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Ok, I’m starting to hate technology. Last night when I was playing Everquest 2 I noticed that my computer was making a lot of noise. I decided to shut it down until I felt like trying to figure out what was wrong. Today, the first thing I did was clean the fans, but that didn’t help. During the day I remembered that my previous video card starting making a similar noise after I had it for a while. That was when I decided to buy my current card. I took my current card out and started the computer without a card and it is SOOO quiet. I hope that it actually was starting without the card and the silence didn’t cause me to mis-diagnose the source of the noise. The card that I have now has always been a little loud, but not this loud. I blew as much dirt as I could off of it, but that didn’t help. There may not be anything wrong with the card, but the noise is annoying.

I miss having Kris around with his 20,000 spare parts. I could just pop in a spare video card and see if everything is ok. I guess I’ll just buy a new one and hope the problem is solved. I was thinking about getting a new card anyway.

On Thursday through Saturday there was a conference in Jackson that I was told to attend. It was sponsored by this group that is trying to encourage minority graduate education in Mississippi. I have so many other things I need to be working on, I wouldn’t have gone if I had a choice. Most of the stuff on the agenda was stuff that I’ve either already heard before or stuff that doesn’t do me any good to hear now since I’m almost done with graduate school.

So I went down to Jackson on Thursday and after getting something to eat and doing some shopping I went to the conference site. After a while I was starting to get bored out of my mind. I looked at the agenda and didn’t see anything interesting, so I decided to skip the rest of the night’s festivities. I went to see Ocean’s Twelve at the theater in Clinton. I even got my own Regal Crown Club card, which I remember Randall mentioning a few weeks ago. I thought it was a good movie, though I can’t compare it to the first one since I barely remember it. It’s pretty rare to see a good movie with so many big name actors.

Friday was a bit more interesting but nothing really noteworthy. On Saturday I left early in the morning and drove back to Starkville. Hopefully one day I’ll get to go to a real conference.

The first week of school was last week. This is the first time I’ve been in classes since May so it felt a little weird. I almost forgot to go to class on the second day. The only class I’m taking is Advanced Computer Graphics (MW 2:00-3:15). This is the first time this class has been offered since I entered the graduate program. I don’t think there was anything on the syllabus that I hadn’t been exposed to before, but hopefully I’ll still learn a lot. I think the programming assignments will be the most useful.

May will be here soon and I will finally be out of school. I can’t wait.

I upgraded to Movable Type 3.14 today. Let me know if something doesn’t work.

Early this morning I finally finished reading Chainfire by Terry Goodkind. Once again, Goodkind did an excellent job. After the first few chapters, I had trouble putting it down.

Goodkind has said that the Chainfire trilogy will end the series and I am getting a real sense that the end is near. Some of the plotlines are tied directly to events from previous books. Plotlines from almost each of the previous eight books were mentioned, even if Richard was using the events to try to convince everyone he wasn’t insane.

One problem I have is that it takes the characters a long time to grasp simple ideas. This has been true since the beginning of the series. People spend way too long trying to get other supposedly smart people to grasp concepts that I get right off the bat. And they always use some kind of analogy to drive the point home. I guess I would just prefer it if Goodkind sped things up a little.

Another complaint is that by now people should learn to believe Richard when he’s sure that something is wrong. No matter how little proof he has to support his claims, they should at least given him the benefit of the doubt. I guess Richard’s only previous experience with people not believing him was when Kahlan was around. She’s not around this time to stick up for him.

Anyway, I almost wish that I hadn’t read it so quickly. Some moron spoiled the ending for me, but that didn’t take away from the experience too much. I can’t wait to read the next 2 parts of the trilogy. Hopefully, I won’t have to wait too long.

I hardly ever finish games these days, but over the break I finished two: Halo 2 and X-Men Legends.

I guess I can understand why people are upset about the ending of Halo 2. The rest of the game is fun enough to make up for it. New weapons. New vehicles. New point of view. Awesome! Jason and I went on Xbox Live to play against other real people and we got owned. The only game we did really well in was a game against a bunch of little kiddies. We figured that if we memorized the maps we could do a lot better.

X-Men Legends is another fun game. If you like hack-n-slash action RPG’s like Diablo, you’ll enjoy this one. You’ll especially like it if you are an X-Men fan. At times it suffers from the same problem that most other action RPG’s I’ve played has suffered from. Some of the missions get long and repetitive, and that usually means boring. This game actually had a real conclusion, but they also hinted that there would be more to come. Maybe not the most talked about game of the year, but definitatea fan favorite. I believe I finished it in about 33 hours.

Well, Christmas break is pretty much over. I’ll be heading back to work in about 6 hours. I have to get back on a normal schedule. I started this vacation schedule before Christmas break even began.

Anybody make any resolutions this year? I always avoid doing that so I won’t be disappointed if I break them.

Happy New Year!