I mowed the front lawn on Saturday, it’s pretty dinky and only takes a few minutes. Lots of weeds and non-grassy stuff growing there. The back lawn is non-existant at this point. Previous owner tore up the whole back lot and paved half with concrete for a large patio, and the other half is just rock and sand where a big above-ground pool sat. It will be a nice-sized little yard in the future, but getting grass to grow will probably be a big challenge.

Wish us luck!

This past weekend I started playing the new Ninja Gaiden game on the DS. It’s controlled completely with the stylus. It’s pretty rad and does a good job of retaining the feel of the awesome Ninja Gaiden Xbox game on a handheld scale. Check it out if you like action games and don’t mind wailing on your DS screen a little bit.

Everyone’s nuts for Grand Theft Auto IV but I don’t have a 360/PS3 so I’m revisiting the original GTA3 on my Xbox. I originally played it on my PC way back when it came out almost 7 years ago. My PC at the time could barely handle it so I’m actually getting a better visual experience with the Xbox. The game holds up splendidly.

I got some nifty “trilogy” edition for Xbox that includes GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas. It’s a cool package with full-color manuals and posters for each game. I’ve played through both VC and SA on my PS2. I will probably revisit them at some point on Xbox. I’ve also got both of the spin-off “Stories” titles for PS2 but haven’t tried them yet. I got them from GameFly, which had a good system for buying used games.

Went to Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay tonight. Nate wanted to go so I tagged along. It was a stupid movie, but it had a lot of funny bits. I was laughing out loud at a lot of it. It’ll be a solid rental, but don’t skip seeing Iron Man or Speed Racer over it.

Also, crap, those copies of Disgaea 2 that I put up on eBay sold within minutes. I should have put a higher “buy it now” on them.

I got Disgaea 2, new and sealed, for a mere $5 at Wal-Mart this evening! And you dipsticks are always telling me that Wal-Mart is evil, ha!

I bought all 4 of the copies they had. I’m keeping one for myself, sending one to Steve (that’s Dead Lantern Steve, not BeerOrKid Steve ) and the other two copies are going up on good ‘ol eBay.

I made a few coasters before I figured out that my old DVD Shrink + Nero setup does not work under Vista. Weak! Fortunately there appears to be a solution: Use DVD Shrink and output to .iso, and then burn with ImgBurner. A quick test late last night seems to have worked.

Vista’s stupid; I may have to go back to XP but it would be such a hassle. If your OS doesn’t allow me to easily copy Netflix DVDs back up my crucial files, then that’s just lame.

I haven’t played a TCG (trading card game) in several years but some of my Dead Lantern pals are getting together tomorrow to play a few rounds before we record our 75th episode of the Splattercast.

I know I have a box full of Magic: The Gathering cards somewhere in the storage garage, but for the life of me I could not find them. I did find a few MTG preconstructed decks, including this insane red-artifact thing from the 1999 world championships, so I can at least play with those. I can tear up the storage garage to find my other cards when we move next month (oh yeah, we found a house - I’ll post more about that when we’re actually in it ).

We’re also going to try playing the World of Warcraft TCG. Our pal Spooky McPhee is getting us into it. He told us about a really curious market dynamic surrounding the WoW TCG. Apparently there are certain cards that the players of the WoW MMORPG can use to get special junk in the PC game. We all know MMORPG players are psycho. Compared to them, I feel downright normal playing a TCG. So, anyway, these WoW MMORPG dudes buy lots of the cards looking for those few specific ones, and then they sell the cards on eBay for peanuts. Spooky bought a few thousand cards to start us out.

So yup, it’s a total nerd relapse. I even dug out my polyhedral dice!

We did a very small run of The Grand Horror on DVD and are selling them online. We’re really excited about how well they’ve been selling so far. We’re actually down to our last handful of copies (only 8 left as I type this) so if you’d like one please visit the ordering page soon!

We’re only charging $10.00 with free shipping. C’mon, don’t be a douche; buy one!

I don’t know if it was a vagrancy of the nLite-ified install of the OS or what, but my PC was just not the same. It was hella slow for no reason, like I’d open a browser and my mouse cursor would chug and stutter across the screen, like the PC couldn’t handle the task.

Granted, my PC isn’t some hot rod. I’m not playing Crysis on it. It’s an AMD64 CPU, 1.5 RAM, cheapish PCI (plain PCI, not PCI-E) GeForce FX 5500 with 256 RAM, 200GB IDE hard disk. A pretty average PC but plenty of power for the non-gaming stuff that I do. There’s no reason XP should chug and stutter.

So I was like, screw it, if I’m gonna reinstall the OS again, I may as well give Vista a try. The install was pretty painless and it saves all your existing crap in a folder called “Windows.old” so that’s handy. I’ve only had it on there for a couple days, only used it for a few hours but my sluggishness seems to have gone away - and that was my main gripe. I know it’s been out for a while but I personally have never touched Vista so I’ll have a learning curve.

Irritating problem right out of the gate: My Linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter was not Vista-compatible. If I had a later hardware revision of the same model number, it would have been supported. Oh well. So I went to Wal-Mart and dropped $40.00 on a newer Linksys PCI wifi card and I got Vista online with that pretty quickly. Optimally, if/when we move in the next month or so, I’d like to go back to running a cable between my PC and the router so it’s sort of wasteful to buy a wifi card that I may not need in the near future. But whatever, as I often say: If that’s the type of thing I’m worrying about, then my life must be pretty ok.