8800GT Failure

Earlier this week I noticed that video on my computer was behaving oddly.  Strange artifacts now and again, things I would have attributed 20 years ago to problems with video memory.

Then last night when I poked my nose into Lord of the Rings Online, that was enough to push the card over the edge into failure mode.  All 3D operations appear to have ceased.  The card, thankfully, has fallen back to some minimal operation state, so I can still do things like type angry blog posts (without pictures), but everything is very slow on the screen.

Are you old enough to remember when scrolling text in a large Word document was a stress test for a video card?  Yeah, I’m operating with that level of video support now.  Scrolling down the page on my blog is a test of my patience.

The card, my second 8800GT after the first one failed almost a year back (also while playing LOTRO) has not given me a lot of faith in nVidia for the moment.

So for my next video card, just in time to be my birthday present I suppose, I think I will jump back to the ATi side of the video world with a 4850 based card.

But no Lord of the Rings Online for a while, not until I get the card replaced.  At least I can update my EVE Online skill training on our iMac.  Go CCP and Mac OSX support!

Raptor Love

While my daughter was interested in druids because they can turn into animals, the only real class choice for her was a hunter.  She loves to have pets, and the ability to run out and tame your own pet was a super bonus.

So she has had various owls, bears, wolves, cats, birds, spiders, and even a crocolisk since she gained the ability to tame pets at level 10.  Her biggest problem is that she can only stable two pets at a time.  (I wouldn’t cough up 50 gold for the third stable slot.)  And so there are hard decisions to be made.

Some pets come and go on a whim.  Some take more work to part with.  And when she accidentally dismissed the little white bear she found and tamed in Dun Morogh there was nearly an hour’s worth of tears.  She had to draw a picture of the bear, named Icicle, and put it on the wall in her room to remember him.

Of course, once the tears were gone, it was off for another pet.

Then, when we were out in the Wetlands she saw raptors.

She knew about raptors.  She had seen people with raptor pets.  But these raptors were nearly in her level range, wild, and ready to be tamed!

Nearly in her level range was the sticking point.  She was level 19, the raptors out there seem to be level 23-25.

Raptor fever was upon her though, so I ended up having to lead an expedition out to The Barrens so she could find a raptor she could tame… you know… now!  And so she tamed Stella.

Stella!

The name Stella actually came later, after my mother tamed a blue raptor from the Wetlands and named it Stanley.

Of course I laughed when I heard this and exclaimed, “STELLA!” in my best Brando imitation then told my daughter to say, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.”  That just got a look of confusion out of her.

So I had to try to explain “Streetcar Named Desire” to her, which went about as well as you might imagine.  There isn’t a lot of Tennessee Williams on Nickelodeon, though I bet I could find some on PBS Kids.

We have the Simpsons version (Streetcar!) on DVD, I think we’ll just watch that.