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March 20, 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 and other things

I've possibly got a new favorite game in Unreal Tournament 2004.

Why developers don't like to put vehicles in games is beyond me. It was one of the main reasons why I liked Halo so much. The Warthog was just too damn cool. UT2k4 is super sweet tho, and the vehicles, both ground and air, are awesome. They each have some great strengths and weaknesses, and if you don't watch yourself, you can get your ass toasted rather quickly. What a great game.

Now, I'm running UT2k3 on my Linux box and it's fast as hell. What was really interesting is that the other PC, which is a Athlon 1GHz with 512MB of RAM and a Geforce 3 Ti200 is running the game like it's nothing as well. The graphics are crisp and clear, and apparently no hesitation or frame-rate dropout. I must say it, I'm very impressed.

In other news, I've been working on the new Win2K3 servers at work. They're also sweet as hell, and you can quote me on that. I have to hand it to Microsoft, they may be underhanded, but their server OS is an amazing piece of work in Active Directory. I've spent the past few days dcpromo'ing and setting up user accounts/groups and printers. What's really nice is that the new domain is hella quick since you don't have to wait for anything else, like Novell, to authenticate before Windows.

Lets see... what else... oh... I got a hell of a deal on Lexmark re-branded printers from Dell. They had a 2-4-1 option going on for their M5200n model printers. I had originally planned to purchase a total of five printers for the entire station, but with the deal that they gave me (practically 70% off each printer), I was able to get 10 of the M5200n's and have enough left over to purchase two w812 (with 11x17 capacity) for the engineering department. I've already gotten four of the Dell printers distributed, and have three more to distribute throughout the rest of the building. That leaves me with 3 backup printers that I wasn't expecting to have at all. Talk about a sweet deal.

Hmm... what else? I got the sales department their laptops, and sales management seems to be really happy that their people are all mobile now. While I'm glad that they're satisfied, my real goal has been to get everyone up to the same speed and on the same kind of OS. There's only a few Win9x machine left in the building, which should all be replaced before we go live with the new domain. While this may not sound like that big of a deal, when I first started at the station, almost EVERYONE was on Win9x and a few Win2K boxes. By the time this summer rolls around, most of everyone will be on WinXP, there'll be a few Win2K boxes, and our servers will be on Win2K3 and Win2K.

Life is good on the PC front these days. I'm enjoying my new Dell Latitude laptop as well.

Speaking of life being good, I went to the doctor on Friday to get one of those overall exams. It wasn't like I thought it would be, however, which I thought was a physical. Instead, this checked for mental health and other things that have happened to me in the past in regards to medical issues. As a result of the visit, I was able to get back on some stomach medicine (yay!) and I'm going to go back on Prozac. What's good about Prozac these days is that it's officially a generic drug now, so it doesn't cost me $30.00 a bottle. The Aciphex, on the other hand, is still expensive and costs $20.00 a bottle. Thank goodness for insurance.

I think that it's a good time to get back on Prozac. I've been off of it since early 2001, and the way I stopped taking it was the wrong way. It was abrupt, and you're supposed to ween yourself off of the stuff. Not me ... I gotta do myself harm and stop taking it completely. Bleh, I don't know what I was thinking back then. Anyhow, I'm going to be slowly getting myself back up to my regular dosage, which I'm looking forward to the results. I remember what it was like being on Prozac back in the day. Everything seemed to be much better, and I was in a much clearer state of being.

I found out something that really didn't surprise me during the doctor visit. I have VERY high anxiety, but a minor bout of depression. The doctor was expecting it to be the exact opposite ... but there I go fooling everyone again. I knew I wasn't really depressed tho ... although I knew that I was feeling a bit down recently and my mood certainly reflected that. I did know that I've been overly anxious as of late, and I blame that mostly on work and trying to cope with the amount of pressure that is put on me on any given day. I'm hoping that with the Prozac back in my system, I'll calm down a bit more and not worry nearly as much. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to sleep better at night and that my stomach, in combination with the Aciphex, will stop hurting me all the time.

I'm starting to take steps in the right direction.

Posted by ed at March 20, 2004 11:27 PM

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