Archive for April, 2008
Theory of a Deadman’s Scars and Souvenirs
Posted by Wanderlust in Music Monday, 21 April 2008 00:01 No Comments
Another great disc and maybe their best, although I’m a bit partial to the Unreleased B Sides (with the AiC cover of Got Me Wrong and Lynchburg Lemonade). I think this third disc is solid with goodness from start to finish. I think of ToaD as one of the newer rock bands in the mold of true rock along with Three Days Grace, Three Doors Down, Nickelback (even if over played) and a few others that just seem to not be hard rock or necessarily have a completely new “modern” rock feel to their music. One of the things that singles these kinds of bands out is their ability to throw out flowing ballads along with heavier tracks. Scars and Souvenirs is no different with several well done ballads. End of the Summer almost sounds like Tyler summoned .38 Special’s Don Barnes and sounds almost like it could have been a cover. For me, it’s a great thing, I love the Don Barnes years of .38 Special (including the newer songs).
I laughed and completely agreed with the lyrics for Hate My Life (oh please kill me now). I think it’s a list of things all of us think whether we always say it or not. 
It seems that Tyler Connolly’s vocals have improved and all of the songs on the disc highlight his abilities and showcases his range and ability to move from heavier tracks to ballads.
Check out Theory of a Deadman’s Official Site.
Also check out the track list for Theory of a Deadman’s Scars and Souvenirs at Amazon!
I really want to check these guys out at Rock on the Range which also has a crap load of my other favorites: STP, Disturbed, Staind, Killswitch Engage, Shinedown, Finger Eleven, Filter on Saturday and Sevendust, Alter Bridge, Default, 3 Doors Down, Papa Roach, Drowning Pool, Fly Leaf, Kid Rock (meh) and Bobaflex (signed and somewhat local) on Sunday!
Battle Team Arena and Battle Freezetag Arena for Unreal Tournament 3
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, MODs Sunday, 20 April 2008 21:48 No Comments
I found a few servers this weekend that were hosting Battle Team Arena and Battle Freezetag Arena! Very cool MOD and I loved both of them!
Here’s a few shots of the Battle Freezetag Arena and the last is from Battle Team Arena…
You can read more about it at BeyondUnreal and download it here!
I also added some screenshots from Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament 2004 (I Know it’s old) and Frontlines! You can check them out in the Gallery.
Henry Rollins “I Know You” with Nine Inch Nails “A Warm Place”
Posted by Wanderlust in Music Friday, 18 April 2008 01:30 No Comments
This is an awesome track that I came across a while back and just found this embedded link so thought I’d post it. The music is perfect and Rollins is a brilliant poet, satirist and musician.
A Few Things…
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming, Site News Thursday, 17 April 2008 23:00 No Comments
I’ve not posted a lot since I’ve been busy with a few other sites. One of which is myGamerZone, which I’m hoping to be up soon… just need to clean it up a bit and make it a bit more flashy. It’s not intended to be a clan like site but rather a site that combines a blog, review site and gaming. I’m hoping to get the forums and galleries up this weekend and work towards a bit more “flash”.
There’s really nothing exciting going on in the FPS world either so I’ve just been playing UT3, BF2 and BF2142. I really need to get back into the single player games that are sitting unfinished (CoD 4, Crysis and both Half-Life 2 episodes). I’ve also ventured back into UT2004 and UT99 with mixed results… I think my weapons only adventures in UT3 has improved my aim in UT2004 on IG and sniper moded servers… I’ve enjoyed a few very good nights… UT99 is another story, it’s really a shock to the system going into that after playing UT3 graphically and in terms of physics. It’s amazing to look at the 3 and how the graphics have changed over the, almost, 9 years. I’d love to see a UT99 10th Anniversary Edition released using the UT3 engine, it won’t happen but get back some of the feel with the updated graphics would be awesome!
Norton 360 v2 and Yearly Subscription Scams
Posted by Wanderlust in Software Wednesday, 16 April 2008 23:59 No Comments
Norton 360 v2 … same as the old …
I received an e-mail that Norton 360 v2 was available since I had bought the first one last year and long ago stopped using it. So many had taunted how it uses less memory, etc. etc. etc. but I found it wasn’t the case (they just distributed across more process from what I could tell) and they removed any kind of usefulness that SystemWorks had in the past. I posted this sometime last year but a quick overview… They made defrag a click and run program with no customization for files, the backup tool requires you to have 360 installed to restore it, meaning if you want to use it to sync multiple PC files, you need to make sure that 360 is installed and they took away countless other customizable features.
So we come up to 2008 and there’s a new version. I figured it wouldn’t be much better but gave it a shot on a fresh system. I added a few essential apps to get back up and running and then installed 360 v2. This install lasted 2 weeks. The first issue I started seeing is a ccvhost.exe (recalling from memory) crash on almost every shutdown which was associated to 360. Not soon after this I started seeing applications not exit memory. I started to notice the system would start to slow way down after being up and running, slow start-ups and shutdowns (with the above error). I found that if I ran something like Word, exited normally it would stay in memory and using a nice size footprint depending on what I was doing. Same thing with Excel, Nero, PS, Flash and other higher memory demanding apps. Small apps like ccleaner exited fine. After seeing this and associating it to the shutdown error, I un-installed and re-installed 360 with their cleaning utility. I didn’t initially see any issues but low and behold it started again. I did find some information while looking for a Symantec cleaner that this apparently happened on the previous version as well and re-installing fixed it, which is the only reason it got a second chance. So I’m officially done with this product and probably any other home based Symantec apps. They made no improvements to allow customization and apparently have some major bugs.
Alternatives:
AVG works fine and I really don’t think the corporate edition of SAV is that bad even though it takes up a bit more memory and if your company can provide it to you. One of the things that somewhat tied me to it before was also having the Anti-Spam as a free add-on which I think is still a decent product (not sure if they updated it for the 2008 version since I didn’t install the add-on pack) but I found SpamFighter as a free replacement. I haven’t had a need for the whitelist/blacklist feature so I’m not that interested in buying it. I probably will at some point as support for the product but it works great without purchasing it. So if you’re looking for a good Anti-Spam and not interested in a $50/year (unneeded) Internet Suite, check out SpamFighter!
The Yearly Subscription Fee Scams:
I want to get a page up of free software soon that covers how you can save cash by using some basic tools that do a good job without dropping yearly subscriptions. I have no issues with buying software but this “yearly full priced subscription” scam these companies are running is worthless. Looking around, I could hardly find anything that was really a spam tool on it’s own. All of them are “Internet Suites” and charge a premium YEARLY for these additional unneeded apps to eat memory. My Windows firewall and a decent router covers me on about everything but AV and Spam. Hell, I’d have no problem with some of these products if I paid $50 for the package and chose to keep that version and paid $10/year for the definition updates. If it works, I could care less about a new version every year. All they’re really doing is repackaging essentially the same product with fixes, changes to the interface and shovel it out the door to consumers as a new version and charge a full price. Some of them aren’t even new versions, just a way to charge a premium yearly. I only hope that these free utilities can get enough steam to start making companies like Symantec rethink their strategy.