Thursday, June 28, 2007

Coming Soon...

... the return of Critically Correct.

I will be updating on July 1st with a full-fledged update and several weekly posts. Thanks for your patience during my break.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

The Future of Critically Correct

It is a bit sad, yet a bit relieving, for me to say that I will be putting my blog, Critically Correct, on hold for an undetermined number of weeks going through the summer.

I do have plenty to write about and to share. I have been unable to post due to other (rather) time consuming activities in my life (including me trying to reboot my writing).

I will post occasionally if something major comes up, but otherwise, expect to hear from me in July at the latest.

- Brandon

Saturday, June 02, 2007

All Kinds of Stuff

The Dragonfly

Late last week I came home from work wanting nothing more than to play World of Warcraft (it was a short, shitty day at Meijer). After about fifteen minutes in Azeroth, my screen blanked and my tower powered off. No biggie, right? Just a crash, it happens. Short version: the fan on the heatsink of my Radeon x700 PCI-E graphics card failed to start on several occasions, and the card overheated on multiple occasions before I disocvered the problem.

Enter a new GPU. I ordered, recieved, and installed a Sapphire AMD Radeon x1950 Pro graphics card (spec'd: 512 MB GDDR3 on-board memory, 16 pixel shader pipelines, 525 MHz clock, 1300 MHz effective memory clock). Even with my pokey Athlon 64 processor bottlenecking the system (at 1.8 GHz), I'm still able to chew through any and every game I throw at it. Examples below:

Oblivion
x700: 1024 x 768 / Small Textures / No Grass / No AA / avgerage 20 - 25 fps
x1950: 1280 x 1024 / Large Textures / Full Grass / No AA / average 35 - 45 fps

Half-Life 2: Episode One
x700: 1280 x 1024 / Max Detail Settings / Full HDR / No AA / average 40 - 60 fps
x1950: 1600 x 1200 / Max Detail Settings / Full HDR / 4xFSAA / average 55 - 95 fps

All in all, I likey!

World of Warcraft

I haven't been able to get much WoW playtime in during the past week (see above). My laptop, which can BARELY chug WoW along, has been my only entry point into Azeroth, and I haven't put any time in my warrior, Symba, until yesterday. I've begun to explore the Horde continent of Kalimdor, which has opened up quite a bit of possibilities. Catch me on Bladefist.

Minor Personal Issues

It's been pointed out to me lately that I've been “different,” in comparison to several months go. Umm... duh.

Yes, I have been a bit self-centered, mainly because of WoW.
Yes, I have been a bit greedy lately, mainly because of WoW.
Yes, I have been... playing a lot of WoW.

I'm more than aware of my selfish nature as of late, although I'll admit that I have not yet encountered a strong enough catalyst to kick me out of the rut. More than anyone could imagine, I'm perfectly content going to work, writing, biking, and filling in every other free minute with WoW. I generally consider myself an amicable person, but more than anything I've been craving selfishness with apathy. It's been a solid month now that I've been like this, but I'm planning on some big changes later in June. Which brings me to...

B3.0 Initiative Update

The B3.0 Initiative has been clipping along as a rather... shitty pace (see above).

Visit this post to review the B3.0 Initiative.

Where I stand on each goal:

Personal Emotional Neutrality: I've pretty much achieved this goal without trying. More than any other part of me, I've become almost oblivious to former emotions, current emotions, and most expected emotions (that is, I simply don't react to anger, joy, etc.).

Physical: Unfortunately this is a goal that is suffering dramatically because of all the WoW time I put in, but I'm implementing a new plan for working out. My calendar is pretty reflexive of this.

Networking: Of course, I've utterly failed at this goal. Perhaps as a side effect to my lack of emotions, I've been unable to really desire the company of many current friends, let alone former friends. Time for a reboot?

Professional: I can't speak much for my progress at BGSU, since it is summer, obviously. However, I am making decent progress on Event Horizon, and I'm wrapping up the last two chapters. I should begin revisions around the end of June.

And with that, I am most certainly, positively, out.