Money money money

Everybody has some, most want more.  What sort of world do we live in were the pre-requisite of living is to have money.  I was in grade 2 when the taught me the barter system, which is the basis of all money exchange.  One PS3 is worth 2 weeks of part time work, or 1 week of full time work, or half my rent.  Which is the same as 2 months of groceries for one person, or 857 packs of the old Juicy Fruit.  That's a lot of gum.  I've paid more than twice the price of a PS3 in NSF fees these past 12 months, and a whopping $217 in the past 2 months.  I paid the full price of a PS3 to my mobile phone company because of one week in Cambridge.  I've also paid enough at 7-eleven this past year to pay for half a PS3.

You know looking at my trends on Mint.com has really made me aware of where all my money is going.  And I've noticed I'm paying way too much to my bank in NSF fees all because I'm too impulsive and pay my bills too early.  If I just waited till the companies that take out the money on there own are finished, I can pay off a bunch of others without incurring more NSF fees.  The only problem now is the negative balance on my bank accounts.

oblivion mods

I'm working on a mod right now that will put a Jester's Outfit into Oblivion.  yes that's right for the past 3 years I could have made a mod for oblivion, but I wait until skyrim is 2 months away before even starting.

Last day for Game Drift Linux

Well It's been fun seeing yet another Ubuntu on my gaming computer, but I just can't use it for gaming.  Wine isn't working well on my current video card, and GameDrift sucks for support.  I sent an e-mail 3 days ago asking if there was any reason why sound shouldn't work on crossover and wine.  No response, so I'm shirking this linux in favour of my old winXP install.  Luckily I had the foresight to make a back up of my hard drive before switching to GameDrift.  Unluckily I didn't have a working BartPE with DriveImage XML on it until today.  It took me a few tries , but it'll work now.  I used UBCD4Win, which I had to build using a VBOX hdd image I keep on my external for just such occasions.  long story short I had to add the following lines into dixml.inf

Normaliz.dll=2,,4
iertutil.dll=2,,4

This made driveimage XML work perfectly on my test VBOX session, and so now I am burning it to DVD and rebooting into windows to copy my back up onto my current internal hard drive.

Soon I will have a new video card, and after I install it I'm making the machine dual boot Windows XP and the proper Ubuntu 10.10 (because I hate 11.04 on a desktop).

mini update on gamedrif

So here it is some 24 hours after installing gamedrift and I've noticed a few things.  First, gamedrift prefers crossover to wine which I can completely understand since crossover is wine made easy.  But this means I had to install wine, and then steam, and finally oblivion.  No problem, I've got the latest oblivion steamapp sitting around so I can just copy it over to the new wine prefix.  Well when I tried it a thunderstorm interrupted the copy/install.  Now I've got it running again but due to circumstances I'm not near my gaming computer right now so I'll have to do another update to say how well this has worked.

My Experience with Gamedrift

Now I've been a windows gamer for a while now, since directx came out and 3d games started getting even more popular.  Nowadays I find myself gravitating towards linux, for many various reasons, such as the philosophy behind a good GNU/Linux and just the raw speed of the entire system.  In fact by now I'm using Ubuntu about half the time and Windows XP the other half.  Now this brings in mind why do I use windows at all if I like Linux so much?  Well the answer is gaming.  Steam only works on windows (as far as I knew) but after looking through a bunch of sites and forums, with little help, i found www.steamgamesonlinux.com and it has helped me realize that I don't have to have Windows to play my favourite games (well maybe oblivion because framerate is low on wine right now.

But this whole thing brought me to another question: Are there any linux distrubutions that are designed for gaming in mind. Something of a bare bones Desktop with only crossover, wine, skype, chrome, and a CDN.  Well yes there is www.gamedrift.org will show you more about it.

This post though is dedicated to what I did to get gamedrift going on my computer, and being able to back track to windows should it turn out that Oblivion and Borderlands don't run on gamedrift as well as it did on windows.

Step 1: Driveimage XML (http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm) helped me back up my windows hard drive so I don't loose anything
Step 2: BartPE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) so I can use DriveImage on this computer to get my windows hard drive back.  Downloading the DriveImage BartPE plugin (http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm) is a sub-step here.  And there's loads of places that will teach you how to make a BartPE and what  plugins to use, this is not the place.
Step 3: Download GameDrift Linux (http://gamedrift.org/)  It's a CD ISO file and I was out of CDs.  This explains steps 4 through 6
Step 4: Installed VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) Made a dummy machine so I can check out the BartPE I made, and verify that GameDrift downloaded from MegaUpload properly (first one didn't work)
Step 5: Used Startup Disk Creator (yes the Ubuntu tool) from within VBOX while booting the GameDrift ISO into live mode to make myself a real life USB installer.
Step 6: Ran BartPE ISO within VBOX.  I'm not going to chance all 40gigs of data to an untested CD image.
Step 7: Burn BartPE using gBurner (http://www.gburner.com/) in windows.  It small but powerful, and I love how fast it starts up.  It's almost worth the $30 for buying it, I just wish it did transcoding to DVD Video.
Step 8: Reboot
Step 9: install GameDrift
Step 10: enjoy!