So, I went to my first hockey game ever last night. I went to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) for a good frickin’ amount of time and I never ever went to one before, ironically enough. Instead of a football team, my alma mater touts a pretty kick-ass hockey team–which almost seems like it’d be sacrilegious here in the south, considering how mad everyone else is about football 😉

It was a really interesting game. Those who’ve been to hockey games before told me that those games outside of the collegiate arena (NHL, pro, etc) are definitely a bit more violent. Both sides found themselves with power plays quite often, especially in the last period.

Ultimately, UAH won the game 6-1 despite having as many as three players in the penalty box in the last period (the 1 point scored by Wayne State was in the second period, so they really worked pretty hard to hold them back).

Today, I have a tummy ache :-\ Maybe it was the popcorn last night, maybe the wings I ate after. I’m not sure :-\ I think that I would most certainly like to take this day to rest and relax. And maybe watch some Olympic hockey 😀

The iBook arrived *wipes sweat from brow*

*sigh* It is depressing. One of the bad things that could happen is the instability in Iraq will embolden the terrorists further. The instability in the region creates a vaccum of power, with the legitimacy of the government coming into question. Iran eventually comes in and fills the void, making what is literally a Super Iran.

They start bullying their neighbors, much as Saddam did with Kuwait. They build an even more Super Iran. All the while, they continue building nuclear weapons (and I have absolutely no doubt that’s what they’re doing, what with all this pussyfooting with the UN).

Eventually, they go after an ally. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc (though I suppose Iraq right now is an ally in bloom). We step up our activity in the region even more. Time passes and it all breaks down into nuclear conflict with Iran’s newly built arsenal.

Of course, this is mostly out or my arse.. Take it with a grain of salt. The Iran thing is something that not only we take seriously, but also the world. Nevertheless, what’s going on over there is really frightening–not only for the ones we all care about but for the rest of the planet, too :-\

Our military forces were told specifically not to touch mosques. Period. They’re sacred. And they did that. Of course, many of us over here would get pretty uberly miffed if they started bombing our churches. It shows exactly what these terrorists are all about that they show their own disrespect in gutting out a shrine of Allah.

Well, this can’t be good. I got a message from a guy on eBay, the guy to whom I sold my iBook. He says it hasn’t arrived. Fortunately, I just happened to have the receipt from the post office in my jacket. I’m going to scan it and email it to him tomorrow. This is quite disturbing, indeed :-\ While a receipt can’t necessarily say much of anything, I suppose that it can say that I did, indeed send it. I’d better keep a number of copies of that scan around, just to be paranoid–it’s all I have :-\

On the plus side, I had quite the awesome Monday-like Tuesday. I was tired for most of the day, and will definitely get a good night in this fine eve. It’s 44 degrees here. Practically a sauna. lol.

I started playing some Morrowind this weekend again. I’m getting the itch for Oblivion, which doesn’t come out for another month. I even got Ruthie into Morrowind 😀 She seems to like it so far, though it’s much easier to attack in Morrowind than World of Warcraft. She just needs to learn where not to point her blades 🙂

Other than that, it’s been fairly uneventful around these parts; just a plane jane week. Since it’s getting warmer, and it seems to be staying lighter later again, I think I’ll start getting some hardcore riding in again. I need to refit the Trek after the long humid winter and get her ship-shape again.

I burned my first Dual Layer DVD over the weekend. My first burn was a backup of my mp3 collection. Sadly enough, all of my mp3s fit on one DL disc. Not only did I jump into Napster a bit late, but I jumped in when I was on dial-up, which made it even worse. So, I have an itty bitty lil music collection. Anyhoo, DL discs are nice, if not expensive.

So, I got a new laptop. Yes, I’m such a trader of tech. I get teased about it way too often 😉 I see something that’s really kewl, or something that seems really kewl and I trade for it. eBay is my is truly my geek heaven. My iBook is eBay fodder–though I did get 90% of the value for it which payed for most of the new laptop 😀

Anyway, this new laptop has a Radeon x600. It features 128MB of dedicated video memory (it’s a hybrid card of shared/dedicated memory bringing total available video memory to 256MB).

I was playing Half-Life: 2 Lost Coast this early evening because WoW was down. I found out, because I hadn’t played around in the settings much before, that the video card has HDR capability!!

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Rendering is a brand new technology in video cards (it’s been around since 1985, actually) that was used in the Lost Coast episode of HL: 2 to simulate how the human eye reacts to light.

The video card on my desktop doesn’t currently support HDR, but I will probably be upgrading the video card fairly soon and it will more than likely have that capability thereafter.

Anyway, I was totally blown away by what it looked like. Below are screenshots of what I saw. It may not seem like much, but to a gaming geek like myself, it’s frickin’ amazing. Really, to have the full impact, you need to have the screenshots side-by-side.

Church windows (HDR off)
Church windows (HDR on)
Hallway (HDR off)
Hallway (HDR on)