Older blog entries for bratsche (starting at number 291)

Then I played in East Texas Symphony last week and they performed it with the orchestra. It was really nice. We also did Mahler Symphony No.1 and some newish piece that I found uninteresting.

It's nothing really new or revolutionary in this game. Usually when I say something like "basically more of the same" it is not meant in a good way, but I'd basically have to say that about this game and mean it in a good way. If that makes any sense. I thought the original Max Payne was really fantastic and was one of the best games I had played at that time, and the sequel basically just takes a good thing and improves slightly on it. There was really no reason for them to try to do anything amazingly new in this game, and I'm glad that they basically preserved the gameplay.

It began very well when I showed up, but things quickly went downhill when Andy came into the room, coughing and hacking. He informed me in his usual manner that he has been very sick recently; he had mono for awhile, and now he has the flu and has had it for awhile. I kept trying to step away from him, but he kept stepping forward as he told me all about it.

So I fled to the main room, where there were chips and dips and other munchies to be had. I ate a few chips, but the fun didn't last long for soon Andy sat in the chair on the opposite side of the coffee table and began coughing in my general direction, never bothering to cover his mouth, and never bothering to aim away from the chips.

So, once again I fled, this time with Short Megan and a small crew of faithful followers, to the front room. Once again, things became jolly (as things so often are in the company of Short Megan), and this time Cathy joined us. We laughed, and were merry, and things were great. But he eventually came into that room, spoke a few friendly words, then remembered something and told Cathy that there was something in the other room that needed to be cleaned up. A certain dread filled Cathy's eyes, but not Josh's.. oh, no! Josh was mightily amused, and slid in a very ungraceful manner from his chair to the ground, where he laughed heartily.

Finally, after the vomit had been cleaned up, Andy decided that he was too sick to stay, and so he began the long journey home to Fort Worth. And there was much rejoicing.

The chips had to be thrown out, both those of the potato variety and those of the corn. Sadly, even the purple corn chips had to go. In my heart, I knew they were the most tainted of all.

Dan brought forth the brisket, and it was a sight to behold. And I did call forth for all to hear, "Yum!", and a good time was had by all.

We laughed into the wee hours of the early morning, when Kathryn left and discovered, much to her dismay, that her car had been broken into by an extremely untalented thief, who managed only to burgle a bottle of motor oil, a bottle of wildshield wiper fluid, and the faceplate of her CD player. Amongst the items left behind were a stack of CDs, a brand new copy of the Extended Edition of The Two Towers on DVD, and the rest of her CD player.

This is just so sad, because I knew Ettore somewhat and I liked to talk to him. He was a great hacker, and a really great guy and I'll miss him a lot. I know I won't be alone.

I tried to install the ndiswrapper kernel module, but it doesn't like my Broadcom chipset apparently. I get some error about "Unknown symbol: ntoskrnl.exe:_allmul". Very sad, indeed.. I guess I need to stick with the Linuxant DriverLoader kernel module instead.

I installing Linux 2.6.0-test10 recently, but I haven't yet gotten my NVIDIA drivers working under it yet, so I'm still using the "nv" drivers with no GLX or GL goodies. According to minion.de, there are some issues with certain AGP chipsets in 2.6.0's AGPGART, but I am told that my VIA chipset has been pretty thoroughly tested and doesn't have any known issues now, so this may not be the problem. I'm going to try to rebuild my kernel with AGPGART as an external module and see if using NvAGP set to "1" in XF86Config with nvidia.o unloaded from the kernel solves the problem.