Mom & Dad, I present to you the primordial god of darkness.

My parents bought their PC maybe 7 years ago. Stock, the eMachine ran Windows XP, came with a 5400 RPM 80GB hard drive, 512MB (2x256MB) of DDR memory, Intel integrated graphics w/VGA port, and an AMD 3800+ single-core CPU. Over the years I have had to fix it several times because of either hardware failure or stupid user software mistakes. I reinstalled Windows twice, upgraded the video card to a crappy discrete graphics card, quadrupled the memory to 2GB of performance RAM, replaced the optical drive twice, replaced the storage with a 7200 RPM 500GB HDD, replaced the 15” 1024x768 eMachines VGA monitor with a 20” 1440x900 Asus DVI display, and replaced the PS/2 trackball mouse with a wireless USB optical mouse.

A few weeks ago while visiting my parents I attempted to use their computer to show them a YouTube video at a resolution of 720p. The piece of crap couldn’t even play the video at one frame per second. I was saddened and curious if my gaming PC from 2002 would have the same problem. I went home, started it up and had the same issue. I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in this thing and it still couldn’t stably play the video. That night I decided they needed a new computer, because no human should be deprived of YouTube.

Both of my parents have birthdays this week; one on the 23^rd and the other on the 25^th. I never remember whose is on which day because they fall so close. Since my folks needed a functional computer and I had a couple of aging gaming PCs, I figured I’d give them one and replace it with something more current. I chose to sacrifice Erebus and ordered the parts for Shepard last week. My personal computer naming scheme has traditionally pulled from Greek and Roman mythology, but after recently completing Mass Effect 1 and 2 I was inspired to name this one after the mainprotagonist, John Shepard. This was due mostly to the case I picked out. NZXT’s Phantom 410 mid-tower case looks like something straight out of the Mass Effect universe. I kept the WiFi card and Radeon 6850 from Erebus to use in Shepard. After delivering their birthday present around 10:30 PM last Saturday night I tutored them on Windows 7 until almost 2:00 AM.

What would normally have taken a couple of hours; I spent all day Friday building Shepard. The reason for the time inflation is because I filmed every step as an instruction video for my YouTube channel. I have always wanted to create helpful instructional projects and share my random knowledge with the world. With several failed attempts at writing tutorials, because of distractions and forgetting to go back to finish them, this seemed like a prime opportunity to complete one. The videos still have to be edited so they haven’t been posted yet, but I will inform everyone as soon as they are done.

Meta-meta-Catching Up

Catching up on life has been a top priority since my departure from Azeroth in May 2011. It is because of this that the games list and quite a few of the other sections of DJHicks.net were totally out of date by about two years. This has, for the most part, been remedied. I just finished the January 2012 video game inventory update. My backlog of blogs will be trickled out over the next couple of months beginning now. The following was written over New Year’s weekend about a month ago.

We’re still at the cabin in Cosby, Tennessee. My second goal for the New Years escape was to catch up on the backlog of blogs I have been collecting notes for since early last year. I wrote the following on my phone sometime around May of 2011. I arrived 30 or so minutes early for class and decided to stay in the car to write (or I guess, thumb type) while listening to Opie & Anthony on SiriusXM. While old, it was completed so what would be the point in not posting it? Here you go:

So, I was doing some research while driving to school and came upon the 2011 Grammy nominees for best score. Can you tell what's missing from this list?

Best Score Soundtrack

Toy Story 3 – Randy Newman (winner)

Alice in Wonderland – Danny Elfman

Avatar – James Horner

Inception – Hans Zimmer

Sherlock Holmes – Hans Zimmer

... You're going to sit there and tell me that effin' Randy Newman's recycled Toy Story album takes home the big W while Daft Punk's completely fresh & original Tron Legacy score isn't even nominated? The Grammys are worthless and their nominators are either out of touch, or too old and lame to decipher innovation from effing Randy the ef Newman.

The only redemption would be if Tron Legacy fell outside the timeframe for the 2011 nominations. The list did contain Avatar, which came out in 2009. If this is the case I expect a Daft Punk nomination and/or win for 2012 unless something mind-blowing comes out between now and then.

January 29^th, 2012 update: Nothing has trounced the Tron Legacy soundtrack to date.

Best Case EVER!

Same old ...crap, just a different year.

To celebrate the New Year, Jennifer and I traveled to a cabin in north Tennessee with no internet, television service, or cell phone reception. I figured I could use this time off the grid to complete random things without the distractions of Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield 3. The first item on my list of things to do was organizing the pictures that have built up over the past few months from various devices. This has proven to be more difficult than it ever should have been.

I took my MacBook Air to accomplish the various digital things on the aforementioned list. On this laptop I dual boot with OSX Lion and Windows 7 Home Premium. This is necessary because I am not a fan of OSX, but I do like the compact form factor of the Air. Unfortunately Asus announced the Zenbook a couple of weeks after I ordered the MacBook. Oh well, that’s how it goes for me. Anyway, for Apple products to be marketed so heavily toward artsy individuals, they sure make it difficult to quickly manage and edit large quantities of photos. Perhaps I am missing something. All I need is to be able to navigate through a folder of pictures with the left and right arrow keys and have the convenient options of rotation and deletion one easy tap or click away. This is the default method of browsing pictures in Windows. On the Mac side of the notebook I have had to customize the “Preview” program to sort of do this with awesome results like:

Since I can blaze through the picture sorting process using Windows, I switched over and began to work. I ran into another issue concerning the pictures I have taken, specifically with the iPhone 4S. To get pictures off my phones, since the 3GS, I have plugged them into a PC, dragged, and dropped. I do this now with the 4S and the pictures are turned crazy ways like upside down. When I try to rotate and save them in Windows using the picture viewer I receive a message stating something like, “You do not have permission to edit the photo.” I respond with, “(insert various vulgar remarks).” I figured out how to bypass this nonsense by opening a folder of pictures in bulk with Microsoft Office 2010 Picture Manager then rotating and saving them en masse. After doing this to a few hundred pictures I rebooted to OSX because that’s where My Dropbox Photos folder is sync’d. When I attempted to edit the Dropbox pictures across partitions I was denied. So yeah, another inconvenience most likely thanks to Apple. Perhaps I could share the folder and solve the problem. I’ll try that later. For now I have had to keep the pictures on my flash drive.

In OSX, when opening the iPhone 4S pictures that I just fixed in Windows 7 they are all crazy ways again. The opposite crazy of the crazy before the rotation. (If you’re new to the Blog or to me in general, I phrase things weirdly for comedic affect. I know that sentence was horrible and it’s also kind of a metaphor for how retarded this whole process has been.) Somehow Apple has, as far as I can tell, unreasonably made photos taken with their devices retain separate properties/characteristics when viewing them on Apple products. This is extremely frustrating and I cannot fathom a valid reason for such a dumb idea. I shall sort this out when I get home to an internet connection and a real PC. First goal: incomplete.

Fanboys

“I have a Radeon HD 6990, 6850, and 4850 running in three different PCs and they give me no problems. The Radeon 6990 replaced a GeForce GTX295 which replaced a Radeon 4870X2 which replaced a GeForce 9800GX2 and so on. Having no bias, I get the best card at the time. Hating on one company is dumb.” – DJ Hicks

This was my response to some fools on the Tested forums who were blindly bashing AMD and their Catalyst Control Center. It gets on my nerves when idiots spread misinformation because of some juvenile brand loyalty. There is a derogatory (at least how I would use it) word for these types: fanboys. I think this mental disability should have a proper name though. Oh yeah, it does…

Stockholm Syndrome, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor.” Wikipedia defines it as “an apparently paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.” DJ Hicks likes the Wiki version and adds, “Individuals plagued with this retardation display the communal characteristics of; closed-mindedness, unrespected by society, blindly obedient, fearful of the truth, incapable of self-thought, and possessing a pathetically desperate need to belong.

Fanboys come in various forms, but all share the previously noted handicaps. Nintendo fanboys show their support of the video game corporation by purchasing every system, game, and novelty associated with said company, and their intellectual properties. They are day one customers with regard to not only software releases, but even Nintendo’s traditionally biannual hardware refreshes. These gamers preorder upcoming and usually delayed games at GameStop even though there is no chance of anything ever selling out. This is also true of Sony and Microsoft’s loyal gaming fan base, just not quite as oddly man-child like. An overwhelming majority of video game fanboys read, and put their misplaced trust into IGN and Game Informer. I say read, but they really only look at the review scores and ironically accuse the reviewers of being biased. Some go so far as to educate the uninformed or argue meaningless points on message boards using unsubstantiated statistics in an attempt to validate their unreasonable obsession with a corporation.

Company-wise, the most appropriate example of Stockholm Syndrome when referring to fanboys is Apple. I have yet to see a more dedicated while consistently abused corporate fanbase. Apple is a master in the art of self-obsolescence with minor periodical tweaks to hardware and software. This is done in correlation with limiting the expandability of users’ current hardware and software eventually forcing their conservative customers to invest in the next version of the product. Despite everything the company produces being obnoxiously overpriced and annually iterated upon, Apple fanboys swarm retailers and websites so that they can be the first to have the shiny new thing that serves the same purpose as last year’s model, which they already own. Taking people who are actually creative out of the equation, most Apple supporters subscribe to the “do other people think I’m special because I have this new Apple product?” mentality. You can easily spot them in the wild because fanboys like to provide free advertising to multi-billion dollar corporations. Apple includes a sticker of their logo with everything they sell making it super convenient for these losers to label their vehicles and other goods. To me, these stickers scream “I aspire to be a douche bag.”

Full disclosure: I own almost all video game systems in existence including everything from Nintendo except the 3DS. The computers I have owned in my life thus far have run every version of Windows, a couple running some form of Linux, and most recently an Apple MacBook Air running OSX Lion. Using a variety of technologies has strengthened my objectiveness when forming opinions and making decisions. Having an informed opinion is right below honesty and integrity in my hierarchy of proper living. I conclude this sermon with three questions you should ask yourself: Am I being reasonable? Do I have an open mind? Am I thinking logically?