This past week was insanely busy for me. I’ve been working crazy long hours to get everything done that I had committed to. It was my fault for letting everything pile up for one week, but it’s behind me now, thank God. Now it’s Sunday afternoon, and I don’t plan on doing anything else today but blow stuff up (computer games) and relax before church tonight. I am about to go post something to the BoroLAN Forums. Everyone who has an account there should go read that fairly soon as it’s time sensitive information.

I’m off to relax now. Have a great week, and don’t forget to come to The Judgment. A lot of people, including myself, have put a great deal of time and effort into making it possible. It’s going to be a good show. I hope to see you there.

I installed Half-Life from cd first. It didn’t work. I found out that the unupdated non-steam version of Half-Life does not get along with Windows XP 64. It can’t recognize the way Windows handles the memory. The error I got kept telling me Half-Life requires at least 16MB of ram. Next I installed steam to RAM and ran Half-Life through that. This time the game launched, and I do mean launched. It was up in mere seconds. The load times were amazing. I hit a loading screen while running down a hallway on my way to get the HEV suit. It looked like the game just stuttered for a quarter second. The only other indication was the text “Loading” that was barely there long enough to notice. The first computer I played this game on took roughly a full minute to load a new area.

I wanted to test with Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, or Portal, but they all require much more space than I can provide in RAM. With another 4GB of RAM I could make a 6GB RAM disk and that wouldn’t have been a problem. It turns out that no matter how much computer I have I will always want more.

All my attorney told me today was the appeal was denied and when the court dates are. The rest I put together myself. I know what they have against me. I know my chances to beat it are next to zero. I’m having a bad day.

The discussion on the radio was about how complex our lives have become. There is so little that we truely need. Most everything in our lives here in the United Stated is just a want. For the most part I think I have a fairly simple life. I go to work, come home, go to work, come home. Mix in some church and an occasional activity like paintball and that’s about it.

The list of what I need is very short. I need clothing to wear, a bed to sleep in, and transportation to work and the grocery store. Everything else is extra.

I’m going to spend the next few weeks trimming down on certain areas of my life. I don’t really need all that Dr. Pepper I’ve been drinking. I don’t really need most of the junk I keep stored in my bedroom. I’ve lost track of what is truely important and I need to adjust my priorities.

We had a great paintball event with the church a couple weeks ago. There was a good turn out and everyone had a great time. We have some new players that fell in love with the sport and vowed to come back next time we play. I look forward to shooting them again.

This past weekend the Men’s Ministry from the church had a retreat at Lakeside Resort on the beautiful Center Hill Lake. We had a couple of Jet Ski’s, and pontoon boat, and a lot of guys having a great time. We had a tube to drag behind one of the Jet Ski’s, and a nice little cove with a cliff to jump or dive off of. Some of the men did some repelling. We all had a great time. For some reason I still don’t understand I actually jumped off the cliff. There is some debate over how high it was, but I’m guessing in the fifty to sixty foot range. It didn’t look like much from the boat, but looking down from the top the water was a LONG way down. I had a long time on the way down to question why I jumped. As I feel I heard Kenny say, “That was a bad decision.”

Of course every time I get on the lake with any kind of water craft it renews my desire to build a hovercraft. It looks pretty easy, and I think I can build a first revision pretty cheap. I would like to make a nice one, but I’ll start small and easy.

I’m about to start a project for the church building a throne for The Judgment. This is a huge production, and I am excited to see how it turns out. The next few weeks are going to be hectic, but it’ll be worth it. I’m building the throne for Jesus, and I want it to be perfect. It’s a big project, and I’m nervous. I hope I can pull it off.

Like I said I’m busy. I’ll try not to take so long before the next update.

EDIT: I need to make a correction to the above post. It’s been up long enough I can’t just change it and go on because too many people have read it. We were not on Percy Priest Lake. We were on Center Hill. There is a huge difference. I got to wondering if I had confused the two after Coops comment about it not being that great. I looked into it and yes, I am dumb, I said the wrong lake. I’m sorry for the error. I did edit the post, but I’ll leave all the comments as they are.

Even though the first issue was fixed every time I started Firefox it would start in offline mode. I would have to uncheck the option at File > Work Offline. This got very annoying very quickly. I found a bunch of forums and message boards with people having similar issues. I finally ran across somebody who made an acceptable workaround.

This guy got fed up with it so he wrote an extension for Firefox forcing it to stay in online mode. My problem is fixed. Thank you.

http://yellosoft.us/index.php?id=88