Vista:

- Classic Start Menu sometimes stops working for me. I click “Start”, point to an item, and click. The Start Menu then closes, not running anything. Task Manager is required to log off or restart then, as the Log Off and Shut Down buttons on the Start Menu don’t even work then.

- Refresh Rate locking like in Windows XP doesn’t work. Windows Vista forces me to just 75Hz when I know my monitor can go higher.

- Event Viewer window doesn’t scroll when you click on the scroll bar and drag it down. Vista has successfully reverted to Windows 3.1 behavior here.

I usually keep hidden and system files/folders always visible, so these two bother me:

- NTFS Junctions for backwards compatibility are all over the place. They clutter up folder views and Explorer gives an error dialog if you try to open one.

- The users’ main documents folder went from a ‘My Documents’ layout to their profile directory, which contains a dozen files and folders. Do I really need to have a folder on my Desktop that lists multiple copies of my NTUSER.DAT file?

…more coming soon…

These Windows XP visual styles are authentic Microsoft themes. They have been created and digitally signed by Microsoft. Nothing is required to use these with Windows XP. You don’t need WindowBlinds, StyleXP, or a patched UXTheme DLL.

Just extract these to your \Windows\Resources\Themes folder, and you should be able to select them under Display Properties -> Appearance.

“Energy Bliss” (Theme from Media Center): Energy_Bliss.zip (1,051KB)

“Royale” and “Royale Noir”: Royale_Noir.zip (779KB)

“Zune Style”: Zune_Theme.zip (179KB)

i dont have cable or satalite. i think the last time i had cable was in the 1990s.

every now and then, i do get to watch cable and/or satalite at a friend or relative’s house.

stuff on cable for the most part doesn’t hold my interest. i like watching news programs (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, etc). TechTV use to be cool, with all their video game shows and stuff, but after the merger with G4, it seems like everytime i turn it on, all they are showing is more anime or another episode of “The Man Show”.

something i saw recently really caught my attention. it was called “Korgoth of Barbaria”. it is an ultra-violent cartoon shown on “adult swim”. while flipping through channels one night, a “TV-MA” warning caught my attention. what followed was some weird humor, interesting animation, and over the top gore and violence. what was also there, was an actually plot and story to the show.

from Wikipedia:
“Korgoth of Barbaria is an American animated television series created by Aaron Springer, the storyboard artist of SpongeBob SquarePants. The pilot episode first aired in the United States on June 3, 2006 at 12:30 AM (EST) on Adult Swim. On June 18th, Adult Swim ran a bumper announcing Korgoth was officially picked up as a series.”

from IMDB:
“Have you ever been to an animation film festival? Imagine one of the funniest of the violent independent animations you’ve seen, fill it full of gag humor like you might see on Futurama, apply a mini-epic plot, add copious amounts of heavy metal, and you’ve got Korgoth of Barbaria.”

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810644/

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korgoth_of_Barbaria

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This page is under construction.

I started doing this NOT for piracy reasons. It all started with me getting a corrupted save with Soul Calibur III (something a lot of people experience with that game).
I ended up purchasing a copy of “Action Replay MAX” to help. It came with a 16 Meg memory card, and software that let my PS2 work with my 128 Meg USB thumb drive.
I found out I could copy save files from my PC to my PS2 memory cards. I then learned about the Memory card exploit.

The exploit cause some sort of error with the PlayStation 2, allowing you to run a program off the memory card. That program was a file manager. It allowed you to install other programs on the memory card.
One of the coolest programs is called “HD Loader”. It lets you copy games to a hard drive in the PS2 to play from. Game load a LOT quicker from the hard drive than the CD/DVD they originally came on.

With the HD Loader, I ran into issues of space. I learned how to “shrink” games then. Several games have “dummy” files on them that take up space on the disc. These dummy files “push” other files to a different physical location on the CD/DVD, where they are read faster. On a hard drive, they aren’t needed.
I had to learn how to copy modified images of games to the HD Loader, since it complained about the game not being on a PS2 disc.

A lot of this was copied from various web forums.

I found lots of info, but ran into problems.

Some things worked, some didn’t. I didn’t understand why some things worked, and why some things didn’t.

As I learned more about what I was doing, I became increasingly frustrated.

I couldn’t find tools and programs I wanted. Lots of 404s, down web servers, bad info. Some of the programs were the wrong version.

One of the most frustrating things were the people themselves that I was getting this info from. Some didn’t know what they were doing. Some didn’t know how to describe what they did. They left out steps, the version of the program they used, download links, and other information that made doing simple things difficult. It also seems like half the people who write information for other people to use don’t even have a middle-school level of education. Incredibly poor grammar and spelling made it hard to read what some people were saying.

http://www.ps2hd.com/list/ – list of hard drive compatible games.

http://www.ps2-scene.org/ – ps2 related

Here are some files.

NOTE: THESE ARE MOSTLY OUTDATED. Always make sure you have the most up to date files.

http://xenomorph.net/files/ps2/cdgenps230.zip – used to rebuild a PS2 ISO

http://xenomorph.net/files/ps2/exploit.zip – pre made PS2 exploit file (contains 800 game TITLE.DB). use Action Replay MAX to install. (MAX format)

http://xenomorph.net/files/ps2/hddfrmt11.zip – hard drive formatter tool. can be used to remove a directory after a bad game install.

http://xenomorph.net/files/ps2/hdinstall.zip – hdl_dumb. old version of Hard Drive installer. (0.8.4)

http://xenomorph.net/files/ps2/hdloader-0.7e.zip – old version of HD Loader.

http://xenomorph.net/files/ps2/soulcalibur3_2.0_usa.zip Soul Calibur 3 “2.0″ patch/fix. this is for the USA/NTSC version of SC3. Soul Calibur 3 1.0 has a save-corruption bug. this is supposed to fix it. copy the files from your SC3 disc to your hard drive, replace the files with the ones in this zip, rebuild the ISO with cdgenps230, then load it onto your hard drive with hdl_dumb.

/sc3_savebug/soul_calibur_iii_file_corruption.txt – text file with info on the SC3 save bug.

(Page ID: 393)

Sometimes I’d find files or folders on my hard drive that I could NOT delete.

These are not files locked by some program, or from wrong permissions. They are files and directories with illegal Windows names.

Trying to rename or delete the file / directory would result in a Windows error message stating “Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk.”

Here is an example folder that appears to have no file name:

The “dir /x” command at a command prompt reveals a different DOS/8.3 file name.

The command that worked for me:

rmdir \\.\d:\server\ftp\anon\0202~1

This is from Windows Annoyances regarding someone else who had a similar problem.
(The thread is at: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/r1012635248)

To answer everyones questions here, I have tested and done a great deal of work on
this, since there is NO documentation on the internet, here is how to create and
remove these ‘rogue’ file/directory names!

UPDATE:

There may be files or folders you can’t seem to delete, even when going through all the above steps.
There are programs out there that have been designed to delete files and folders with invalid names.

DelinvFile is one such program.

Some “SecuROM” copy protection crap got on my system, and created files with invalid names that Explorer could not work with or delete. DelinvFile was able to delete those files.

Microsoft has made available Windows Vista RC1 (Release Contender) for download here:

http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm

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Half-Life High Definition Pack for Steam Guide

This page is very outdated now. The information here is for the pre-Steam version of Half-Life 1.

You can get a custom HD Pack installer for Steam from FilePlanet:
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/130000/135089.shtml

From Planet Half-Life:

One of Half-Life: Blue Shift’s biggest selling points has to be the “High Definition Pack,” a graphics upgrade for Half-Life, which adds visually enhanced player and weapon models. The models, and their respective animations, contain double the amount of polygons over their original versions – and best of all, it’ll also upgrade all the weapons and models in Half-Life and Opposing Force too!

If you try to install the HD Pack, and don’t have Blue Shift or the legacy versions of Half-Life or Opposing Force installed, you will get this message:

The setup process will end right there.

If you copy and paste the text below into a new text file with the extension of REG, you can import the settings into your registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP\bshift]
"directory"="C:\\Sierra\\Blue-Shift"
"Full Name"="Half-Life: Blue Shift"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP\halflife]
"directory"="C:\\Sierra\\Half-Life"
"Full Name"="Half-Life"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIERRA ONLINE\SETUP\OPFORENG]
"directory"="C:\\Sierra\\OpFor"
"Full Name"="Half-Life: Opposing Force"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX\BLUESHIFT]
"upgrade"="no"
"shared"="C:\\Sierra\\Blue-Shift\\bshift"
"installed"="no"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX\HALFLIFE]
"upgrade"="no"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GEARBOX\OPFOR]
"upgrade"="no"

That will place the default installation values in your registry – what the HD Pack installer is expecting to see.

What happens then when you run the HD Pack installer?

The games are found!

Once it allows you to continue the installtion, have it copy the files somewhere.

If you go with the default, the files will be copied into the C:\Sierra folder.

Now you need to download a PAK viewer. You can get one HERE.

If you like, you can follow the guide found HERE for extracting the correct files into your Steam installation.

Basically, you want to extract the files from the PAK1.PAK file from the “C:\Sierra\Half-Life\Valve” folder into the equivalent folder in your Steam installation of Half-Life.

For example:

C:\Program files\Steam\SteamApps\email@address.com\half-life\valve

Of course replacing email@address.com with the e-mail address your copy of Steam uses.

Original, Low Detail:

Updated, High Detail:

(Page ID: 328)

This is just a silly little set of pictures (and certainly not “epic” in any way).

I use to have a young gerbil that was quite… “fond” of an older gerbil I had. One day I decided to take some pictures of what was going on in their cage.

(Page ID: 327)

(Under Construction)

This is the forth car I’ve owned. My first was a 1991 Chevrolet Cavalier that I purchased used in 1997. It lasted me to about 2001. My second car was a 1987 Chevrolet Celebrity that I paid a guy in a salvage yard $300 for. My third was a Chrysler LeBaron Turbo Convertable, also purchased used. I also use to drive my sister’s old 1986 Dodge Charger, and my dad’s 199x Buick LeSabre.

2002 Kia Rio, purchased new in Oct 2002.
Light Silver

Engine: 96-hp DOHC 16v 1.5-liter inline-4 “MI-Tech”
Miles Per Gallon: 25 City / 30 Highway
Air, Automatic, AM/FM CD-Player, Tachometer
Cost: ~$9,000

Miles: 13,xxx (Jul 03)
Miles: 14,xxx (Aug 03)
Miles: 15,xxx (Sep 03)
Miles: 16,xxx (Oct 03)
Miles: 18,xxx (Nov 03)
Miles: 22,xxx (Dec 03)
Miles: 24,xxx (Jan 04)
Miles: 28,xxx (Mar 04)
Miles: 29,xxx (Apr 04)
Miles: 32,xxx (Jun 04)
Miles: 34,xxx (Jul 04)
Miles: 41,xxx (Oct 04)
Miles: 46,xxx (Jan 05)
Miles: 72,xxx (Jan 06)
Miles: 85,xxx (Jul 06)
Miles: 100,xxx (Mar 07)

Miles: 104,xxx (Jun 07)

Issues I’ve had with the car:

The car seems slightly underpowered. It performs about the same as my 1991 Cavalier performed, but weaker than my 1987 Celebrity. Nothing I can really do about that, it has a tiny engine.

The steering wheel seems to get way off-center if the either one of the front tires are inflated differently or have slightly different tread height. When delivering pizzas, I’d knock the alignment out a lot and wear the tires down unevenly, so I’d spend most of my time driving with my steering wheel turned 45 degrees to the left or right in order to go straight.

The camber of the front passenger wheel seems to be slightly off, which may have been caused from hitting something I shouldn’t have.

This is what my car looks like:

Since this is the first car I’ve had where I better understand how it works, I eventually would like to learn how to make small modifications to it (air intake, etc). With my other cars, I treated them like they were someone else’s. They were used, after all, so I never really bothered to get to “know” the vehicles.

Things I’ve worked on in the car:

• Replaced Rotors
• Replaced Brake Pads (Ceramic)
• Took apart, re-lubed, and re-assembled the calipers.
• Replaced heating/cooling blower fan.
• Replaced faulty/damaged wires.
• Repaired faulty cigarette lighter plug.
• Added wiring for a second, “always on”, cigarette lighter plug.
• Refilled the air conditioner’s R134.
• Replaced spark plugs.
• Replaced rust-damaged metal clasps on the exhaust.

(Page ID: 317)

You can get the Simple Machines Forum software from here: http://www.simplemachines.org/

Bleen Theme

Misc files:

XdN Classic Theme for SMF 1.0 (tested in 1.0.1)

Version 1.0e (Jan 26th, 2005)

smf_theme_xdn_classic_1.0e.zip (123 KB)

Show Only Authenticated Users Modification Package for SMF 1.0 (tested in 1.0.1)

Version 1.0.1

ShowOnlyAuthenticatedMembers_101.zip (2 KB)

This modification will only show authenticated users on your Board Index and Member List. This is so if a problem user keeps registering offensive names, they won’t be shown on the forum.

(Page ID: 313)

At the very bottom of the main page is a little language selector and translate button. So far I’ve got it to work with Spanish, French, German, and Italian…

I’m not sure how much this will help anybody, but I’ve seen that my page gets a lot of hits from non-English readers for some reason…

just for fucks sake i logged into HTMLgear to see if my old guest book was still in limbo – let me go back to the beginning. i signed up for a guest book from a service called “Lpage” like 4 years ago. even when my site switched servers and its domain name changed, i always had the same guest book. After Lpage bought/merged/sold/renamed/etc to HTMLgear, all seemed fine until my guestbook stopped working. HTMLgear said I still had the guestbook under my account, but when i tried to access it, it always said “invalid guestbook name” or something similar. so after having the guestbook for 3 years, it was basically gone. now, a year later, i logged in and found out i have full access to the guestbook again!

so here it is, complete with entries going back 4 years.

View Guestbook

Sign Guestbook

I will try to have some pictures soon of my wedding. I’ve been in the process of moving the past few days – and I don’t have access to a computer & scanner right now.

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I have taken up skateboarding. My skateboard is a World Industries. Sorry, I don’t know the deminsions on it, I’m still new at the whole skating scene. I have fallen on my ass only once in my first day.

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