What a weird few weeks I’ve had.
It all started when my laptop died. Hard drive went into seizures, threw a fit and melted down in flames and a rush of ozone. I exaggerate, but that’s pretty much what it felt like, watching all my lovely files go WAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa……. down to the place even /dev/null can’t go.
Seems all in all it’s been a solid positive since then, though. For one, it looks as though my novel’s getting published — that’s The Grey Knight, for all you Amazon-watchers, though you can damn well bet I’ll post a link here when it’s actually going up for sale. Waiting with all the patience I can summon for my editor to tell me “THEY BOUGHT IT” or “THEY CALLED YOU SILLY NAMES”, but I know she’s presenting it to the team with a proposition to buy, so I’ve got all my appendages crossed. That can be crossed without causing pain. Et cetera. I’ll ramble more about that stuff later.
Also got contacted by a company that’s doing a massive online game (yes, for those of you who I know via independent game development, an actual company with actual money). Friend of a friend sort of thing, but I’ve gone through the preliminary stages of design tests with them, they like what I can do and we’re doing the contract negotiation dance to see if I can do some work for them on their next up-and-coming game.
And lastly, I got the new hard drive from Dell very quickly; was a breeze to install, and instead of coming pre-loaded with NTFS (gah, spit, bleh) I was able to load it up with FAT32 in two partitions, which, as any gamer will tell you, is the ONLY way to format a drive. NTFS = No Two Files Survived, in my case, so I’ll stick with the simple but elegant solution. I had a backup from a month ago on my external drive, so most of my shareware and licenses are intact, so I’m pretty much back up to speed now. And yes, I’ve missed my World of Warcraft!
On a sad note: nothing that uses the Unreal Tournament engine seems to want to run properly on my laptop. *sigh* My favorite fragging game apparently uses reported processor cycles instead of a proper timing mechanism to determine framerate, and thus my laptop, which reports 600 cycles from its Pentium M but actually runs more like 1600 cycles, is just impossible to play. I’ve changed drivers, set compatibility modes, all to no avail. I may be forced to install UT2003. So sad.
Good enough for an opening blog. If anyone can figure out how the hell to get UT running on a Pentium-M on reasonable speeds please, please, let me know!
