Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Y'know, it's absolutely shocking how little you can do when your abdominal muscles are being held together by what's basically a glorified elastoplast.Can't walk more than 30 yards. Can't lift even so much as a cat. Can't sweep the kitchen floor without collapsing in exhaustion, never mind even thinking about hoovering.
Wanna know the worst thing though? Have it done yourself and then try taking a dump!
Yeash!
A special mention for Andrea is required at this point.
Not only has she had to put up with me stressing for weeks before my op, then sat around all day at the surgical clinic while I was being operated on and in recovery... and then been there for me as I whine and wince like a wuss through my recovery... all of which must be extremely annoying things to put up with... she's done it with such good grace, and more than this, she's done much of it while injured herself. Somehow she managed to do something nasty to her knee/leg while sitting in the hospital waiting room, and is now largely incapacitated herself.
What a wonderful woman. I could almost believe she injured herself so I wouldnt feel like the only cripple in the house, but... she's not stupid like me, and deserves much sympathy.
In other, non-medical related news, I got myself a new graphics card recently, coz my old one was getting a bit creaky. The new one's pretty much as powerful a card as it's possible to get on an agp based motherboard. It's a Gainward 7800GS+ 512Meg, which surprisingly doesn't use the nVidia 7800 chip at all, but the 7900 one.
This little monster of a card was purchased solely to play one game... Battlefield 2.
Hooked? You bet!
The funny thing is, the way I came to get into the game in the first place. It was THIS spoof video.
I saw it, recognised similar behaviour from playing SOCOM, laughed my head off all night (no doubt annoying Andrea), and promptly went out to buy it at the soonest oportunity.
Anyways... it's very very addictive.
Labels: games, graphics cards, hernia, medical
Steve 4:38 PM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, September 26, 2004
So yesterday I went shopping for another graphics card.The more I read about the one I'd recently bought, the less impressed I was. It seems my old (new) card is sold so cheap coz it'd crippleware. When making the 9600 chipset, they had a bad batch where only 4 of the 8 pipelines worked, so the manufacurers take their 128 bit chip, stick it on a 64 bit bus, and use a software patch to make it work, albeit at half capacity. Thing is, they dont bother to tell anyone about that.... or at least, the shops dont.
Annoyingly, most of the shops I tried have that card and sell it like its the dogs bollocks... which it most certainly isnt. Worse, PC World looked at me like I was nuts when I told them I was looking for something more powerful. They had a range of decent Nvidia cards 'on display', but did they have them in stock? Hell no!
So finally, the last place I looked, a crappy little shop in town that I swore I'd never go to finally turns out to be useful.
They had the same card I already had, but pleasingly, also had the next card up in the range. More than that, the sales assistant actually knew what I was talking about and understood why I didnt rate the 9600SE.
So anyway, I now have a funky new ATI Radeon 9800 in my machine, and everything runs not just well, but brilliantly. All my emulated games (even the Sega System 2 games) run super smooth, and Farcry is running with maximum settings on all the graphics options with not a flicker of slowdown.
I'm a happy chappy :-)
Labels: annoyed, graphics cards
Steve 5:42 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
I installed a new graphics card in my pc yesterday, since on board graphics are always a bit pants.The Sapphire Radeon 9600SE is dead easy to install and deffinitely faster than the on board chipset, but having read a few reviews since fitting it, I wish I'd read them before buying it. Obviously I've had nothing in the same price range to compare it with, but it would seem that it's actually something of a lame duck in terms of outright 3D performance.
I guess thats what happens when you just wander into PC World with the intent of buying a card without doing your reseacrh first
Still... no big deal really, since I'm not a hardcore gamer by any means. Most of the games I play are on emulators and the Namco System 22 and Sega Model 2 emulators I'm messing around with like it just fine.
Update:
Ok, sod all that. I don't care what the reviewers say about this card.... I just installed Farcry on my pc to give the card a good workout and it's absolutely breathtaking. So the graphics settings may all be on medium to get a fluid framerate, but when it looks this good, who cares? It does make me wonder just how good it'd look with everything on 'Very High' settings, but even so... I'm gobsmacked.
Labels: games, graphics cards
Steve 1:13 PM [+] (0) comments
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