Configuring Opera

Opera remains my favoriate web bowser and today I installed it on yet another computer. For the most part, all the settings came the way I wanted them. there was one thing that I had to change though, and that was the ram cache settings. I only have 16mb of ram on this machine, so that’s something I have to turn off. This machine is a little slow. I can type stuff and it takes a while for the text to appear, but it all gets there. Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to sift through thousands of extensions to find the features I want. Add on capabilities are a good idea, but lets face it, basic functionality really needs to come be bundled.

Amusing Myself, but not in That Way

I just compared the quality of my camera against a few other webcams with my friends. I guess I might see the image without as much compression as they do, but I think I have the best image quality out of all of them. I’m using an ezonics ezmega cam, a cheap 3 in 1. Somehow I always thought that the purpose built webcams would be better at this than the multifunction ones. Then again, there’s also a lot of cheap webcams out there. I’m also surprised that everyone has roughly the same field of view too. It’s nice to be able to see some people who are far away. It’s also nice just share a few of my surroundings spontaneously. I got a good laugh when one of my friends told me that no matter how far he leaned, he couldn’t see around me.
I wonder if I should carry this thing as a back-up camera when I travel. It uses the same batteries as my good camera, but different memory.

Configuring Firefox Yet Again

Somehow the latest software update has rendered my copy of portable firefox useless. I had to delete and reinstall. So, now I’m browsing through thousands of exentions again trying to get it back the way I had it. I have to rebuild my bookmarks after this. Anyway, I’m finding some rather humorous and superflous ones that I just might try. Getting this thing setup is a lot of hassle.

The Comedy Club Experience

So, I went to a comedy club yesterday. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in. Perhaps a few laughs, some guy standing in front of a wall telling jokes. Hopefully good jokes.
What I found was that some people will laugh at almost anything. The comic will make some general remark like, “you guys are a good crowd,” and people will start laughing. He’s not being sarcastic there, he’s trying to be polite. It’s not a joke. If I gave you a compliment, and you started laughing at me, I’d be wondering if I said something wrong.
I didn’t really find a lot of it all that funny. Much of the time, I was wondering why people were laughing. It was like they didn’t come to see something funny, they came to laugh. Seeing that was kind of like watching people go to a sports game to cheer instead of going to see the game. I don’t see people waving banners, jumping up and down yelling things like, “Whoo, awesome time out! Way to take a break.”
Reading this probably makes me sound like a whiny brat. Just pretend that you’re sitting in a comedy club and I’ve just been introduced as a traveling comedian. Add a bit of facial expression, some gestures and maybe that’ll change things a bit.

Space Empires IV mod Dark Nova V4.22

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Space Empires IV just to pass the time. I decided to try out the dark nova mod that is supposed to one of the better ones. It has a lot of neat interesting options. One of the ideas that I really liked is the gattling mounted weapons. Basically, a tenth the size, tenth the damage, tenth the supply use. If you’re up against something that’s hard to hit, you can fire a large number of shots at it and hit it with a few shots rather than shooting a few shots and missing all of them. Though because of the rounding, some weapons become more deadly, others become less deadily and some will let you shoot them without supplies. It’s an interesting little quirk. There are also some strange things that happen when you fire them at planets. After the cargo is oblitherated, the number of points of damage a planet can take is determined by its population. The population is counted on a different increment so all damage is rounded up to the nearest 200. This is a pretty major balance disrupter for the AI.
There’s also some features which I’m not sure work at all. This mod lets you do stuff like produce resources in space without remote mining. There’s orbital research facilities and components that have features that say they just generate resources. I built a couple of orbital research platforms and a few ships with components that are supposed to produce minerals and they don’t show in my accounting.
There’s also a few discrepencies in the description of some of the mounts and what they actually do. It’s a little surprising for such a late version mod.