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Thanks to the might and expertise of my brother, Christian, and his wife Robyn, we got the main rough framing completed for the outer theater walls in the basement. After seeing how it all works, I’m REALLY glad I didn’t try doing it on my own. Christian has all kinds of tricks and best practices for building. It figures, though: he’s a supervisor for a major luxury builder on the east side. We plan to continue working this weekend if our health holds up. Gina and I most likely caught the remnants of the flu that Robyn and Christian had last week.

- Duane

I’m back at Wayne State for the last of my classes after another break. This most recent delay was due to a handful of things including selling our old house, moving, and work responsibilities. Now that things have settled a little, I’m trying to finish up the last few classes I have left. This semester, I’m taking Political Science and a replacement for an upper-level Art History class: Philosophy in Literature. (I’m a fine arts major…) After this semester, I have 1 or 2 classes left (depending on whether or not I get grandfathered into the old course requirements or not). I don’t like school. I never have. I never will. I’m only doing this to get it out of the way and not have that nagging “close, but not quite there” feeling in my head.

As often happens in the winter, my friends and co-workers have turned to video games to fight off the madness of cabin fever. We “meet” online a few nights each week to play simulated combat scenarios online. Last year we focused on Battlefield 2142. This year, it’s Call of Duty 4… and I’m pretty good at it for a change. We’ve started a 2-on-2 tournament and my teammate, Dan, and I started out strong: winning the first match. However, we were unable to finish off the other team (Jon and Jona) due to Jon’s technical issues. We’ll pick up where we left off once Jon gets the gremlins worked out.

- Duane

One of the requirements Gina and I established when shopping for a new house was an area suitable for a home theater/game room. In Michigan, that means a basement. When we first looked at the house we eventually purchased, we were concerned that the basement would not be big enough or laid out well enough for a theater. However, after getting a closer look, we agreed it would, in fact, work quite well.

We’ve been in our house for almost 2 years now, and have completed step 2 of our basement project: installing a subfloor. (Step 1 was upgrading from an 80 amp breaker system to 200 amps.) Over the past 2 weekends, we leveled our concrete floor and installed a Dricore subfloor system. It consists of 2-foot square interlocking wood panels with plastic glued to the back. The plastic has cleats molded into it allowing for airflow under the floor as well as a vapor barrier. According to their website, covering 500 square feet would take about 8 hours. We clocked in around 24, but this was mostly due to the extensive leveling work required. A little concrete grinding and a few dozen Dricore “leving kits” (shims) took care of that.

My back has nearly recovered and we now have a warm basement floor ready for the next step: rough framing! Woot!

- Duane

Christmas was quite nice, apart from my bumbling about in the scheduling department. We did a fair bit of driving, including 3 trips to the other side of town in 4 days to help my parents set up for Christmas eve, celebrate my Mom’s birthday, and celebrate Christmas eve. We also attended both Christmas eve services at church (I run the sound board and Gina sings in the band). On Christmas day, Gina and I opened our gifts, enjoyed a delicious breakfast, and drove out to the Clarkston area for lunch with Gina’s family, then to Sterling Heights for dinner with my family.

Gina got a few pairs of fancy jeans, a “muppet” scarf, and some CDs. I lucked out with a sweet Lego™ Ferrari

- Duane

I struggled to get Crysis to start up correctly. I kept getting an unresponsive black screen when starting the game. Here’s how I fixed it:

1. Uninstall any “network managers” (especially if you have an nVidia mainboard
2. Uninstall Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120% or any other virtual drive/iso mounter applications
3. If you continue to get black screen-ed, install the latest nVidia beta driver

On a 2.4 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3 gigs of high speed ram and a BFG geforce 8800 GTX, I’m getting pretty nice frame rates at the highest settings, with no anti-aliasing enabled. Best of all, the darn game actually works!

- Duane