As usual each May I trek down to San Antonio to celebrate the combined birthdays of my sister, brother and myself. I picked up Uncharted 2 for my brother and my sister requested Star Trek Season 2 on blu ray.

I watched my brother cruise through Uncharted 2 and it was totally awesome. I can see why people love that game so much. He blew through it in 2 days, both school nights, so the game is overall really short, however the experience is nearly unparalleled. I think the way they presented the game is phenomenal and extremely polished. If I had one gripe, and this is really silly, it is that they used depth of field blur heavily. It adds a sense of realism but not really. I mean when you look at an object in real life you don’t really notice everything else is out of focus. When you do that in a game it seems more like a technique to force the player to look at a specific thing. I had this problem with Avatar (the movie) as well. Let us look where we want please and our eyes will do the blurring for us. Other than that very minor problem the game was totally excellent.

I made my sister and brother watch Summer Wars. Summer Wars was made by the same people who made The Girl Who Leapt Through Time which I thought was excellent. Actually both are excellent. Anyway I let them watch GWLTT but it was out on DVD and they watched it in English (which the dubbing is really good actually) and they loved it. Summer Wars hasn’t had a DVD release to my knowledge so I made them watch it subtitled. I think that was too much for my brother plus I don’t think he was too invested in the story so he quit halfway through but my sister liked it. I guess 50/50 isn’t so bad.

My sister picked me up the second disc of Gurren Lagann so my collection is now complete. She also picked me up a Green Lantern shirt which I need to shrink down a little. Overall a nice haul since I don’t ask for things really anymore.

Coming home however was kind of a mess. Important facts before I continue:

• I left on the 16th and came home on the 20th.
• I just signed a new lease starting in May. Every time I sign a new lease they give me $50 off my first month on the new lease.
• I don’t usually read my utility bill I get in the mail. I wait for them to post a note on my door. This is due by the 18th
• They usually post said note on my door around the 10th-12th.

Ok so I get home and I see two notices on my door. One saying that I owe nearly $300 and the second one saying that after “multiple” times trying to collect from me, they’ll begin the eviction process at 10AM on the 20th if I don’t pay $180. I read these before I tried opening my door. As I put the key in I wondered if they changed my lock, but it slid right in and opened. As I opened the door I was wondering if they took all my stuff and if so if my cats were still somewhere. I opened the door and there were my cats sleeping on the couch watching TV (automatic timer to deter thieves and entertain my cats).

So an interesting side story is that the past few times I renewed my lease I always get a crazy overdue bill of like a million dollars because they forget that I had 50 dollar reduction for that month so they do like 50 dollars plus 10 dollars it’s late after the 4th so it balloons to some crazy amount. I go to the office and they go “Oh yeah! Forget about it.” then I go about my way.

Combine the above story with the fact that I actually hadn’t received my utility notice yet before I left I guess they added both the 50 I forgot plus utilities plus 10 dollars a day every day it was late and it was nearly 300 bucks. I went in the next day and they say “Oh weird. It shouldn’t be that much. You just owe 30 bucks for utilities.” So I paid and that was a huge sigh of relief. I usually get myself something cool for my birthday so if I had owed 300 bucks then I guess I would have bought myself rent.

So on the topic of getting myself something cool I’ve been needing a computer upgrade for a while. I feel like when I got this processor (Core 2 Duo E6600) I did a bad thing. I have a fairly cramped case and the area where my CPU goes is a total hotspot (800W power supply and a GeForce GTX 280 just below) with cables cluttering everything. I thought it might be great to try some mild overclocking since the motherboard has all these nice autotuning utilities built in for it. Well after a week or two the CPU goes up to like 75 degrees celsius. The rating for the E6600 is like 80 max and eventually it reaches it. I’m thinking that there’s no way this setup should be so hot. I open the case and the 3rd party heatsink had the fan fall off. So I was basically frying the hell out of it. I put it back on and go about my business then a few days later same thing. I open it up and it had falled off again! I’m sort of thinking the thing I bought was junk but I have an epiphany as I’m putting the side back on. The side of this case has this air intake duct that is made for stock coolers. It’s designed to help pull the heat off the CPU and direct it out the side. The problem was with the 3rd party one it was way too tall. So the air duct is like pushing against the apparatus and just knocking it off when I slide it on. Ever since then I feel like my computer has never really performed very well under full load. Clearly no scientific method applied here but in various situations where I feel like I should be getting killer frame rate in an app vs someone with a weaker system, I’m actually underperforming.

So long story short, I’ve been eyeing the Q9400 for a while now. However my motherboard explicitly states I need a BIOS update. BIOS updates being possibly the most frightening thing you can do to a computer because if some weird thing interrupts the update you can basically brick your system. I’ve had a great streak of updating my own and never destroyed a system however the software for updating the BIOS didn’t want to take. So I found I could update the BIOS via floppy. The crazy thing is my floppy disks are freakishly old. I’m kind of risking a lot on a floppy that I have no idea if it’s in good condition or not. I throw caution to the wind and go ahead, right before work. I apply the update and the computer won’t restart. I sort of freak out. I didn’t have time to mess with it unfortunately and had to go to work.

In my spare time at work I looked at the worst case scenario of having to get a new CPU/Motherboard/RAM because why just replace the motherboard and not go for the whole thing if I was going to get a new CPU anyway. The total was like $450 for a cool i5-750 combo which is quite a bit more than the $189 for just the Q9400. I still had hope though for fixing the motherboard though it was very slim. My board comes with something called dual BIOS. Basically it has a backup of the original BIOS and in the event of a bad flash process it will kick in the original BIOS and take you back to square 1. So I broke out the manual and read up on restoring from dual BIOS. The thing says it should work automatically. So since it hadn’t I felt like I was screwed. On my laptop I do more research on the problem and someone said it could be a RAM thing. So my last light of hope was that maybe I had a bad RAM stick. I did some swapping around, which is the worst experience ever with my case/motherboard as I have to remove my video card every time to access the RAM. It worked, I took some sticks out and it reset to the original BIOS.

So did I want to try to get that BIOS update again and risk the headache of this whole thing all over again? Yes. However this time I discover I can put the update on a thumb drive. The update goes without a hitch so all my hopes for the i5 system are dashed. However in addition to getting a new CPU I feel like I need to get some replacement RAM sticks as well.

So my welcome home consisted of a near eviction and nearly destroying my computer. I did avoid both but I feel like this crazy trend of horrible news with near total saves is going to just keep up. I dunno if I can keep up with this rollercoaster!