Back in Utah Today

Thank You! I'll be here all week, and don't forget to tip your waitress.

Patio Garden

A little over a week ago, I potted a couple of tomato plants, a couple of orange bell pepper plants, a couple of red bell pepper plants and basil plant. Everything is doing very, very well except perhaps the basil, which is doing okay.

By the way, did you know that tomatoes are a member of the nightshade family?

I so want one of these devices to grow herbs year round in. My sister has one and loves it.

A few pics:

Coca-Cola Ruined My Life...

...or at least my day this past Tuesday. I was driving to work. It was raining. The 520 was busy; always is during rush hours. Traffic rapidly slowed in front of me. I reacted. The guy behind me driving the Coca-Cola van reacted as well. Just not as quickly or as effectively.

The aftermath:

Crysis

I finally finished Crysis this past week. I never played it on my old rig, but once I got the new hardware, it practically begged to be beat. I played through at normal difficulty with little trouble.

I let it auto pick the quality settings; it chose a medium-high to high setting for everything with my monitor native resolution of 1680x1050. Enabling diagnostic output during gameplay revealed a consistent frame rate of +30 through out the game. That would probably drop in multi-player networked games, but the drop could be compensated for by scaling back on some of the quality settings.

Overall, I'm reasonably pleased with the new rig and video card considering the card was budget priced, compared to my previous one, and the CPU is ostensibly 900MHz slower than the previous one. Obviously both the new video card and the new CPU are actually superior to their predecessors, but on paper, in a certain light, one might be fooled into a hasty judgement otherwise.

Millenium Falcon

Over six months ago, I bought the biggest set that Lego has ever made. At 5195 pieces, the Millenium Falcon is absolutely huge. Once assembled it measures 33" long, 22" wide and 8" tall.

A couple of weekends ago, I finally got around to building the mammoth set. It took the better part of the weekend to do it. Well worth the time. The instructions were very straight forward. Unlike the Death Star II and the Star Destroyer before it, there was very little repetition. Each section was therefore rather novel and interesting. Add to that an additional 2000 pieces more than either of the previous sets and it becomes obvious why the assembly of this one took so much time.

Disassembly will be postponed for a month or two. :)

Obligatory press photo: