Little Mr Mahatma

In which the middle-aged Peacenik mouths off about War Drones--and all the other things that make him cranky.

Mr Mahatma--who is a Mr in real life--lives in the valleys of Southern California with his wife, a herd of Dears, and an impressive collection of books. Pnorny!
He is reachable at:
littlemrmahatma@yahoo.com

All writings are copyrighted 2003-2008 and trademarked: Little Mr. Mahatma

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Some fun links:
Little Miss Attila - polar opposite and origin of LMM.

Critical Sites:
Dr. Forbush Thinks
Slashdot
Games Slashdot
UserFriendly
James Randi
Snopes
Home of the Underdogs
The Sun Online

For those generous in spirit, heart, and wallet:

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Little Mr Mahatma

Monday, November 01, 2004

Vote!
Please vote tomorrow and carefully, carefully, carefully check your ballot. We don't want a bunch of little mistakes adding up to another big mistake namely another appointment by the Supreme Court. And to be doubly sure vote for Kerry.

Halloween
This year was a surprise - we had a large turnout, about 30 kids, knocking on the door - including a handful of teenies and some absolutely adorable wee-uns. The trend for the past few years was maybe 10 kids at most even though our neighborhood is relatively safe. So we had bought candy accordingly and came close to running out. I'm wondering if nervousness about the election brought people out. Y'know, something to take their minds off the craziness, though I'd expect Halloween horrors to serve as reminders of political horrors. Ah well. I have my chocolate stash ready in case Bush steals another one.

Stupid PC Obsolescence
I picked up Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 over the weekend. I loved the first 2 versions and had high hopes for the latest and greatest. So while at the Northridge Maul (sic) I purchased the oddly shaped box and with kids in tow, went home, and installed it. On my "new" XP machine (i.e. inherited) with a geForce 2 MX 400 64 mb the game ran OK with the lowest video setting. But the game recommends ATI Radeon cards. OK, fine. On my older Win 98 machine I have a Radeon 7500 with 64 mb. Installed the game and it chugged. The video looked terrible and kept tearing.

OK, look for new drivers for the ATI. Nope. The latest ATI driver for the 7500 support up to DirectX 8 and RCT3 uses DirectX 9. None of newer graphic cards support Win 98. Fudge.

OK, look for a new graphic card for the newer machine. Off to Frys to look at an ATI Radeon 6800 XT which concistently gets good reviews. Hmmm, $200 or so. Errr, arrrgh! Can't do it. Plus the fine print on the box says the card needs an AGP 2.0 spec slot and a 300w power supply. Drive back home and open the XP machine. AGP slot is unlabelled and can't find any info on what version it is other than it supports 4X. Doesn't matter because the machine has a wimpy 200w power supply (my older machine has a 400w supply). Do I want the hassle of getting a new card and power supply? That's about $300.

Or I can buy a new computer for about $800 and get all the latest. To play a game.

This is why consoles are so popular...

11:55 AM

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