Defeat and Victory

If there is one thing that can be said about high technology is that when it works it is like magic and when it doesn’t it feels like a curse – or cursing. So I’ve been dealing with an ugly side effect of upgrading to the GeForce 650 TI this week. Every game I’ve thrown at it has run faster and looked prettier with two exceptions. They would be Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.

Neither will run. The best I can get out of them is a slideshow after the intro movies. Neither can connect with EA’s servers and the moment 3D graphics are used they run about 1 frame every 2-5 seconds.

Normally I can solve such a problem on my own or by browsing gaming forums. Not this time. Every trick and tweak known has been tried including:

• Reinstalling the games.
• Installing Nvidia’s latest beta driver.
• Reinstalling DirectX 9.0c.
• Reinstalling PhysX.
• Setting processor affinity via task manager.
• Setting processor affinity via a utility.
• Running windowed.
• Running with the resolution low and all the pretty settings at lowest.
• Glaring balefully in the direction of the games.
• Deleting save games and imported settings from previous installments.

My suspicions lean toward bad PhysX coding in the game, but from all the complaints online about something having changed for the worst in recent months one has to wonder.

What’s really ironic is the more temperamental first Mass Effect runs beautifully. Of course it is on Steam…

I give up. It is rare to be defeated this way and it is very disappointing. Time to remove the games from my drive and gain a huge amount of space back since I have all the DLCs.

Some of the aggression I felt after that went into tearing my PC apart to install an intake fan Gateway never bothered to. It involved snipping rivets (and using a Dremel on two) to remove rails for hard drives plus unplugging just about everything that could be unplugged. Nearly three hours of fighting and fuming later the new fan is working nicely.

The air flow has always been suspect in the case and now it should be just dandy. Now to test how gaming temps go, though the cold front threatening snow make it a little harder to verify.

Nearly 2000 Movies Taken Off Netflix

Checking the news this morning revealed that Warner is removing 1794 movies from Netflix’s streaming service. It reminded me of an argument I had a few years ago with my brother-in-law about Netflix having a future via streaming. My position was that the studios would eventually shut them down by starting their own pay services.

Sure enough it has begun despite Disney’s earlier exclusive deal with Netflix. A month ago (or was it two) I was notified that Warner had started a streaming service of its own, Warner Instant Archive for $9.99 a month. I occasionally purchase made to order DVDs from them so it was not a surprise to get an email from them. The collection is all older movies – for the moment. I expect that to change over time.

BTW, a lot of content is shown as available in 1080p HD. I can’t say it is tempting enough to merit $10 a month, which works out to $120 a year. Other services such as Hulu Plus and Crunchyroll are available at cheaper rates while Sony has a free service, Crackle. Maybe the service will fall in line with them eventually, but it is hard to tell.

Roku and PC are what’s supported at the moment via Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which was a surprise since Flash dominates the streaming industry. This is another nail in the coffin for Adobe’s fading standard as the Web transitions slowly due to Apple’s refusal to support Flash in iPads and iPhones.

Rumors have been floated that HBO might start an online only subscription service for their shows, so this is not an isolated incident. We’ll be seeing more fragmentation in services as time goes by since studio executives blame streaming for loss of revenues from DVD and Blu-rays. They want profits to go back up or go entirely to them. Hulu may not survive if it is finally sold off since the content won’t be included thanks to this kind of reasoning.

I wonder which studio will be next to launch their own service?

A Thank You Speech to Remember

Actually there are three, but the last is the most eloquent and appropriate acceptance speeches ever given. This is from Rush being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an ever controversial institution. I know I'll never forget Alex's passionate speech.

Area 88 Ep. 4: The Treacherous Sky

It may start with a bang, but this episode is more about revealing Shin’s mysterious past than aerial combat. When a mission goes wrong, the Japanese mercenary pilot finds himself alone in the desert. As he struggles to survive he is forced to remember how he ended up in a civil war far from his home.

Area 88 is at its best during slower moving episodes rather than the flashy dogfights. That’s rather ironic since I suspect most people who watched the series were attracted by the action. With the fourth episode, the main story begins in earnest. The questions of who is Shin and why is he here are finally answered.

An ominous tone is set early on when Shin Kazama lands his aging F-8E Crusader to refuel. Pickings have been slim in the skies lately and this causes the resident ace to press his luck. His mechanic Gustav warns him he’s being reckless, but the dollars associated with each kill matter more.

Makoto photographs all this as usual despite feeling something is wrong. Gustav, on the other hand, actually knows something is wrong. He can hear a malfunction within the Crusader’s turbojet engine.

Ah, There You Are Spring!

At long last we broke the 60 F mark today. This tied a record for the region set in 1951 according to the National Weather Service. I’m feeling slightly better so I’ll venture out to hike the driveway to the mailbox in a bit. Oh and there is sunlight coming out of a blue sky too. My thimble runneth over!

It has been a long, hard winter and I’m glad to see it finally end. Maybe people around the area will start cheering up. For awhile now it has seemed if everyone was either on edge or gloomy. Yesterday at the clinic there were a lot of comments about doubting spring would ever come only partially tongue in cheek.

Oh and the  right front brake has been fixed on the car, though it will be necessary to replace the other side soon. At least we don’t have to worry about braking anymore. Trying to down shift and not stop doesn’t work so well once you are in the city.

The world might end tomorrow (doubtful), but at least there is sun today.

Health 4-24-2013

Oy vey is the phrase that fits right now. I’d been feeling dizzy the last week or so and also noticed a little pain where the infection from February was but saw no swelling. That changed today.
The pain escalated until it was impossible to ignore this afternoon and so I checked again. It looks like the infection has returned. My suspicion is that it never fully went away because there has been no cat clawing me incident lately.

So it is off to the clinic tomorrow.

All of this is adding injury to insult thanks to one of the car’s rotors being shot. So no safe long distance travel and now this again. I’m going to have to get a ride from a neighbor at this rate.

What an exceedingly bad year this has been so far.

UPDATED 24 Apr: Back on antibiotics and the abscess is draining again. That's almost as nasty to type as witness happening. Thanks to what I learned last time, I got in early enough this time around. At least I now know why I've been out of it since Sunday!

A Very Strange Blogger Referral

I checked my stats today and found a referral that looked extremely suspicious:

mysql . removeyourcontent . com / russ_pornbb_spider / admin / hentai_check . php

An attempt to access this through a virtual machine asked for an admin login plus password and when I limited it to the domain I got an Apache 2 test page. Apache is one of the most common software packages that runs servers.

To my eyes, it appears to be a misconfigured spider checking web sites to see if it can drop porn spam. Either that or it is looking for porn. The hentai part of it relates to anime and the referral showed up on one of my anime reviews. Since I don’t have any hentai this is a dead end if it is a search.

Could it also be a way to get into an Apache server? I wish I knew more about the software to say.