Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Square Eye for the Gamer Guy
Maybe building the Athlon box wasn't such a good idea. I killed a whole lot of time building the Smoothwall 2 box out of the old Celeron box, enabling ad-zapping & playing Gunship and Operation Flashpoint. Now that I can play these games without the system crashing, I'm discovering that - even at the easy levels - they're harder than I'd anticipated. I guess that's because playing console games might have reduced my expectations of complexity back on the PC platform.
Now I can see the point in getting ADSL. So today I call up Hellstra because their 'Can I get ADSL?' page told me to get stuffed, but didn't say why. Half an hour and three departments later (Sales, Tech Support & then Line Activation) I'm told that I'm on a pair gained line & a tech will have to come around & look for an alternative path. I'm not holding out much hope; chances are that this whole apartment complex is wired to some sort of line-splitting tech and every line will be ADSL-crippled. If that's the case I'll have to get on to the body corporate manager about getting that fixed. I don't understand why the suburbs with more apartment complexes & presumably a higher than average disposable income is so technologically crippled. No ADSL, no TransACT, no cable. Perhaps we'll just have to wait for powerline transmission or for iBurst to bring wireless broadband to the capital & tell Telstra where to go.
And then Electronics Boutique goes and drops the price of an Xbox to $250. I said that'd be when I'd get one, but nah, I'm going to be strong on this one; I've got two old consoles sitting on the shelf gathering dust & an Xbox would just do the same (albeit after a couple of weeks of intense usage). I'll just sink the money into the PC. I'm thinking about a digital tv card next...
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