Hello, darkness, my old friend

The lack of updates lately is mainly because life has been a bit crazy. Work has been horrible, with a day today so stressful I wanted to pull what remains of my hair out. We lost power across my section of the base this morning and naturally the wonderful UPSes that are years old saw servers rebooting; one in particular then gave us an hour's worth of issues restoring the drive array, not to mention all the customers calling clamoring for access to their folders and files. Also I'd previously mentioned winning a battle over default roaming profiles and that's actually turned itself into a political circus so enervating I don't even want to discuss it in any real detail. I'm pretty much to the point with my job that I think I would've walked out in the last few weeks if I were single, and since that option is not available and thanks to the Dayton IT market being utter shit these days I'm left feeling somewhat trapped, frustrated, and angry. I try to remain positive and think that it could always be worse, I could be unemployed, so regardless of my feelings toward the current situation I should at some level at least be thankful for having a job, but that's often easier said than done.

My mother's 70th birthday bash is approaching this Sunday. My brother is flying in Friday night at 10:30 and staying with Melissa and I until Sunday, going back with our sister after the party to spend Monday with their father. There's been more drama with planning this birthday event, some of which I don't want to discuss publicly. This blog has proven more popular than I'd anticipated, though that's probably more my own naivity on how fast 'word' travles online than sheer traffic. If that makes sense. But I'm now at the point because of all the crap surrounding the party that I don't even want to attend, and feel like I of course have to go to avoid upsetting my mother, so I'm stuck having to put up a front and pretend to enjoy myself while I'm there. I never imagined that organizing a birthday celebration could become such a fiasco.

On the geek-front, I got word that the graphics division formerly known as ATI has shipped a Radeon HD 2900 XT review sample that should arrive either tomorrow or Friday. The NDA lift for this new part was Monday and while it didn't take the performance crown, something a lot of people were apparently expecting and are thus disappointed over, it's still an interesting part and I'm really looking forward to testing it, especially the new anti-aliasing custom filters. I just hope it's not a screaming banshee like the Radeon 1950 XTX I've been using can be, but with a power draw that peaks at over 200w that's a lot of heat to dissipate so I wouldn't be the least surprised if the reference cooler isn't a miniature blow dryer once the chip gets hot. With newer simulations like LOMAC and FSX both being so CPU-bound, I'll have to come up with a benchmark suite that stresses graphics performance without alienating the site's readers, something I think I've skated along the edge of at times in past articles.

My LOTRO passion rages on, which my fearless Worm-slayer build reaching 33rd level earlier tonight. I've now got four current co-workers, one friend, and one former co-worker playing the game, most of whom are in the same guild (or kinship as it's known in this particular MMO) with me. I'm hoping the 2900 XT evens out the client's performance a bit since I'm still running the game with its highest texture detail enabled and there appears to be quite a bit of post-processing effects common throughout its visuals.