HerdingChaos

This game has some of the best graphics I have ever seen. It looks very close to what you would see out of a plane. I have flown places in the simulator that I have flown in real life and was actually able to find an airport based on the landmarks in the city. Not big landmarks like you would find in a major city. I mean the little landmarks that I know where they are because I grew up here. It was creepy.

However, all that beautifulliness is not a word and not easy I guess. I have a pretty fast machine. X2 4400+ with a Nivida 7900GT. I can run most games out now at full settings and still get 40 fps. I did that with FSX and got 1.3 fps. I have dialed a ton of crap down and I now am getting around 16 fps. I would prefer 20 or 25, but at 16 most of the really cool looking stuff still looks really cool. I just hope they release a patch with something in the readme that says “Oops, anyone with an AMD and Nivida system was getting one third the performance they should have. We have it fixed now.” But somehow I doubt that will happen.

One of the few things that Microsoft does really well is their Flight Simulator. I have been playing MS FlightSim since I had an old TI Portable Professional Computer. The TIPPC was the first PC at the time to have something close to what we now call VGA graphics. So flight sim always looked better on my TIPPC vs. friend’s IBMs or clones. Or if you are not all geeknerd like me, it happened in the mid to late 80’s.

Well, this Tuesday they are releasing Flight Simulator X. Tonight I downloaded the demo and dusted off my old CH Pro yoke and pedals. The demo is pretty impressive and I am sure I will pick up the game as soon as it hits the shelves. It will give my PC something to do now that I spend most all of my time on this mac.

Perian — Watch most anything in quicktime.

iusethis — cool site for finding new apps on osx.

MS office v.X was not playing nice with some of the documents and the mail server from work. Then I found out that we have a site license for MS office 2004 for Mac. So I upgraded office and all of my document problems are resolved.

Apple released the new 1.5 version of Aperture couple of days ago. I upgraded Aperture and the biggest feature I noticed is a much better caching of thumbnails. Now even when I am working in a library folder with 8000 photos the scroll through the thumbnails is quick and clean. It did take about 8 hours for the new version to update all the photo libraries and sync to my backup vault.