Hello, strangers. Sorry I've been such a DF ghost of late. As many of you know from an email I've just sent out, I'm having a New Year's party up here at the spec house.

I lack contact info for many of you, but want you to know you're all invited! There is crash space available, I think... let's see, 3,000 sq ft + 1,200 of walk-out basement... divided by O2 availability... factor in operation eagle... add square root of it's cold out and (insert identity here) is drunk...

Yep. Got it covered.

So what's the game of choice tonight? We still shooting zombies, or have we moved onto something else?

So what's the flavor of the night...

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I'm the T-train.. I bring the party with me.

I have a apple-ified nVidia 8800 gt that has a sometimes annoying fan.

Apparently, some aftermarket coolers exist, like this one, and if one's case is well-ventilated enough, it can even be used fanless.

Has anyone ever futzed with something like this? I assume it isn't altogether much different than putting a fan on a CPU, right?

The other alternative is upgrading to an ATI 4870, but that might not be any quieter, and the apple-ified version is 'spensive ($314 edu pricing).

Rendered by a graphics card manufactured this decade!!

Uncle Sam came through, and while some home-repair issues have reduced the potency of my gaming dream, I am never-the-less officially getting a new gaming rig!!

If your at all curious about what I went with, you can see it here in all it's "essentials only" glory.

I am in the middle of moving, but I think I "deserve" a couple hours of recreation. I won't have much time to install any stuff, so I think that sort of limits us to TF2, L4D *coughbeats TF2cough*, or CoH, unless people have all run out and bought/installed Diablo 2.

Anywho - deciderate so I can be ready.

So, Micah mentioned something on Wednesday at the Officer's Meeting East and it got me to thinking.

For our Thursday night game, would anyone/everyone be willing to take a trip down Memory Lane and play some Netrek? It's definitely old school, but I have to say that it still figures highly in my memories as one of the all time best online games I've ever played.

It's free (heck, it's open source) and the graphics are, well, simple is probably an understatement, so nobody should have a problem with running it.

You can find it at http://www.netrek.org/.

So I'm playing with the idea of building a new gaming machine. I've been running XP Pro on an AMD Athlon 64x2 4200+ w/2G of ram and a GeForce 7800GT 256M, and it does alright. But I'm getting to the point where I have to start turning quality setting down, load times are suffering, and certain games get that beloved Viewmaster quality...

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