Hard Drive Fun

11.22.2004

2 weeks ago I ordered new hard drives. One of mine was developing some bad sectors, which makes me paranoid enough to replace it at the drop of a hat. 1 week ago, a box of hard drives was waiting on my stoop. At that point my real troubles began.

I opened the box to find two Western Digital 250GB hard drives. And that was it. No install discs (usually packed with scripts to transfer data), no instructions, nothing. I'm still running Windows 2000, and I had heard about a problem with large hard drives. It turns out that there's a natural limit of 137GB on a hard drive for most versions of Windows. Luckily, they've patched this for Windows 2000 (in Service Pack 4) and XP (Service Pack 1). I had installed SP4, so I thought I was good to go.

I installed the 1st drive and.... nothing happened. I opened up "My Computer" and didn't see "Your New Hard Drive". I went into the Control Panel to Add New Hardware, and the drive was already there, it even had drivers installed. I was guessing the drive needed to be formatted, but I needed a way to point to the drive to format it. After trying multiple guesses for a day, I finally went to the Western Digital website for an answer. It seems I needed to add the drive under Control Panel - >Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. OK, I can do that. Once I did that it seemed to work ok. I now had a 233GB (after formatting, you always lose a little from formatting) hard drive showing up! I tried the same steps on the second drive. Only 131GB were showing up. That didn't sound right, so I tried to re-format the drive, but the max size it would give me was 131GB.

After trying all kinds of things (including a wrong turn when I accidently knocked the extra IDE card loose), I finally went back to the Western Digital site and searched through their tools. It seems that they have a tool that not only transfers your data and shows you how to install, but also sets up and formats the drive. I only had to search down from the product page 4 extra levels (at about 1.5 days/level) to find out that this was a much needed application to make my hard drive experience a happy one. Western Digital bastards.

So now I have all my hard drives installed and recognized. I'm moving files from old drives to new drives now, hoping to soon have 578GB of potential formatted hard drive hardness from my two new 250GB drives and an old 120GB. All of my old stuff almost filled up an 80GB drive. Now I bet I'll never have to delete anything ever again!

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EC F'N W

11.17.2004

One of the new video releases yesterday was The Rise and Fall of ECW. It's a 2-disc set, the first disc being a 3 hour documentary about the life of ECW, while the 2nd disc has some of the better (I guess) matches. Last night I sat and watched the documentary disc and was amazed by how good it was.

The one thing that really comes through is how much Paul Heyman (The guy running the show at ECW) and Eric Bischoff (The guy running WCW back then) really dislike one another. I've always liked Heyman. Well, once he stopped being a manager I liked him. You could just tell he was doing what he loved, and it still comes through in the interviews when he talks about ECW. In the interview segments where Heyman and Bischoff were talking about one another, you could just feel the animosity between them. It makes you wonder how they do now that they're both working for WWE.

Although 3 hours seems like a long show to cover the history of a wrestling organization, there seemed to be a lot of things left out. They really only touched on the wrestlers that made the move from ECW to WWE (except for the Sandman). I had started watching ECW about the time their popularity peaked. A local cable access channel would air the show at midnight on Saturday, usually (that's the problem with local cable, sometimes people forget to turn a switch). I got caught up in how different the story lines and action were. Like Paul, you could tell that these guys loved what they did, there's no other explanation for why they would put their bodies through the torture that they were going through. They were the underground, counter culture wrestling group. If there were a way that they could have remained that group and survived financially, I bet they would still be around today.

Bleeding. Jumping off 2 story balconies onto burning tables. Cursing at the fans the whole way down.

Permalink movies/tv/dvd wrestling

More Binary Wrestling

11.16.2004

It's been a busy couple of months for me and my wrestling game fetish. I got Day of Reckoning for the Gamecube, which made me get a Gamecube, so while I was at it I got 2 more older wrestling games for the Gamecube. I've learned that wrestling games on the Gamecube are fairly disappointing. I got the latest Smackdown game for the PS2, my annual "it's November, get new wrestling game" fix. It too, was a bit of a disappointment this year. This leads me to the wild card of wrestling games, Rumble Roses.

Rumble Roses isn't the traditional wrestling game. It's chicks. All chicks. All showing off the latest in graphics with bouncing boobs and butts. And a mud wrestling match. Now, as much as that sounds like a porn game, it's actually a good wrestling game. The move sets are well animated. It's not too arcade-like (except when the evil cyborg shows up at the end and starts whirling around). I especially like the way you can concentrate on a specific body part to wear your opponent down.

As far as story, the game plays more like DOA 3. You start with about 10 characters. You pick one and start a story mode that lasts about 10 matches. While each story follows roughly the same track, each one has back story differences unique to the character. Once finishing the story line, you unlock alternate costumes along with the character's heel (or face, depending on which you're playing) character. You can then play an abbreviated story mode with the unlocked character to unlock more costumes. Once you unlock everybody, a new character is unlocked (I've got 5 more to unlock before I find out, but I'm betting the bonus character is the cyborg chick).

It's a fun little game. Going through the story mode for one of the characters takes 20-30 minutes, so it's a nice little diversion. It lacks a lot of things that most other wrestling games have come to offer as standard - creating your own wrestler, different types of matches, guys - but I think that not trying to do everything is what makes this game good. Except for the voice acting. Oh god, it's just horrible. It's like it's been translated from English, to Japanese, back to English with inflections in all the wrong places. But I don't think anybody plays this game to listen to the actors. It's all about the bouncing boobage.

Permalink video games wrestling

Electronic Arts

11.15.2004

One of the reasons I became a programmer was that I wanted to make a video game (my long awaited wrestling game that I'm hoping one day to at least get a good start on). Recently, I've seen more and more ads on tv for schools specializing in gaming - design, production, art, etc. If those things had been offered back when I was in school, there's no telling what I would really be doing now.

But what about the companies that make the games? What's it like to work for them? I doubt it's the dream job every 13 year old thinks it is, sitting around all day playing video games. Electronic Arts has been around forever. I think their sports games are probably their best sellers (they have the Madden franchise), so odds are it would be a good place to work. Well, it looks like it may not be the dream job it could be based on one former employee and a current employee's wife.

Permalink video games wrestling

Tickets. Oooh Yeah!

11.10.2004

Saturday morning I had the feeling there was something I was supposed to be doing. I had slept late (9:30-ish), and had been talking to Gina on the phone. After I hung up at 9:53, I started to wonder more about whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. I looked at the clock again, and it hit me.

WWE Raw is coming in Dec. Tickets were going on sale this morning. At 10:00. Well, there's no way I can make it to the VBC in 7 minutes, especially seeing as how it's a good 25 minutes away. Hmmmm, I'll try Ticketmaster.

So to Ticketmaster I went. I loaded appropriate pages of ticket information, seating charts, got my credit card ready, and then I waited another 2 minutes before the tickets actually went on sale. Seeing as how this was going to be on TV, I was only going to get a ticket if I could find one near ringside. The last time I went to see wrestling, over 2 years ago, I had gotten a pretty good floor seat to see TNA, so maybe my luck would hold out. The 2 minutes passed and the tickets were suddenly available to the world. I quickly put in my search for "1" and "best available" ticket and waited to see what would pop up. I was shown a floor ticket, 5 rows back from ringside. Sounds good to me, that baby's mine now!

Everything went off without a hitch. This morning I got an email notification that my ticket has been printed and will be mailed soon. I guess it's ended up being worth the extra $12 that Ticketmaster tacks on top of the ticket price. I didn't have to leave home, wait in line, drive 25 minutes. Tipity tap tap and "here's your ticket".

I'm hoping I get a chance to hang out with my favorite lighting designer Uncle Jason when they come to town for Raw. Unfortunately, there's a PPV in Atlanta the night before, and they're taping Smackdown in Nashville the night after, so he's going to be pretty busy and pretty tired. But maybe I can hijack him for a little while!

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