Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

January this year – my hard drive mysteriously starts making clicking noises every now and then. I check the drive. Nothing is wrong. Life goes on. This past Friday – Working on my projects when a folder of documentation is listed as corrupted. I run CHKDSK. Errors pop up. Life goes on. Monday – something else fails. My machine and sysadmin insist I run CHKDSK again. More errors pop up. I sigh. Tuesday – The part of IE that holds passwords fails, so I can’t use forms without two error messages. Then my major project folder dies (luckily backed up the day before). Then Internet Explorer gets corrupted. Welcome to Hard Disk Replacement City – population, me. I have rebuilt my machine from scratch, and it’s been a complete bitch. I thought I was having troubles with my Mac at home, but this puts things in perspective.

After some serious hassles with Tripod (their web server not understanding how to serve pages, their banner ad scripts sucking), I offered to move Katie’s page over to here and she gladly accepted. So, you can now find her stuff here – there’s a link in the menu bar. In an related note, I’ve found there’s a serious lack of good guestbooks for PHP. And there’s no remote page administration tools, either.

As the title says, the May news has been archived and is handily located off to your right if you’re on the front page. Coming up soon – more reviews, and a hopefully very comprehensive FAQ on emulation.

Kate plunked down in front of the scanner last night and scanned some ultra-cute pictures of us from our day at King’s Dominion. You can check out her site here, and click on the pictures link.

Last night, the boys and I went and saw the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks (SHAFT!). Good enjoyable movie, just what I’d expect. Definitely go see it if you need something to do. Full review is forthcoming. This afternoon, I finally kicked myself in the ass to drag some old games over to EB. What was originally a $46 buy back turned into over $75 worth of merchandise. I now have a copy of Legend of Mana and Tony Hawk Pro Skater, plus a soundtrack sample disc from LOM. I also finally gave in and bought a 60 block memory card. You don’t care, but I’m telling you. So anyhow, that means I have 4 games that need playing. Yikes

As some of you may know – actually, probably one of you – I have had musical training for a number of years in both the piano and the trumpet, and I always loved playing around with music. I would always try valiantly to create my own (and fail miserably, most of the time). Well, yesterday, I saw the release of an amazing piece of freeware called Igor. Igor is a notation / engraving software that really takes the hassle out of writing sheet music. It’s intuitive, it’s clean, the music looks wonderful, and best of all, it’s free. If you have a Mac (PC version coming soon!) and have any musical ability, you owe it to yourself to download this and play with it.

After my two week hiatus, I am officially (and reluctantly) forced to rejoin the real world. It’s been an amazing break, so let me give the capsule version of what happened. Kate was up here for the first week, in which we spent a lot of time down by the lake, saw Road Trip, went to the Ithaca Festival, went to the ever-exciting Memorial Day parade, walked the Glen while being surrounded by Mennenites (sp?), watched Taxi Driver and Jawbreaker, and just generally enjoyed ourselves. The ride on the bus to Kate’s house was marred with a little stupidity on the part of the bus people, but that happens. At her house, we played Playstation, watched Eye of the Beholder and Drop Dead Gorgeous, fell asleep watching Snow Falling on Cedars, went and saw MI2 in the theatre, ate a lot of Taco Bell, went to King’s Dominion, had my birthday dinner at Josef’s, and did a fair amount of shopping. All in all, I’d say it was a very good trip. We both got a lot of time to unwind, we had a lot of laughs, and hey, Kate even found religion.</insidejoke> I obviously got a lot of crap, so that gives me lots of reviews to write. The list is as follows: Movies: Road Trip, Taxi Driver, Jawbreaker, Mission Impossible 2, Eye of the Beholder, Drop Dead Gorgeous Games: Vagrant Story, Driver, Resident Evil 3 Music: Massive Attack/Mezzanine, KMFDM/Nihil. I have already done reviews for MI2 and Vagrant Story. Much more coming over the next few days.

Early morning here in Maryland, and I’m still not quite awake, but I figured I’d pop in and check out what’s going on. I see that the news script on the front is broken; no idea what’s up with that, but hopefully this will fix it. So much for not posting for 2 weeks. As you may have guessed by the title, today is my official leap out of teenagerhood and into adulthood, as I turn 20. I don’t feel any different, but I’ll keep you posted. I’ve been having a wonderful time with Kate, despite whiny siblings and moronic bus drivers. You can all rest assured that I am safe and out and getting extremely well rested. I’ll post a full report when I get back on Sunday. In less important news – mdfmk was on Farmclub.com last night. Was pretty interesting to see Sascha and Tim in the flesh. Check out the performance in the archives if you’re interested. Oh, and Vagrant Story rocks.