CGSociety – Maya 7 Steps Up

I think the funniest thing about this article was that Alias was owned by a Canadian school teacher’s pension fund.

A few months ago, I removed an ASUS 6800GT from my Sony VGC-RA828G when I was doing some troubleshooting to see why my computer was crashing. The problem turned out to be some bad RAM, but in the troubleshooting process I replaced the 6800GT with the ATI X600XT which came with the Sony and never put the 6800GT back. Although the X600XT is a good mainstream card, I missed the better graphics of the 6800GT. The 6800GT ended up on my brother’s new computer at work, so if I wanted a high-end graphics card, I would have to buy a new one. Although F.E.A.R. played okay with the X600XT, I wanted a better graphics experience with future games. I purchased the MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E because it had a decent price from Newegg of $299 after a $30 mail in rebate and bundled Call of Duty 2. My only concern in purchasing the card was that the Sony VGC-RA828G states that it has 364.7 watts max in its specs sheet, but the 6800GT worked fine, so I was hoping the 7800GT would also work. I breathed a sigh of relief when the display came up after installing the new card. After loading the MSI/Nvidia drivers, I installed Call of Duty 2 which shipped as a DVD within the MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E box. The box wasn’t shrink-wrapped when I received it, so I think the Call of Duty 2 DVD may have been a recent addition. I’m glad I purchased Call of Duty 2 with the card because the normal game purchase has 6 CDs for installation – you only get a installation DVD with the deluxe version of Call of Duty 2. Even before I started playing Call of Duty 2, I noticed the screen seemed to be brighter and sharper than when I had the X600XT installed. Initially, Call of Duty 2 defaulted to a display of 1024×768, but I pushed it up to 1600×1200 with 4A on my 21-inch LCD screen and the game still played well. The card is quiet, and I look forward to seeing how well games will look and play with the new 7800GT. In addition to the new 7800GT, the Sony VGC-RA828G has a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 560 (Prescott), front side bus speed of 800 MHz, an Intel 915P chipset, 2 Gb of PC-3200 400 MHz DDR ram (4×512 sticks), and a 400 Gb 7200 rpm SATA drive (Hitachi).

Amazon.com: Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (Scribner Library of Daily Life): Books

This is an example of how an algorithm can mess things up. The suggested book that would be “Better Together” with the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion is Encyclopedia of Rape. I guess the Amazon website sees “Encyclopedia” in both items, and thinks that they would make a good match – PDF of page as an archive in case Amazon fixes the error.

Film Set for iPod nano

Nice protection for your iPod nano that doesn’t add much bulk. I still wouldn’t mind a skin with a clip though.

CBS News | Gaming Grandma Slays Competition

At the age of 39, I thought I was getting a little bit old to play games.

Old Grandma Hardcore Blog

Online shoppers set to storm the Internet Monday / Consumers use workplace’s faster computers for e-commerce

It would be interesting to do an annual comparison of retails sales of Black Monday vs. Black Friday.