Movie night ….

I watched The Wedding Singer again tonight, after years since the last time I caught it. Damn, that movie rocks like Billy Idol in his full on “White Wedding” days. Adam Sandler plays his role subtly enough that I actually could stand him for a change, and Drew Berrymore is as hot as she’s ever been in her cute little waitress outfit.

The only flaw? It’s 1985 and not one Fiero in the background.

Watching it did make me a little melancholic, though, as it reminded me just how much possibility the world seemed to have twenty years ago, when I had no doubt in my mind that I really and truely could be or do anything, that there was nowhere to go but out and up.

Alas, while it still may be technically true that I could do anything now if I wanted, the truth is that things certainly aren’t heading anywhere, either up or down. My life is in stasis, and unfortunately, at a level that’s really unacceptable and unfulfilling. I’ve been much further along in my life, but right now both circumstances, and even my will, aren’t giving me much hope in the way of moving onwards from the emotional, financial and spiritual mudpit that I’m stuck in right now.

American Wedding

I watched American Wedding today, having liked the first two American Pie movies, yet not having seen the third in the theaters.

I ended up fast-fowarding through much of it. It’s humorous to me how most of the characters routinely expressed the opinion that they didn’t want Stiffler in the wedding, because that’s pretty much how I felt about American Wedding in general: Scenes with Stiffler bored me greatly.

The film gets a decidedly “meh” rating.

So I bought myself a new motherboard yesterday …

The local Microcenter was having a 10% off sale on all DFI Lanparty motherboards, which was good as the mainboard in my Windows XP machine had begun to act highly unstable, to the point of shutting down randomly.

The Lanparty series of motherboards are slightly more expensive than boards with similar chipsets, but they do come packed with features that will immediately catch the eye of overclockers and actual LAN party participants.

I ended up getting a Lanparty NF2 Ultra B.

Lanparty NF2 Ultra B

Visually, the boards are interesting in that all the plastic ports are covered with a UV reactive material which glows nicely with a simple in-case light, which makes a nice show for those of us who’ve gotten into the field of in-case windows and other computer cosmetic modifications. Additionally, the board comes with two rounded cables (one IDE and an FDD) covered in a similar material.

The board itself has an nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, which I’d been looking for as a nice, powerful and far more stable alternative to the VIA chipset based alternatives. There’s an on-board 6.1 channel sound card, as well as two network cards, one of which even has gigabit ethernet capability. The 8x AGP port will be a nice upgrade from previous 4x slots, at least when it comes to my ATI Radeon 9800, and while I’m not currently finding a use for them, the Firewire and SATA Raid capabilities of this board are tempting me with future upgrades. The board’s BIOS has the ability to save up to four seperate configurations, which makes switching between diferent overclocking profiles a new and tempting possiblity.

The rather large box that the board came in even included such things as a “PC Transporter” case harness to help lug the case to your next lanparty, and a really nice bit of kit from FrontX which puts several ports in the front of the case in a drive bay slot to provide USB, Firewire and audio port access.

Basically, this is a really nice motherboard, and provides a really solid base for me to start upgrading the other bits and pieces, with a slightly newer revision of the AMD processor with twice the L2 cache and a third faster FSB being my next choice on the list.