Wraithrants

I’ve posted a few pieces in my writing section which will seem a little odd without context. Way back in the late 90′s and early Noughties I was involved in e-Wrestling. Think role playing game involving sweaty guys in spandex. One of my characters was called Darklight Warrior. That was my online alter-ego before I was dubbed Wraith, which has obviously stuck to this day. The name came from a bit of an amalgamation from several Final Fantasy games.The heroes in the original game were called Light Warriors. One of my favorite characters from FFVI was a rogueish guy named Locke Cole. He debuted as Light Warrior, once he turned heel, the Light Warrior name didn’t really fit so I went with Darklight Warrior. And on it went from there.

I always kinda thought of it as “what if Sting went really, really off the deep end?” Turns out it was a merger of Tommy Dreamer and Sabu in white face paint. Guess I was ahead of the curve way back then. Fun fact: I did the crow gimmick a full year before Sting stole it and Mark Madden tried to steal the name. Seriously.

The previous paragraph will mean nothing to people who haven’t followed wrestling in the past 15 years. Sorry about that.

The stories:

Where Are They Now: Darklight Warrior

Darklight’s Reform 1

Darklight’s Reform 2

Darklight’s Reform 3

Got a RocketFish 7.1 audio card today, basically a clone of the Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio. Yeah, I know, Best Buy’s house brand what ARE you thinking? Well A) it was relatively cheap and B) See below.

It has an optical port which is a big plus to me. I can tell a big difference between the old Audigy 2 SE that I had to hack all over the place to make work and the newer card. Front channel is clearer, audio’s about 10db louder in general. I credit the fiber optic cable for that. The old card you were forced to take a mono mini-jack to RCA converter and use an RCA cable to your receiver’s COAX audio port. I’m honestly amazed that ever worked really.

As for the drivers, the ones RF include with the card are shit and as mentioned on some reviews and forums Vista will not auto find the drivers for you. Apparently Windows 7 will but it will also do your laundry and find your keys for you. I digress. I went with some working hacked drivers, or more accurately proper Creative drivers updated to work with the older cards that often work better than what Creative puts out. I used them with the Audigy until Creative actually came out with a somewhat-decent driver I’m sure coincidentally with the Win7 drivers.

For those interested, DanielK’s drivers are located here. He updates the post when he does a new release. Very, very handy since Creative will (probably)never update the older stuff again and RocketFish appears to lean on third-parties to update their stuff.

I can’t really complain about the Audigy finally giving out. I had it for about 3 years, it did pretty much what it was supposed to and now it’s time to move on. I need to feed some high-bitrate audio through this guy to see what I get but for now, it’s done some pretty good work on my music collection.

The good thing that came out of this is I found a really decent DLNA server to stream things to my PS3. In a nutshell, it lets me take things on my Media Center PC and watch or listen to them on my Playstation 3, It’s called PS3 Media Server oddly enough. Its GUI is Java-based, seems more lightweight than TVersity which I was using previously. Makes sense since TVersity is a bit more bloated cause it handles a bunch of streaming setups. Saved my ass last night when I wanted to watch the new episode of Doctor Who.

The GUI seems a little broken in the Beta version I’m using and you will definitely want your PS3 and PC on a wired connection unless you’re on Wireless-N or something depending on what you want to stream. It’s a little backward in my opinion though. I watched the Doctor Who episode which was x264/DD5.1 in a MKV. Program transcoded with no glitches. I watch episodes of Bleach and Naruto Shippuuden in formats the PS3 can handle natively, both MP4 I believe, and I had to change to a wired connection so the PS3 could handle it.

Now to play some more. Makes me happy!

Aetna sucks. No really they suck. They’re a shining example of why Health Care Reform was needed, and is still needed. Over the past 3 years we have had them, their rates have gone up significantly and the coverage has been less. We are now being forced to use mail order for certain “maintenance medications” which has significantly raised the prices of said medications. We were sold that it would be cheaper than going to the pharmacy. They, of course, lied.

I was insulin-dependent a few weeks ago, but thanks to Aetna I’ve had to go with Plan B. At the suggestion of a friend, I’ve started the Couch to 5k program. It’s designed to get you in good enough shape to be able to run a 5K, or 3.2 miles. I’ve personally never been able to run over 1 mile and that was back in 8th grade but I’ve always loved running so hey, what the hell right?

I’m in the middle of the second week in the 12-week program: Walk 5 minutes, 6 intervals of run 90 seconds, walk 2 minutes, then a 5 minute cooldown at the end. I’ve actually been doing a lot better than I thought I would. I’m having to do a lot of stretching before and sometimes after the runs but I can definitely tell a difference in my energy and my mood. I’ve also changed my diet a bit to eliminate bread and pasta and add a lot more fresh veggies, fruits and lean meats. Still working on totally eliminating bread. I’ll make it eventually…

Hoping I can stick with this and not get bored and give up like normal. I have 30 pounds to go and the motivation is simple: no more hospitals, no more insulin. I have too many little ones in my life to not be there to see them graduate/get married/have kids/make mistakes/live.