Well, I got myself an old Sega Dreamcast for about 30 bucks the other day. It came with 2 controllers, a lightgun and a couple of memory cards as well as a couple dozen games. What a fricken deal! The dreamcast has some great titles that just can’t get ignored. My personal favourites:

-The light gun games (There are only 3). Especially House of the Dead 2, and Confidential Mission.

-Jet Grind Radio: A Japanese version of Tony Hawk. The object: Rollar blade around putting up graffiti tags and busting up rival gangs. Try and avoid the police, attack helicopters, tanks, and swat teams. This was one of the first games to use cell-shading, and the first one to do a good job of it.

-Crazy Taxi(1 and 2): Drive around frantically trying to get fares before the clock runs out.

For a small price, this system is giving me hours of retro-gaming fun.

I have an older PIII450 I’ve had lying around that I decided to install Mandriva on. I’ve delved a bit into the linux world before, but it’s been so long that I can’t remember squat. Luckily I have the one page linux manual.

The install was pretty easy actually. If you follow the directions you can turn a windows machine into a dual-boot linux machine. One thing: Make sure you install the development tools. You will probably need them at some point to compile software for your distribution or a new kernal. The install took about 25 minutes, but as soon it was done everything worked fine, and the computer was capable of its primary task: surfing the net.

Right after install I had some issues with how sluggish the ol’ pIII was running using the default KDE GUI. After consulting the guys at the BBr Unix/Linux forum I decided to switch to fluxbox, which is a variation on blackbox. The fluxbox site had a package to compile that I had problems with because I was missing “x windows” development stuff. Eventually I brokedown and used an RPM(basically a self-installing file) that someone on BBr showed me at http://www.rpmfind.net .

This was all a good warm-up for the new system I just put together. Sometime this week I have to update the nvidia drivers, and install RTCW:ET.

Well, I managed to get done about 25% of my COMP 200 course. I did the first assignment and quiz and got 100% on both! At work I’m planning on finishing my first course project which has something to do with making an Access database. This means I have to learn Access. The university provides tutorials, so I don’t think it will be a problem. Here are the tutorials if anyone feels like learning Microsoft Access.