My Hobby Page

What do I like to do?  What are my hobbies?  I'm drawing a blank...  To be quite honest with you, I thought that one of the marriage vows that I repeated without even thinking about it said something about "foregoing all pleasurable pursuits."  If you're getting married guys, I strongly suggest that you PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO WHAT'S BEING SAID!!!  I swear that I completely missed one of my wife's marriage vows too - the vow of celibacy!!  :-D  [Wait a minute...  What the hell am I laughing about!?!?]

Now seriously, one of my all-time favorite hobbies is overclocking!  Starting with my Pentium 150 and Pentium 166, to the ever-popular Celeron 300A, to my current AMD Thunderbird, and hopefully with my "near future" Intel P4 Northwood rig with GeForce3/4 - "Please, Honey?..." - I love squeezing every last ounce of performance out of my PC hardware.  Now, I'm not 'way out there'; I don't bother messing around with Peltiers or water cooling.  I strictly run air-cooled rigs.  You'd be amazed what kind of performance you can get out of CPU with a very good heatsink/fan combo and a strategically placed case fan or two.  My current PC configuration has me smiling every time I hit the power button:

AMD Thunderbird 1GHz @ 1.3Ghz
GlobalWin FOP-32 Heatsink/Fan
Soyo SY-K7VTA-B Motherboard
512MB Crucial CL2 PC133 RAM
64MB VisionTek GeForce2 Ultra
Hercules Game Theater XP Sound Card
IBM 40GB ATA100 HD
Maxtor 40GB ATA100 HD (non-RAID)
12X DVD-ROM
12/10/32X CD-R
Antec SX830 Full Tower case w/ dual 80mm intake fans

With the new Antec case this rig barely makes it over 100 degrees Farhenhrit. The highest I've seen is about 102 with a full load.  Not too bad at all...   The cooler weather right now helps a bit.  So, with warmer weather around the corner, things will start heating up.  But with room for two additional 80mm fans, I'm golden.

Of course, with a PC like this, you know my second favorite hobby has to be PC GAMING!  And that it is...  I've always been a strategy game buff, loving just about anything that came from Blizzard Entertainment and Westwood Studios.  However, Black & White monopolized a fair amount of my time.  There's something about playing a god that is strangely invigorating. =)  I kinda ride the fence as Neutral though, unable to commit to a dedicated path of Good, or Evil.  However, my alignment does tend to deviate depending on my mood, and Oh! how those villagers can nag sometimes (micromanagement can be a real P.I.T.A.!)!! 

The most fun I've had playing online since the discovery of Internet porn...  err, wait...  I mean since StarCraft, and old MechWarrior2: Mecenaries before that (in my former life, I was known as Highlander and was a member of Clan Ghost Bear), is with Unreal Tournament.  This game is the S$&%!  Now, I'm not going to brag, or gloat, or pump myself up about my UT prowess, mainly because I know I wasn't nearly that good.  I got into many an online pissing match with other UT afficianados, and lost quite a few them.  Some of them were close, while others left me wishing that a 'mercy rule' was enforced.  However, the small group of people that I played with regularly (for about a year, if not more), began to hate me for my accuracy and apparant invulnerability (although they may say otherwise).  Now if Unreal Tournament 2 would come out [drool - wipe], we'd all be able to get along.  =)

Recently, I've rekindled my online bloodlust with MechWarrior4: Vengeance and the MechWarrior4: Black Knight Expansion. I'm an active member of Clan Diamond Shark in the NBT and UTS leagues.  My handle is GloWorm.  CDS is a great bunch of guys (and gals, surprisingly) that know how to have fun and don't forget the most important thing of all when it comes to online gaming "factions" - it's only a game!  Well, at least some of them do.  LOL!!

Grace, honor and nobility; show these beforehand.
but when the battle begins,
attack with terrifying swiftness,
be the Diamond Shark, relentless and ruthless.

- Passage 127, Verse 42, Lines 16-20 (Clan Diamond Shark Remembrance)

Offline, I'm usually working at tweaking Windows XP Professional. But I have been having a fun with Return To Castle Wolfenstein" (haven't yet ventured online), Red Faction (finished it and haven't touched it since), and in a completely different genre, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (turn the music off and I fall asleep - LOL).  Did I mention that I'm also a husband and a father of two?!?!  Needless to say, it's not often that I get a lot of sleep.  :)