Bullocks. Really… there is hardly any other way to describe it. I mean… I could go into detail with my thoughts on the matter… but what’s the point? Sony has shown that it is willing to play Judas with its customers, and that there really isn’t much to be done about it. You may be familiar with my reliance on Linux on my PS3. This has not changed. If Sony has decided that it isn’t worth it to have me as a customer, who am I to argue? No more Playstation Network for me… and what with developers shipping buggy games that require downloadable patches… it looks like that means I won’t be buying any more PS3 games. I have to say, I shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, the company that installed a virus on customer’s computers. Knowing that Sony has the audacity to both remove advertised features from paying customers and infect their computers with malware makes it an easy decision for me to stop supporting them. My new PSP breaking within three months of buying it due to, what appears to be shoddy laser construction, makes it an even easier decision. Are you willing to support this company?

On a more positive note, I was at a club on Friday night to help support my brother in law by taking photos while he DJ’ed. The manager of the club spotted me and had me take photos for her as well. You can see some of those in the selection of images below in addition to a few others that I have taken since the last blog post.

I like to sing. I may suck at singing… but I like doing it. I’ve posted videos on Youtube. They’re met with mixed response, however generally the feedback has been positive… which leads me to believe that I’m not that bad since Youtube comments are generally trash. Megadeth and Dream Theater both favorited videos that I’ve put up there. And the videos were later removed by Warner Music Group. Sure… I get copyright. But seriously guys… when fans are trying to promote your stuff… it’s not cool to get in their faces and show them that you’re just out to earn money.   I buy all my music, and I fully encourage others to. However, it’s hard to *want* to continue supporting the people you represent when you go out of your way to make things difficult for fans.  Reconsider?

I hate Vista, and I hate Adobe, and I hate Dell, and I hate NVidia.  Note I may not actually *hate* any of these things.  But they thoroughly frustrate me.

So the Antec power supply that I had bought to fix my Video card problems did not help me because the motherboard that came with my Dell Precision 490 requires both a 20 and a 24pin power connector. Lame as crap. So I returned the Antec power supply (still waiting for the moolah to come back my way even after all this time) and ended up buying myself a Thermaltake Power Express which is a PSU specifically for video cards which sits in an empty DVD drive slot. This is a product that I had no idea existed, but actually did the trick quite nicely. It says that it’s supposed to take the 24 pin.. but for some reason my computer wouldn’t work when I tried that… I tried the 20 pin however and it works like a charm.

So the video card now works, however, the Nvidia Geforce GTX 280’s heat up rather harshly. For some reason the Dell Precision 490 is set to have the fans really low, and thus when I start running Folding @ Home, the hard drives start heating up to 50C in no time at all. To get around this, I’ve had to remove the side of my computer case. Dell relinquishes control of the fans and lets me set them as fast as I want with the side removed and so I am able to keep everything at a reasonable temperature, but it now sounds like I have a freight train under my desk. I’m glad I have headphones.

Or do I?

For some reason I turned on my computer this morning only to discover that there was no sound. No windows start-up sound, no YouTube, no iTunes, no Windows Media Player, no Guild Wars, no test sounds for my sound card. Everything appeared to look fine… I could hear myself through my microphone, and the drivers all appeared to be functioning and up-to-date. But no sound. Five hours later, after uninstalling and installing and rebooting and wanting to stab myself in the eyes, I came across a forum with the tip that solved the problem. Simply go to control panel, Double-Click on the Sound Icon, single-click the sound card to highlight them, Click on Properties (bottom right corner). Magically after opening this menu, everything worked! Not impressed.

Speaking of not impressed, Photoshop CS4 sucks. Like really really bad. Seriously. If you consider switching to it… reconsider. It will kill every dream you ever had. The brushes lag, the zooming animation is horrible, the ipodesque panning is horrible, you can’t resize your various tool shelves, the 64bit version is crippled and will crash when you try to use text, gpu accelleartion is gimped in XPx64 and on Macs, and the 32 bit version doesn’t appear to allow you to use more than 3 gb of ram.

Stick with CS3.

Sorry I don’t know your language, but I see you visiting! I always find it interesting when I see a spike in my traffic from a particular site, and it seems like cafe.naver.com has a link to my site in regards to the Renderman article I linked to last time. I’m not 100% sure about the google translation of this site, so I just want to clarify that it was someone else who wrote the article, but I’m glad that I was able to help other people find out about it! In other Houdini related news, you may be interested to know that your time to win a copy of Houdini Master is NOW! I’m currently working on making another tutorial series for Houdini, however there is no E.T.A. on when that shall arrive. I just had a chance to check out the new Digital Tutors training on Mantra however, and can safely say that it’s worth checking out if you’re interested in getting into rendering.

It’s been a while since my last post… my evenings have been eaten up quite heavily due to my decision to switch to Vista.

It all started when I decided that I should check out Adobe CS4. I was pretty excited actually, because when I bought my machine a couple of years ago, I got a 64bit quad core machine with a Quadro FX video card, and 6 gb of ram. When I found out that CS4 seemed to be designed for a 64bit environment with highend video cards in mind I wet my pants. Mentally. Anywhoo, I tried the trial of CS4, only to discover that the new GPU features weren’t designed with Windows x64 in mind. For shame, Adobe. So I took a chance and upgraded to Vista. I’ll spare you the spiel about how many fucking versions of this OS there are. I feel almost as confused as when I think about which Linux distribution I should consider.

So after spending some cash on Microsoft, I discovered that the Bios on my computer was a couple of years old, and disagreed with having Vista on it… it took me a couple of days to figure this out, but when I upgraded from version 2 to version 8, suddenly Vista seemed to be much more co-operative except for the fact that my expensive Quadro video card was not working properly. I discovered that while NVidia has drivers for the Quadro FX 4400 (my card), it actually isn’t on their Vista compatibility list and so doesn’t actually work. There appear to be a number of people on the net complaining that their Quadro 4400’s aren’t working in Vista… no response from NVidia on the matter. Though to be fair, there also appear to be reports of some people running 2 of them at the same time… Fun. So I decided “what the heck… printer manufacturers, scanner manufactureres, Adobe, Macintosh… they all have their hate on for XP… let’s just stick with Vista and try to move forward”.

So I bought a new video card, the NVidia Geforce GTX 280 that comes overclocked by BFG. For those considering the GTX280, keep in mind that this thing is the size of a short bus. I had to remove the blue safety clips from my Dell case so that I could close everything back up after installing this puppy. Though technically it’s not installed at the moment. I’m still using my original Quadro NVS 285 that came with the computer since I discovered that the GeForce card requires more power cables than what came with the Power Supply Unit in my Dell Precision 490. So now I’m awaiting my new Antec power supply which I’m hoping will solve all my problems.

I also had like a gallon of blood taken the other day when I went in for a physical. Afterward I went over to EBGames and picked up Guild Wars. I guess I do silly things when I have computers that barely work and am barely able to stay conscious. Keep in mind when looking at the screengrab to your left, that I’m using one of the weakest video cards available on the market and so must turn the graphics quality down while playing at the moment. That said, I’m sure the graphics won’t blow me away when I do have my good card working. I’ve been playing it a little though, and it’s fun so far. I’ve never gotten into MMORPG’s because I don’t believe in being taxed each month to be allowed to play the game that you purchased. Guild Wars doesn’t suffer from this problem. I say kudos to that. On a side note, EBGames is no more.