Emptyeye

(This post is huge; most of it is hidden behind a tag to prevent you from having to read it all each time the page loads)

This past weekend was spent at Connecticon. Quite honestly, I had hoped to have the CD/business cards/etc. out at this point, but various circumstances that I have documented before have prevented that thus far. In any event, I first became aware of this convention sometime last year, and went on the Saturday of last year to play in a DDR tournament. I didn’t do very well, but that’s beside the point–I had fun, and decided to go to the entire convention this year, and actually booked a room at the hotel despite living fairly close. This made more sense when I lived in Waterbury (My thinking was I’d go right to the hotel from work on Thursday, because I didn’t want to go from Waterbury to Cheshire, back to Waterbury, and drive back through Cheshire again on my way to Hartford), but as I’ve since moved out to Milldale, I did go back to my apartment after work to pack and then headed off to the Convention Center at about 7:30 Thursday night.

(Continue reading…)

The title of this post pretty much explains my past week–I’m watching a StarCraft-related video as I write this update, in fact. I continue to be terrible at the game, though I seem to be learning, if nothing else, the patterns of the computer opponents (Or, put another way, “How to Hold Off the Computer Until I Can Mass Carriers”).

Other than that, I haven’t been up to a whole heck of a lot. This upcoming weekend, I’ll be heading to Connecticon, and Tuesday night, Jess and I are going to the Poison show at Mohegan Sun. She likes Poison a lot, and I figure I’ll at least enjoy Sebastian Bach, so…

Until next week…

-EE

This past week as far as the site goes mainly consisted of me finding out why my soundcard doesn’t fit my new computer. Apparently I have the next step up in card technology in the computer…which renders the soundcard obsolete, at least temporarily. My options now are either getting an adapter for the port, which is expensive in and of itself, or trying to find another sound solution–the current hardware is not going to cut it, if my brief experiences with trying to record Astyanax speedrun commentary are any indication.

Other than that, the main thing that’s been happening with me is work. Without going too into the details, we have a big project we’re trying to roll out, and a rather severe lack of resources to add some of the features that are basically needed. Not a lot of fun.

And I continue to be awful at StarCraft, if you’re curious.

-EE

Yep. I had planned this post to coincide with (At least within a day or two) the opening of the site…then checked my archives and realized I made the first official post on the site on October 7th, 2007. So I was late by nearly a week. Whoops.

Anyway, the most interesting thing is that my prediction as to the usefulness of a review of the Dream Theater book was apparently completely off–it’s the most popular post on the site in terms of views, and even the author himself (Hi Rich, if you happen to read this) stopped by to share his thoughts, which was pretty cool. Filewise, the most popular thing appears to be the commentary for my speedrun of Rygar, which makes some amount of sense.

And that’s about it as far as that goes, for now anyway.

This past week here on the site, not much happened, though if you pay close attention you’ll note I updated the about pages to make them more current (The About the Site page had a reference to the long-gone donation button). And other than that, I’ve really been pretty lazy.

Neil Peart once wrote “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing at the moment with The Six Day Exile–rather than decide to forge ahead without my Echo Indigo, or see if I can fix the problem (Outlined here), I’m just sort of letting it sit in limbo and playing lots of StarCraft, which I continue to be terrible at. I’ll have to eventually find a style and stick to it; I actually found a neat little map that trains your multi-tasking abilities, which I’ll have to practice a bit until I can improve those skills.

Until next week…

-EE

Well, no I don’t. But I’m not particularly happy right now.

This week was pretty much an idle one in terms of the site. I do have ideas for writings which I should really get up and running sometime soon, because I certainly haven’t been doing much lately as far as music goes, instead opting to laze around and play video games when I’m not working. Some would argue there isn’t anything wrong with this, but The Six Day Exile isn’t going to finish itself.

So today I finally tried to get up and running to resume work on said album. I say “tried” because I think I hit a major setback, and it wasn’t even the one I was expecting (Namely, Windows Vista not playing nicely with my extremely outdated version of Cakewalk SONAR…I still haven’t installed that on this machine yet, by the by). No, I went to install my Echo Indigo on it…and found out that the cardbus slot is apparently not the right size for it. Or, more precisely, there is a “notch” inside the slot that prevents the card from going in fully. Hopefully I can somehow remove it, but if not…without the Indigo, I have no idea how any recording/mixing/etc. I do on this comp will actually sound. And it really annoys me.

Anyway, yesterday I saw one of my friends from college that I hadn’t seen in close to three years. She graduated about a month ago (She was a sophomore in college during the one semester I finished up in Fall of 2005), and she’ll be moving out to Texas soon, so I went to her graduation party seeing as she lives around here for the moment. It was fun, and hopefully she’ll come by to see the apartment before she moves halfway across the country.

Until next week…

-EE

This past week, a lot of the issues I had with the apartment got fixed, specifically the toilet and cable (The latter of which involved a simple reboot of the system on Cox‘s end). As a result, the place actually feels something like a home now, and to celebrate, we had a housewarming (Apartmentwarming, I guess) party earlier today. It pretty cool, as some of my friends from Massachusetts showed up, as did my parents and a bunch of Jess’s family. So that was neat.

In about a week, work on The Six Day Exile will resume, for real this time. It’s a good thing I had everything backed up onto two external drives, because on of them has just about died. Luckily, the second is still up and running; late next week sometime I’ll probably get another one to keep that redundancy (A good thing when it comes to backing stuff up) intact.

Speaking of things being on the fritz, my Cobalt Flux continues to not work right even after a cleaning. I’m not entirely surprised, mind you–what it did isn’t really consistent with it being dirty, but rather some type of wire problem–but it is a bit disappointing. Well, more than a bit–DDR was about my only form of exercise nowadays.

Finally, I’m back into playing StarCraft. I’m not exactly sure why, to be honest. But I’m going through all the missions again to get some semblance of skill in the game back.

Until next week…

-EE

Just a quick post to say that I’m alive and moved in. We won’t have official Internet until next Tuesday, but I’m currently, um, borrowing someone’s wireless connection, and I’ll try to sporadically update between now and then when said connection is available.

Also, check out Rich Wilson’s comment on my review of Lifting Shadows. I apologize for not acknowledging it sooner, but I’ve been a bit busy with this whole moving in thing.

This past week, my main activity was signing the lease for my new apartment. Hooray for that. I’m pretty excited about it, and I’m slowly packing up non-essential smaller stuff to move little by little throughout the week since it’s right by my workplace. I have to admit that I’m also nervous about it. Not that I won’t be able to adjust to independence, mind you–I should be okay there, and I have enough saved up money-wise that we’ll be okay short-term even in the worst of scenarios. Rather, I’m a bit scared that Jess and I will move in together and discover we can’t actually stand being around each other every day. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.

Other than that, I haven’t done much this week. Once I get all settled in with the apartment and such, work on the album will finally continue. That will be a good thing for sure; I must admit to being lazy on that front of late.

And I’m still playing through Wizardry III. Just earlier today I found a particularly nasty trap that insta-kills your entire party. I was pretty sure it was a trap, but stupidly walked into it anyway out of curiosity, wondering what would rhyme with “clock” that would hurt. I wasn’t expecting “rock” (As in “You teleported into…”) to be the rhyme completer, though. Still, at least it only killed my party (In case I haven’t beaten it over all your heads enough, the fact that I am thanking the game for not doing something worse than killing my entire party–and yes, worse fates exist–should really hammer home how brutally sadistic the game is), and it was kind enough to ship their dead bodies back to the castle for me too!

Until next week…

-EE

This week at emptyeye.com, I put out the original Intro for The Six Day Exile. Beyond that, I’ll admit I haven’t done much to advance the project (Which is why I wanted to constantly work on it–I know myself, and I know that once I stop something, take a break from it, whatever, I don’t usually pick it up again). That should change shortly, however, as I pulled the trigger on ordering a new laptop (And wireless keyboard and mouse, and printer). After that, the big thing will be backing up all the project to my second external drive, and then trying to get my hopelessly outdated copy of SONAR to run on the new machine (I imagine Windows Vista may be an obstacle here). After I pull that off, I’m seriously considering moving to, or at least going with a dual-boot setup of, Ubuntu Studio for the purpose. Not that I don’t like SONAR, but let’s just say that there are certain unwritten rules of music software use that change when you go from making music for fun (SEE: The Musical Doodlings material, especially the DoD Entries) to actively trying to profit from it, and because of this, I really shouldn’t have used SONAR even as much as I did for The Six Day Exile.

Following up on this post about MySpace Karaoke, it seems that it’s not really a contest per se. But what I really wanted to discuss was the fact that, as I mentioned in that post, the biggest Internet phenomenon of 2007 (and it seems to still be going strong now) is not represented on the available choices. Thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because Myspace, for all its posturing about how it’s a place for “cool young hipsters” or whatever to hang out, is owned by a corporation headed up by a crusty old dude (And please don’t take my linking to a Wikipedia article as an endorsement of the site as a whole) who is hopelessly out of touch with the Internet and its fads.

I’m still playing through Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn. I’ve got two parties going now, one Good (With a Neutral character), one Evil (Also with a Neutral character). The Good party has something of a unique setup–thanks to this video, I found out that this particular collection allows you to easily re-roll your stats when creating a character. To that end, the Good party is set up Samurai-Samurai-Samurai-Priest-Bishop-Thief. I took the Bishop along to easily identify items on the fly, plus as a backup healer. Incidentally, the restrictions on Floors 2 and 3 don’t seem to include Neutral characters, which is good.

Until next week…