Leinninger.com

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

- Duane

I’m in the process of getting Vista set up on my bootcamp partition. Here’s a little tip out there for the edgy kids on the block: use 32-bit Vista. I’m sure that someone out there figured out a way to get 64-bit working with some kind of devil dance in the moonlight, but if you want to save yourself a lot of headaches, stay 32-bit. I run 64-bit on non-Mac desktop at home with no issues. Apparently, I lucked out with the hardware in that box having 64-bit drivers available. The bootcamp drivers on the other hand, are strictly 32-bit compatible.

Leopard, on the other hand, is absolutely lick-able. The big features are great (such as time machine and spaces), but the stuff that really stands out are the unified interface, simplified control panels, and much better Rosetta (PPC-emulation) support.

- Duane

Holy writer’s block batman! After over 2 years, I’ve finally written a new editorial article! It’s actually something I started over a year ago, but attending a Web Technology Summit recently inspired me to finish it up. When I browsed through my articles-in-progress, I noted quite a few that could be finished up. Perhaps a few new ramblings will make it onto the homepage in the near future…

- Duane