - the other serious flaw: no native PDF reading ability. They need to add that as a firmware upgrade.

So, you have content or downloaded a book that you want on the Kindle but it's not already in the PRC for AZW ebook format... now what? You can create a compatible file using Mobipocket Creator, which I believe is actually supported or something by Amazon. It's free. It's not the most incredible interface and doesn't allow easy customization (such as a simplified way to make a table of contents). Of course, you could also email your documents to "yourkindlename"@kindle.com and for ten cents per document to be sent right to your Kindle or @free.kindle.com for a free conversion that will be send back to your email address (as registered at Amazon. I tried to convert a document and it came back ok, but the equations and images in it kinda got in the way. Again, they need to work on the "experimental"-ness of that feature.

So, there ya go. A long review of the Amazon Kindle . I tried to say what matters, but I'm sure I left some thoughts out. I'm sure I can only keep your attention for so long anyway. As for the link to buy it above, hey, yeah, I'll make some change on it, but if I helped convince you to buy it, why not? :)

Catching up on random stuff

Transformers - Karen (the wife) and I went to the Monday 8pm showing... a whole day earlier than I originally expected to be able to go. We liked it. I liked it as LOT. Sadly, half of my friends hated it. I'm a music snob, but not really a movie snob. I guess my expectations are more easily met. The trailers made me fear that the Transformers would be too clinical and frankly, robotic. Thankfully after more of them came into play, their personalities came out. Could have been more, but it was there, so I was happy about that. The efx were amazing. The 3d models were insanely good. I wish they gave us a bone with some slower transforming shots. For years I wondered about the literal transformability of them. Probably 5 years ago I started to try to model Astrotrain (my triple changer Decepticon) in Lightwave 3D. I gave up because I struggled with a few details and didn't have a lot of time for side projects that were only for experimentation. Anyway, it would have been a little lame compared to even the Beast Wars or Beast Machines models.Those Canadian [Mainframe] modelers know their shit.

Anyway. The only problems I had with the movie were more about the cinematography - the fast pans and fast action made it nearly impossible to really get to take in the transforming action. Seriously... when we were kids, wasn't that one of the most important points of the cartoons? "How did they do that?" I also detest gun violence... and there was just far too much rat-a-tat-tat machine gun action for me.

The picture above is the costumed I made for the annual Halloween party our friends put on. I spent a solid two days on those costumes after some initial work. They could be better, but I lacked the funding to do a few things I would have done better... not to mention ideas I thought of while making them. The picture also really sucks... I have some that are nicer, but don't show the whole top to bottom of them. Oh well.. perhaps we'll pose some day just for a better picture. :)

There... movie covered. July 4th comes with fireworks, but in Burlington they are on the 3rd. I like that. We go to them every year, and sometimes friends join us. This year, we joined up with Jonathan and his new girlfriend (yeah, I said it) Lauren, and her friend JP. I think we both think that his new girlfriend is a pretty good choice. I like her a lot. She's pretty young, compared to us, arguably a solid two generations behind us, but she's "older" than her age. I like that she speaks her mind, and actually has a mind. Much more so than the typical person of her age I've run into over the last 5-6 years. She also just fits in with the group easily... so I'm happy for him and happy for us. Of course, she goes away for grad school in a month. I guess we'll play it by ear.

I just realized I need to post some more politically oriented stuff. I'm getting soft and I wouldn't want the one or two readers I have to think I've lost my edge. ;)

Worst tech week ever

WTF!?! Last week our new printer came in. We spent months researching what to buy - a color laser that is networkable and does duplex - our ink jet of 8 years was finally just not even trying to work right. Thwe night after I set it up and get it installed on all the machines on the network, I try out printing in duplex... no go. I mean really???

Then out of nowhere, the wireless router dies. Actually, the wireless worked just fine, but the ethernet on it stopped working, so it couldn't connect up to the DSL modem... which makes it relatively useless. I spent about 3 hours fighting the damn thing and eventually had to give up and run out to Best Buy to buy a replacement. I get it home and after spending a while on the phone with Verizon tech support (gee, shock, awe - an Indian who spoke barely understandable English... I didn't expect that from Verizon) until I gave up on her, she wasn't fixing enything. Another hour of trying myself, I got it to work. Unfortunately it's a newer version of the Linksys WRT54G (v8) so the DD-WRT firmware isn't released for it yet... grrr, so for now, bittorrents are touchy since the machines aren't able to be assigned IPs by DHCP using MAC addresses. Grr... yeah, I said that already. I put on some requests in the DD-WRT forum and it looks like it's really new, but I think people are finally working on it.

Thursday afternoon I get home from school ready to do some work on the laptop and then go to violin practice. My screen wouldn't come up. I figured it was just that it was stuck in sleep so I hard booted it - something I really really hate to do. It came up, but then the screen went super dark shortly after. I tried, fruitlessly, a few ideas to get it working, but no go. It stayed on if I started it without the AC adapter attached and the external VGA worked when I plugged into an external monitor. But not good enough... battery life is low and resolution is too high for any of our power hungy CRT monitors.

I break down and call Dell. The machine has Complete Care on it, meaning they are supposed to fix thing and in next day fashion. Well, after 2 and a half hours on the phone with yet another Indian tech support person - who also could barely be understood, causing the call to likely take twice as long, I was told anc convinced that it was a driver issue. I gave him control to install a new driver (which is really the same driver I installed not too long ago anyway) and update the bios for the video adapter. It did work, for about 30 minutes, then the same old thing. I wrote an email about the comeback of the problem. No answer by the next night even. I think I waited even an extra day. Then I remembered my typical standby... boot to a live linux CD. I had the newest Ubuntu CD already downloaded so I burned it and booted to it. I figured, it the machine worked just fine with the other OS, then it's NOT a driver issue. Lo and behold... after plugging the AC adapter in, the LCD went dark after about 10 minutes. Ding ding ding it's a hardware problem. I wrote to Dell again. Still, two more days later, nothing. I'll call them when I have a chance, hopefully tomorrow night. I expect them to send someone here to fix this thing.

Right now I'm working on an older Dell (Latitude C600) that I've had Fedora Core 6 installed on for fun for quite a while. I can't complain, I love it, but the resolution sucks and the machine is slow. I also have web development stuff I needed to do, so my normal way of doing things got torqued. I also had to use the Gimp for some image editing. Don't get me wrong. I love the Gimp, but it does an ass job of creating a nice transparent gif. Photoshop just does it better. Of course, I prefer using png, but since so many fucking dolts still use Internet Explorer (pre version 7), they can't properly see png with alpha channels (that's transparencies), so I still need to do shit like make trans gifs - when I'm doing something for a paying client, unless they are cool with a big F.U. to IE-tards.

Anyway, an install of thunderbird and a few other tools and I'm ok to go, but damnit, I want my main laptop back. I can't even play Lord of the Rings Online, another story altogether. If I'm half lucky, they might have to replace the machine with a new machine that might be better equipped to play LotRO with better video options... hahaha, um, don't count on it.

So, for a guy who lives by technology, this last week was just crappy.

Game of choice

First post and relatively pointless at that... I'm about to get playing Lord of the Rings Online. I was part of one of the stress tests then invited back for the closed beta. I'm new to these types of games, but certainly not new to Tolkien's amazing world... so I really didn't have a choice in the matter, I pre-ordered the game and am now in the open-beta until release and then I'll likely fork over the $200 for the lifetime subscription. Sad huh? Well, I figure that during summer break, I'll get in a LOT of gaming time, so that alone will likely make me feel like I got my money's worth.

So... I'm sure I'll post some pix/screenshots over time and perhaps talk about my experiences there. I'm currently playing a hobbit bandit... had to make a new one for the open beta, but I'm pretty much playing the same character I made for the closed beta. His name WAS "Brand", but amazingly someone took it before I re-created him... damnit!!! I believe I ended up picking Torbrand... good enough. Brand is the name of my halfling monk in one of the D&D campaigns I play in every Wednesday night.

More later.