Finally.

Yeahhhhhhhhhh

Like $3 shorts from Walmart

Started out with these blocks and more are soon to follow. I barely ever play Minecraft these days so I don't know why these make me so happy but I have always enjoyed cubes and video games, so why not. They're exactly one inch in diameter and have a nice weight to them; only drawback is that they cost about $15 each to print, but I have nothing else to spend my money on. Hopefully these will be available to the public eventually, but I think they need to confirm that they printed successfully first or something.

My AF career is a go.

Guess who just spent $1000 on an ugly-ass overpriced Alienware laptop?

This guy.

It's about time I got around to upgrading. I don't have the time or know-how to build a desktop (not to mention I need mobility right now) and I really want to be able to play games, so I figured why not a "gaming" laptop.

I made it through USAF BMT (made Honor Grad, actually) and now I'm at tech school where I have internet access. Busy learning Air Force things and whatnot but mostly drinking Monsters and eating candy. Probably won't be doing anything creative anytime soon unfortunately; all my free time goes to exercising, keeping my dorm inspection-ready, and playing Starcraft 2!

So I've been using the same Dell Inspiron N4110 laptop for about 4 or 5 years now. It's been very useful and I've taken care of it as best as I know how, but I found out today that I know a lot less than I thought about taking care of a computer, at least in one critical area: graphics.

I always wondered why my old laptop, a POS with 512mb of RAM and equally shitty specs, ran Morrowind better than my current laptop. I can still play it on my current computer, it's just not quite as smooth as it used to be, which is of course a bit weird. I discovered the issue just tonight, while playing Minecraft actually.

Minecraft runs alright on my laptop, but I've always had a few minor lighting bugs. For some reason I always assumed these lighting bugs were just an issue with the game itself, but tonight I finally decided to look them up. Turns out, Intel graphics chipsets tend to have a few issues with games like Minecraft. Okay, no problem I thought, I can live with that, since I'm not going to try upgrading hardware any time soon. Then by chance I read a comment that mentioned Window's Device Manager was unreliable for graphics driver updates. It had never occured to me to manually check that my graphics drivers were up to date.

So I manually updated my drivers, not really expecting anything to come of it..... and now I'm getting a 10+ FPS improvement on almost every game I play. I can even set some graphics settings a bit higher without damaging performance.

Moral of the story is: I'm an idiot who's been suffering lag needlessly for years due to simple ignorance, and you should probably check on your drivers manually to make sure they're up to date.

who's ready

These past two weeks I've been working out a lot more trying to get ready for BMT, and just now as I finished watching Undisputed (thanks @Sense-Offender) I realized that my diet is still way out of control and I've been drinking more soda than water. No wonder I've felt weak.

That's all