Financial stupidities and a new OS (again).

I really should get an accountant that will only allot me so much a week for allowance to play with. It never fails. Every month, just after payday, I go an spend money on crap before I start paying my bills. Some of the things I've bought are a necessity. The Jeep needs some maintenance, so I've picked up most of the supplies for that, already. But, I made a detour to GameStop after work today and picked up 2 games. After last night, I've decided to start migrating the Xbox games that I can to the PS2 versions. So, I took a couple with me to sell that won't play on the 360 that I didn't really like when I bought them. Man, talk about a money making racket. I got all of $12 out of 3 relatively "new" games (I take care of my games, unlike other things). That's just sad. I probably paid a total of $100+ for those. Well, sorta. One of the replacements was the latest Tomb Raider. Yes, I'm madly in love with Laura Croft and own the entire series; even the crappy Angel of Darkness. My sister's probably gonna be a little peeved since she's the one who got me the Xbox version for my b-day last year. But, I have valid reasoning: it wouldn't play on the 360. I had no intention of getting a 360 when she asked me which platform I wanted it on. Duh, Xbox has better graphics than PS2. Course, now that I've been playing it all evening, the only difference I see is some minor rougher edges in the polys and a pain in the ass trying to calibrate the brightness and contrast. But, it supports widescreen (don't remember if the other version did or not since my old projector didn't support it). :D Enough; I could go on for days about Lady Croft. The other game I picked up, that I couldn't resist, is the newly released .Hack//GU. Generally, my GameStop trips are for used games, but I couldn't resist. I really got into the .hack series between the previous game, the anime, and a couple of the manga's. I forgot that FF XII came out this week. I'll have to put that one on my Christmas list. I still need to rent Dirge of Cerebus, even tho it's gotten a lot of bad reviews. I've been a fan of the FF series since the Nintendo. Yes, as in 8-bit. I know... I'm old. FF VII was the one that fully hooked me into the series, tho. But, now can you see why I need to have someone else pay my bills and get my staples? All I need is an allowance. I suck at finances.

Yes the wedding went well. No one passed out or didn't show. I was just happy for it to finally be over. Now maybe they'll let everyone continue on with their lives while the bride and groom start theirs. ... What? ... You want me to describe it? It was a wedding. You've all been to one. You should know what it looked like. ... It was big; too big. I'm all for the whole bride, groom, officiant, and small crowd (close family and friends) kinda wedding. This was too much of a dog and pony show for me. If I'm lucky, this is the last one I'll have to worry about until I get married (assuming I get married, that is). Small will be a big stipulation on it, that's for sure. Marriage is over-rated. No, no, no. I will not be bitter.

So, I'm back to Linux, again. Specially as my primary system. Some ppl probably think I change operating systems about a frequently as other ppl change their underwear. That's not too far off. I'm constantly installing and re-installing. It's what I do for a living. If I haven't re-installed my system at least twice in a 3 month period, something's wrong. With a little (and I mean _VERY_ little) convincing, I now have Core 6 in the laptop. I'm digging the power for virtualization, but Xen still isn't all that friendly. I'm back to running XP in VMware Server (for support purposes). My only complaints are: the Dell (Broadcom) wireless doesn't work out of the box, there's no CPU scaling support for the Core Duo, yet, and the power management still isn't totally there for the Duo (only about 1 1/2 - 2 hr runtime compared to between 3 and 4 under Windows). I think the Bluetooth works (haven't tested it); it supports the On/Off switch (recognizes when it's turned on or off via the switch on the side). There were, also, some much needed updates to a lot of the programs I like to use. I must say, I'm impressed. Which means I should be very happy with Red Hat Enterprise 5 when it finally comes out (slated for some time early next year). I've played with the beta, but it's not ready for my full-time attention, yet. Now don't get me wrong. Vista runs quite well on the Duo.. by itself. Once you start tacking on "legacy" programs (i.e., current versions/builds), it's still a little too unstable and grouchy for me to deal with right now. I'm going to take some time this weekend to try and get the wireless working (there should be some "Google"-able documentation somewhere out there). If I can't, then it's back to Vista, I guess.

l8rs.