Stupid work. Stupid life. :) You know, I think that honestly the only reason to work is so you can have money to buy toys and game. Ironically enough, the more you work, the more money you theoretically have.... and the less time to enjoy it. There's gotta be a legal way to be rich and not wo.... Hey..... Why the hell am I not in politics..... DAMN IT! Stupid me!

Speaking of which, I'm VERY annoyed. As some of you likely know, I like paintball. I like it alot. (I also like firearms. As in, real guns. I used to collect, though I've given up due to the regulations and hassles.) In fact, even better than a dozen headshots in a row on Broadside is a few single shot kills up at Wassaga Beach Paintball Adventures. I'm pissed off because of something that happened late fall. Wayne Dollak, a guy who runs "Big Games" for paintball, (A large scenario style game where you get several hundred players together at a field.) came to our fair country to run an Americans vs. The Vietnamese big game. Very cool.

When Wayne was stopped at the border, his truck was searched. No big deal, as he didn't have anything illicit or illegal with him...... Or did he?

For use as props for the game, Wayne had brought with him 4 air-soft guns. Air soft guns are exact replicas of a real firearm, but they fire .117 caliber plastic pellets using air. They cannot be used to harm a person realistically, unless you were to use one as a club. They are NOT firearms by definition in law. Regretably, they do seem to fall under a new firearms law that is naturally designed to save our children and schools from something. (It's all part of this new "gun control" bullshit that criminals will of course continue to ignore, as they have since such measures started taking effect in the late 1940s)

It is illegal in Canada to have something that LOOKS like a firearm but does not fire a projectile. That's right, it's illegal to own a gun that cannot be used to harm someone. Wayne was under arrest for 5 hours, his $500/each airsoft guns were confiscated and he was fined $800 for daring to defy our glorious laws. Of course, he had no idea he was doing anything wrong (Which he certainly wasn't.) but luckily, in the eyes of our noble and virtuous border defenders he was a terrible smuggler. Luckily they actually released him after harassing him for a while and let him go on his way.

God I hate this country, it's run by complete idiots. The little gov't brouchure on this matter actually reads:

Q: If a person crosses the border with a water gun under the front seat of their car, are they importing a replica firearm?
A: It will depend on the extent to which the water gun resembles a real firearm. If the water gun is obviously made of a bright florescent plastic, the answer is _probably_ no. If, however the water gun resembles with near precision a firearm in terms of colour and overall appearence the answer if _probably_ yes.

Note the word _probably_. This whole set of laws is actually written like it. Vague and completely up to the interpretation of whoever arrests you. Gah. I won't even get into the hundreds of millions of dollars over budget (Promise of dismantling it if over $85 million, they've over $450 million SO FAR) etc etc. Sufice it to say that it's a good thing dangerous folks like Wayne and everyday Canadians suffer while the people the laws were never meant to affect (Ex. the NON-law abiding) sit around laughing.

Enough political ranting, on with computer related news.

Still completely hooked on Day Of Defeat. If you haven't played it, go download it now. It's worth it. I'm writing up a little review for it, Dopper is helping with some screenies. Doing an interview with the dev team as well.. I just have to think up the questions. :) If you have any, email 'em in!

Thanks to Dman, I now have a sweet little util for doing flash. And it's alot cheaper and easier to use than flash as well. Swish doesn't seem to do any of the REALLY fancy scripting and stuff you can do with the full Macromedia product but at $30 USD you really can't complain, and it does allow you to do some nice basic stuff. Like the little animation I have in the upper left corner of this page. Take a look, the trial is a free download though it can't save to the web. :) Take a look at what I've been doing with it just to see.... This is where I learned that too many effects kill slower machines, especially over the web.

iLL sent me the world's coolest flash intro. Lego Clan. Frickin' buff. Check it out!

Speaking of Politicians, Kingpin sent me to the Chretienizer. Now THAT's humor. If you've ever wondered how FRAGtopia would look through the eyes of our non-lingual (Hey, you'd almost get the idea I don't like him, eh?) prime minister, wonder no longer young one! (I know, I know... Those are the sorts of questions that keep me up all night too!) *Sniff* I...I feel so patriotic.

From the wonderfull world of Rune (He's back from his mission to Iraq, and is using our PS2 smuggli... er....... Umm..... I mean, child relief funds to go to school now.) comes a SHHWEET link. Streaming game music from Game Basement. Woot! Nice work Jeff, we lub j00!

Still laughing at Wienerboy. A month or so ago he sent me a message declaring that his beloved ATI 128 card (Which at one time he had the audacity to compare to my incomparable GeForce DDR.) wellll... Sucks. Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Nolan sends over some depressing news (I know, I know, I just forgot to post it, sorry!) for you folks making billions on eBay with your Evercrack accounts. Apparantly the people at Sony object to anyone other than themselves making money on such things, so it's time for the lawyers!

WHOA! Never thought I'd see this in a Microshaft advert. Thanks Iceman. It's ironic. When the FRAGtopia staff (Well, most of us.) were at a Microsoft conference, MS spent alot of time ripping their old software for instability and ranting about the new. Now, I may be a naieve fool here.... But isn't that kinda like a politician going on about what a rotten job he's done in the past, then asking you to vote for him because he's doing better now? (Hmmm. Lots of politician bashing today. Excellent.)Why the HELL would you trust them the second.... Actually in Microsoft's case it's more than that. DOS was a crappy though at least stable rip off of UNIX. Windows 3.x was a crappy rip off of the MAC OS that just plain sucked. Windows 95 was a crappy unstable OS/2 rip off. Windows 98 was a little better, but still unstable as hell.. Windows NT didn't/doesn't really play games worth a damn. Windows ME is garbage. Windows 2000 is the only decent OS they've ever made, and it's still a little wierd sometimes. Gah.

Saw a funny saying, not sure where... "The irony of it is that Bill Gates claims to be trying to make a stable operating system, and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world." Heh.

WOOHOO! Updates on Stonetrek, one of my favorite spoof sites ever! (Thanks Goshwin!)

Well, off to work so we can afford to keep this site up. :)

Marauder out.

Must shoot Americans... Must shoot Americans... Must kill Dopper for getting me hooked on Day Of Defeat. It's the American's vs. those dasterdly no-goodniks the Nazis. In the Half Life engine..... It's adictive as hell. The FRAGtopia server has been converted over. Go play.

Not much new to report. A little down on the whole news sites loosing their hosting thing that's been going on lately. Lucky we don't rely on sponsorships for the site hosting eh?

Just did up another little wandering nostalgia piece that doesn't go anywhere. Check it out.

Marauder off and away to the Omaha Beach. Cyah there.

Found a neat little site called "Converters Paradise". Basically it contains a "wack load" of utilities to convert from one file format to another. It's a fairly large collection as well.

There's a pretty funky game with sweet graphics being developed called Black & White. Check out this clip of a lion morphing between good, neutral, & evil!

Another interesting war game (halflife mod) that is out, that has characteristics similar to Counter-Strike & Unreal Tournament is Day of Defeat. It has nice graphics and war games just rock!

Well, I'm back. Again, just been too busy to keep up the hourly posting sched. :) Thanks to Rune & Dop for the cover.

Been playing Quake III: Team Arena. Apparently it's getting poor reviews everywhere. I personally really like it! I've posted a review with an absolute TON of screenies. My personal theory is that the complexity of the games. (Ex. You can't just KILL everything.. There's actually goals you have to acomplish) is throwing the Quake guys a loop. :) Heh. We'll see.

Speaking of the review, Pappy-R posted it in the Planet Quake news..... Yes Pappy... 0wn3d for now.... But I'll be back. Oh yes I will......... :)

Drooling over the new AMD chipset.. Hmmmm.. DDRAM. So fast, so tasty..... In theory at least it's twice as fast as standard DDRAM, unlike the oh-so-crappy RAM (Heh. And it's not just an acronym in this case...)BUS memboy. Prices are still high on it. A normal 128 PC133 goes for $100, a DDRAM PC266 is $320 or so. Roughly Tripple the cost. Remarkably, a 128 RDRAM is still well over $400. Imagine how you'd do on 3Dmark 2000 with a Dual Tbird 1.1 ghz, 256 meg of DDRAM & an NV20... Ohhhhhh.......

Heheh. Found the first transexual video game character. Wahwhahaha. Stupid Nintendo users. :)

I'd love to work for GOD (Gethering of Developers.) They have the world's coolest office.

I hate Tycho from PA. He's got me playing this stupid Bejewled game. Gah. It's annoyingly adictive and does not involved violence. An intriguring and unusual combination.

I found my new speaker set finally. Check it out! Woot! Oh yeah, this is where it's at!

I thought I hated some games. I've never had one blow my monitor up, unlike Old Man Murray. Ouch. Note to self: Never, EVER buy anything from Red Storm again. Not that they've had anything good other than Rainbow 6 anyhow.

I can't remember if I posted this or not. It's from MoShun, and it's a few little tips from a woman on how to get women to like you. :)

Enough with news. On with work. (Gah)

Marauder out.

Hey all this is my first post and it will most likely be sort and sweet. I'm the Network Admin for Fragopia 2001. As I did last year and we had no problems with the network. Now this year I would like to know what you guys would like to see on the network. Like what other stuff do you think we should add to the server. Here is a list of what we WILL be having on the server. As follows below.

1. IRC Server - Internet Relay Chat - This will be Internal and External. So people on the web will be able to join it. The IP will be posted the NIGHT before Fragtopia Starts. So that would be the Friday.

2. DHCP Server - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol- This gives everyone on the Network a IP Address to play games with everyone else.

3. Proxy Server- Internet - Sorry guys Staffers only get this and Pappy from PlanetQuake .

4. Web Server - Web Site Server - Here you will be able to see when the the next tournament is on and who is playing and who won or lost.

5. FTP Server - File Transfer Protocol - Pretty simple. Here we will have files with the NEWEST updates and maps or add-ons for everyone. Hopefully we won't have to use it but last year Quake3 came out with a new patch 3 days before Fragtopia.

If anyone has anything else that they think that we should add please e-mail me with the info. Also if you do send me info. Give me a URL of the site and the Program name and what it is. Myself I would like to test it out before Fragtopia and put it to the limits!! And see what happens.

Send an e-mail to gezerman@home.com

Thanks agian, See you at Fragtopia 2001

I found a neat little utility called TextAloud MP3 that reads back text using a microsoft text to speech product. I've been having a lot of fun playing with it. Here's a really cool sample of what it is capable of doing. The system requirements for TextAloud MP3 are minimum P100, 16MB RAM, 5MB Disk Space, a Sound Card/speakers & a windows 9x or NT based OS. It is a free download for the shareware and cost $19.95US to register.

Some other neat multimedia stuff I've been checking out is actually movie productions from Tritin Films. You can checkout thier film library and download any of the films for free. They are made from a variety of games/software including quake2, quake3, halo, & 3dstudio max. I find these types of demo/movie compositions very cool. I remember some of the coolest movies off all time were Quake Done Quick and "the Artifact" by Clan Phantasm and Blahbalicious. (of course you'll need quake1 to playback those movies) If anyone knows of any cool sites that fall into that category send the links my way so I can check them out.

Damn, this really sucks! Something Awful, one of the funniest sites on the web is in danger of being shut down. It seems that Loxtax over at Something Awful is considering shutting it down by the end of the week. Apparently E-Front, the web network that SA is with hasn't been paying him so he may have to stop working on the site. Check out this thread on the Something Awful forums for more details.

Tribes 2 Players has part two of an on-going interview with Tribes 2 Producer and Stud-muffin Dave "QIX" Georgeson. This installment deals with the sweet sweet visuals that Tribes 2 will have to offer. Here's a little snip to get ya going:

Tribes 2 Players - A fear that many people have is that they will need one of the best system to be able to play tribes 2. Will this be much of a problem and why or why not?

Dave G. (Qix) - It shouldn't be an issue. We're working hard on making the min spec of the game a very fun, playable, and visual experience. This will not be one of those games where, if you have the min spec, you have to shut everything off in order to play.

Check out the rest of the good stuff here. Thanks to the homies at Tribal War for the linkage!

Of course if you just can't get enough of that Tribes 2 scenery than you probably will want to check out Eric and Chet's "Best Tribes 2 Screenshot" over at Old Man Murray. And the Oscar goes to: "Woman beside a tree"...

Computer Game Online has a piece up on How Many Frames per Second you really need in today's games. Remember when 30 frames per second was enough? Are you still talking lovingly to that Banshee card and praying that it will give you the 24 fps performance that you crave or are you into brute force poly crunching power and blistering framerates that the latest GPUs provide? (while putting a hurting on your poor depleted bank account I might add). Does it really make a difference? Read the article here and find out what seperates the r33t d00ds from the llamas.

Additional note: Yes, Marauder, we all know that you are an all hardware and ping whore who despite getting astoundingly fast framerates and 3dmarks still routinely gets his ass handed to him in Counter-Strike. See folks, sometimes all the hardware in the world just won't help you when you suck. ;-)

Speaking of hardware ownage, rumours have it that Nvidia's new GPU/videocard/toaster-oven/french-fry-maker awe-inspiringly codenamed the "NV20" is supposed to be released on Feb 27 2001. Start saving those pennies now! I'm sure that poor Nolman will be really excited to hear about this news as soon as he stops crying over his now obsolete GeForce 2 Ultra.
(you all realize that I'm really an Nvidia PR rep wannabe in disguise don't you?)

Some of the Fabled specs on the new wonder-chip are as follows:

Fabrication Process: 0.15 or 0.13-micron
Transistors in the Core: 30~50 million
Rendering Pipelines: 4
Texture Units per Pipeline: 3
Core Speed: 300MHz
Memory Speed: 250MHz (DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 8G/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 1200 million-pixels/sec
Texel Fill Rate: 3600 million-texels/sec
Triangles Processing Speed: 150 million-triangles/sec

Check out this guy's Geocities (?!) page here. Again, some people might be inclined to think that the guy is smoking a particularly potent brand of crack as these are only rumours (i.e. read at your own risk, take this with a big-ass gain o'salt) but he's come through before and was apparently right about the GeForce 2 GTS. Props go out to Hard OCP for this one.

For more NV20 goodness head over to this page at Riva3D where they not only give you the leaked specs but also provide pretty pictures to go with them. Is it me or does this thing look exactly like the GeForce 2 ultra card? hmm....

I've been running the liveware 3 drivers for win2k for a couple months now flawlessly. The other day I started getting lockups and problems while attempting to shut down win2k. It turns out that the problem was the process "devldr32" from the liveware 3 software. I know that a lot of gamers are starting to run win2k & the SBlive is one of the most popular sound cards for gaming so other people may experience the same problem at some point. Here's a few suggested possible problem/solutions I've found on forums and I'll let you know how well they work after I try them:

1) The problem is two copies of the program "devldr32.dll" start running, one on each processor. According to Creative Tech Support, the only way I can get their SBLive board to work under W2K on my dual Xeon computer is to disable virtual IRQ's. -transco

2) If you rename the file, called devldr32.exe to something like devldr32a.exe, then it wont load it at startup. Then put a shortcut to it in Startup folder in the start menu, then reboot and it 'Should' only be in the processes list once. - Nightmare

l'm going to give it a try and see how it works, until then other people who experience the same problems may find that info useful.

Also I appologize for Fridays news being posted on Saturday but as Orangeville citizens know, the cable has been out all over town this weekend and I had to drive to Marauders Computer Store and hook up to his DSL account to do site updates.