After Simms went down I picked up Leftwich, and probably would have just went with him and left Bledsoe on the bench, but apparently he's got an ankle ding as well. So Bledsoe is dropped, and now I have to pick up a starter as I don't feel safe plugging Leftwich in. Some of my choices were Romo (screw that I'm done with Cowboy's QB's), Rothlisberger (thought about it but too many question marks this week), Lossman (ugh), Frye (again I thought about it but something about Cleveland QB's scares me), and Harrington. Honestly if Harrington wasn't on bye this week I'd have gone for him, and still might next week.

But in the end I went with Wallace. My theory is that the Chiefs are playing a Seattle team without it's starting QB and all-pro RB, at home, so in theory they should dominate on D, which of course means that they'll give up about 35 points. At least that's my hope. It'll probably end up costing me, but oh well, if it works out I'll be a fantasy legend in this league.

The new Dell arrived last Friday. Thanks to Jenn (it was shipped to her office, stupid State of Kansas rules on receiving personal shipments) I got it Friday afternoon, and had it up and running and installing Warcraft by that evening. My friend James asked me how the new computer was over the weekend, and I'll retell the story I told him.

When I was in college down in Pittsburg I had an old Compaq 486, 25Mhz, with I believe 12 meg of RAM. I had got this with some accumulated graduation money, which is a story in itself. In short, it started out as a Packard-Bell 386, then PB 486, and finally the Compaq, after two PB motherboards failed. The Compaq, however, lasted through two years at Hays and three years at Pittsburg.

So while down in Pittsburg I played a lot of games on this thing obviously, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Civilization, Colonization, and a great little game called X-Wing. If you're thinking that X-Wing was a little bit too much game for a 486/25Mhz/12RAM you'd be right, compounded by the fact that I didn't have a joystick card in the machine.

Yes, that's correct. I played X-Wing with a mouse. Not like a track-ball mouse or obviously a digital/laser mouse either; the standard gumming-up, $4-worth-of-plastic standard mouse that came with the machine. And I gotta tell you, I was damn good at it too. I beat the damn game, slamming my mouse all around the desk, desperately trying to shake Tie's any way I could as I made my trench run.

Finally my roommates at the time, James and Ron, after telling me for months to go buy a damn joystick card, must have got sick of hearing me abuse that mouse at all hours of the night and went and bought me a game port card. Of course, the first time I played X-Wing with a joystick, it was like playing a different game. Turning and rolling were about 1000% easier, and quicker to boot. With the mouse I was constantly stalling out in my turns each time I had to life the mouse to roll it again, meaning that I was constantly getting blasted from behind by enemy fire, meaning I was constantly re-adjusting my shields and charge rates just to survive, taking pot-shots at enemies rarely when the opportunity presented itself. With the joystick, I mowed through Tie's like I was The Force personified.

It's like that now with World of Warcraft and this new computer. I didn't realize how much of the in game lag I was experiencing was due to my hardware rather than the internet. I mean I'm no dummy, I knew that my 800Mhz/512RAM/128Radeon wasn't exactly state of the art, but still...I guess you just get used to playing a game a certain way. No longer is running through Alterec BG's a slideshow; no longer do Horde I'm battling disappear before my eyes as my processor struggles to catch up with the rendering. It no longer takes 2-3 minutes to load all the textures when I log in in Ironforge. While the difference in gameplay isn't quite as pronounced as it was with X-Wing (I still get owned by Warlocks), there's no doubt that the new computer has been worth it.

Also, I'm now 8 days late in mentioning that Jenn and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary this past October 19. This time three years ago I was back at work after a week in San Antonio, probably wishing that I had taken another week to spend with my new wife. We didn't do anything super special to celebrate this year, just went out to dinner basically, but that's OK. Happy Late Anniversary sweetie :*

Working this weekend; bringing up a new domain controller at work. The plan is to eventually retire the current one, but we of course want to make sure things go smoothly, especially considering that we'll be going from Server 2000 to 2003, so this new one will run in conjuntion with the current ones for about a week or so.