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Welcome....
So you're probably wondering how you stumbled across this page. Don't ask me, I don't know. Really, I don't. But, as long as you're here, you might as well stick around. Maybe you'll learn something about how fascinating I am. Or maybe you'll learn that I need to get a life. But the only way you're gonna find out is if you read this page, because I'm not going to read it to you. I couldn't, even if I wanted to. I'm here, and you're...there. You have to read it yourself.
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Jul. 16th, 2009 @ 05:00 pm Finally
Finally, a mere day and a half after the idiots doing construction on the street outside severed our phone line, the phone and internet are back.

Oh, and they also managed to cut a neighbor's water line and pollute our water. Fantastic. This makes three days in a row where they've damaged something. What's next, they burn down the house tomorrow?
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Angel Cordy
Jul. 5th, 2009 @ 01:01 pm No Radio Show Today
Yep, you heard it here first. No radio show today. I'll be back on the air next Sunday at 5 eastern/4 central (in the afternoon) on Ocean Front Jams.
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Angel Cordy
Jul. 1st, 2009 @ 10:47 pm A Few More Things
Advertising in video games is a rather touchy subject. I've seen my fair share of people who either don't want it at all or don't mind it, but I haven't talked to too many who are in the middle (as I am). The way I see it, it's the context that matters. It's acceptable in some games but not in others.

For instance, if I walk into a city in Oblivion, I don't want to see a sign plastered on the castle wall telling me to get my oil changed at Lube King. Even context-appropriate advertising (for instance, for a shop that sells renaissance-type stuff) wouldn't be appropriate in a medievalish world.

On the other hand, such a thing would be a tad tricky in something like Fallout 3. While most advertising would not be appropriate, perhaps an old, worn sign for something like McDonalds could work (though I'm still glad there isn't any advertising there).

So what's the point of any of this, you ask? The idea for this post mainly occurred to me while looking at the rather blatant advertising in "MLB 09, The Show", a game based on major and minor league baseball. There was a big hoopla in the reviews (and somewhat in the forums) about the amount of advertising in-game, but I don't have a problem with it. Nearly every (or every) major league baseball stadium has billboards filled with advertising. In-game, these billboards are still there, and some have been used in the same way as their real-life counterparts. So where's the problem? If anything, it adds a touch to the immersion since any advertising is where it should be and is not just plastered anywhere (as some of the reviews seem to suggest).

Context matters.

******************

In other news, I've been thinking more lately about how if I ever get a couple weeks off from work and school and everything else, I'd like to go somewhere. Obviously with my old car, driving cross-country was pretty much out of the question, but now with a new car, that's not an issue anymore. This one would hold up if I were to try to drive somewhere and see the country (even if for a couple weeks).

On top of that, it's nice to finally have a car that's mine. Ok, so it mostly belongs to the bank, but I am paying it off with my money, and I paid the down payment with my money, so I don't really have to worry about people telling me where I can and cannot drive and how I can't take the car with me whenever I move out.

Here's hoping it lasts me several more years (at least).
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Angel Cordy
Jun. 19th, 2009 @ 11:10 pm One Stormy Day
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Angel Cordy
May. 28th, 2009 @ 10:41 pm A few things
I realize it has been quite a while since my last update. I would apologize for that but I'm not sorry. Really. There have been a few new things, but I've just overall felt "meh" about the whole thing.

That said, probably the only new thing worth mentioning is that I have a new car. Well, a new used car (though it's only a year old). It's a bit of a long story (and it just got longer today), but I won't go into that now. Nope, that's a subject for another time, if at all.

There's new music I've written (and am proud of) and I've made some significant progress on Through the Fire, but I'll go more into those sometime in the future.

But onto the real reason for this post. A few days ago I was suddenly hit with sort of an idea for a fantasy story/novel. I say sort of because I really have very little idea what the overall story arc would be or what anyone in it has to do with anything.

I did, however, write a few paragraphs that are little more than a character introduction, but I like how they turned out so I'm posting them here. I think I'll probably do this story for Nanowrimo come November (just 5 months away!) given that I don't need anymore projects right now.

The only backstory for this excerpt you really need is that in the first chapter, the prince in this kingdom was murdered, leaving the king, well, upset.

How chapter 2 begins )
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Angel Cordy
Apr. 20th, 2009 @ 01:41 am Idjits Abound
I hate AT&T. Have I mentioned that recently?

Tonight the modem decided to do what it occasionally does and erased some crucial piece of information. Specifically, it forgot the username and password to the internet account, and so it was bye bye internet. Now it's been a while since this last happened so I tried a bunch of things (including extensively testing the router to make sure that wasn't the problem, though in the process I had to change the encryption key). But because it had been so long, I had a bit of a brain cramp on how to fix the modem so I just took a couple hours off from working on it. But I decided a few minutes ago to give it another shot and I had everything up and running again in a matter of a couple minutes.

Maybe AT&T should hire me to do tech support (not that I'd necessarily want to), considering their existing tech staff doesn't seem to have a clue. Plus I'm pretty experienced at fixing their problems with how bad the service has been...

It just cracks me up, though, that I took a Jimmy Johns delivery to an AT&T store last week and the guy tried to get me to sign up for a cell phone plan. Man wouldn't take no for an answer. I came quite close to telling him he didn't have a chance what with the craptacular phone and internet service I've been getting at home. Maybe next time I'll bring that up. I do go in there every so often for deliveries and I do feel like unleashing on someone....

On an unrelated note, I've been watching Lost (new episodes as well as from the beginning). I'm up to the middle of the fourth season now. It's certainly not the best show ever (or even the best on tv), but it's interesting, at least. I don't get how people can claim the show is confusing though because it's really not. Yeah, there are lots of weird and unexplained things, but that's just it -- they simply haven't been explained yet (and in theory they will be at some point). But the show itself isn't hard to follow so long as you accept that some seriously weird things happen around that island (and again, supposedly that'll all be explained at the end of the series). *shrugs* I should be finishing the fourth season in a day or two, anyway. Yeah.
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Angel Cordy
Mar. 12th, 2009 @ 12:36 am New Video Card Performance
I have to say, I'm impressed with this new video card. You know, now that it's working. While it's really only an upgraded version of my previous video card (which was a beast on its own), this one has indeed been improved. For instance, it runs about 10 degrees C cooler than the previous card since it blows air out of the back of the case instead of into the computer.

So far I've only tried the card in two games -- Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Oblivion's performance was about the same as with the previous card, which suggests to me that the game isn't optimized as well as it could be. Fallout 3, meanwhile, runs on the same engine but was vastly improved by the new card. With the old card I could run the game with a decent framerate on medium, but not really beyond that if I wanted it to be playable. This new card runs the game on high graphics settings perfectly smoothly, so I decided to try the card on ultra-high (as high as the graphics get), and it still runs about as smoothly as the previous card ran the game on medium. Impressive indeed.

Up next: Crysis. Bring on the beast.
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Angel Cordy
Mar. 11th, 2009 @ 05:04 pm And this is why I was up until 4 am....
So, yeah, I stayed up until 4 am last night with computer troubles.

It started yesterday when my new video card (otherwise known as vidjamacard) arrived courtesy of UPS. So I pulled out the old card and installed the new one. I didn't worry about drivers since I know nVidia cards all run on the same drivers. No big deal there.

But I booted up the computer and got an error that said, "Reboot and select proper boot device". Great. So I went into the bios and looked at the boot order but saw that it looked ok. No problem, I figured it was probably a driver issue, for some reason. So I downloaded the newest drivers from Nvidia and put them on a flash drive then put the old video card back in the computer and tried to boot up so I could uninstall the old drivers and install the new ones. However, I got the same error. Now things were really fishy, given that a video card that had just worked suddenly wasn't.

A short amount of Googling later, I found that perhaps the Windows boot got messed up and that going into the Windows recovery console could fix it. So I dug out my Windows disk and tried to get it to run setup, only to receive a STOP error. I googled the error and found there could be a number of causes, from a boot sector virus (which seemed unlikely) to hardware problems to driver problems (I figured it was the third option).

Another trip into the bios, however, revealed that somehow it wasn't detecting the hard drive at all. Well, crap. I figured this was like the problem I had dealt with when first building the computer, so I went online to look for SATA drivers, put them on a floppy and dug out and installed the old floppy drive I have. But after installing the SATA drivers, I ended up with the same STOP error. I figured perhaps a cable had come loose, so I checked all the cable connections and saw that they seemed okay. But by this point it was 4 am (I had spent 5 hours doing the above) and I needed sleep, so I figured I would pick up where I left off after work today.

So I got home from work today and, for good measure, swapped out the SATA cable from the hard drive. Then I noticed something odd in the process of making sure everything else was hooked up. I followed the power cable plugged into the back of the hard drive and found that it ran only to a fan on the inside of the case with nothing plugged in in between. Huh. So in about five minutes this afternoon I found that the power cable for the hard drive had simply disconnected while I was installing the video card last night. *facepalm* Needless to say the computer started up without any trouble. Nice waste of five hours that was.
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Angel Cordy
Mar. 8th, 2009 @ 11:41 am The Proof
I've had a few things bouncing around in my head lately, so I figure I might as well post them here. This post is going to be sort of long, but I'm dividing it into three sections for you. This post also may or may not be the first in a series. Don't know yet.

Anyway...

The Existence of God )

The Problem With Evolution )

A Perfect God )
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Angel Cordy
Mar. 5th, 2009 @ 10:32 pm Three Projects
In order to make things manageable, I have decided to focus my efforts on three different projects (instead of the bajillion different things I'm working on, most of them novels). This way I can at least divide up my time and not feel guilty about not spending enough time on x project or about neglecting y project, because I really don't need that. This doesn't mean I'll ignore all other projects altogether; if I end up with specific inspiration for one of them, I'll go with it for a bit. But otherwise they'll be left alone for now.

These three projects are:

My Music -- Considering I have been writing music for about 15 years, if not longer, I think this is one that's going to keep on going for as long as I can keep on writing. Even though my album is slowly nearing completion, that won't be the end, not by a long shot.

Hollow Creek --My animated series about the supernatural goings-on in the fictional town of Hollow Creek, Montana. This one's my baby...if it ever gets done. It's going, just very very slowly. Though once I finish designing all the characters it should go a whole lot faster.

Through The Fire --The novel I started for Nanowrimo in 2006 and continued last year. This is by far the longest book I've ever written -- 133,000 words and counting -- and it's far from complete. I'm guessing it might end up somewhere around 200,000. This project will very likely be the first of the three to be finished (in fact I expect to at least have a rough draft done this year).

So what does this mean for the other projects? It means they may or may not get their turn. Fear not, those of you following Circle of Fire -- that one will be the first substitute once one of the other projects (probably Through The Fire) is done, meaning it's pretty much just on a short hiatus for now. Understand that I don't necessarily want to put that project (or To Dust, for that matter) on hold, it's just that I have to because I've found that while I can balance three projects, four is just too much.
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Angel Cordy