I'll admit, lately I've been a bit behind the times with gaming. After FF2 and Valkyrie Profile 2 came out, I haven't really turned it on much. The PS3 and XBOX 360 look amazing, but ehhh, so much money when I know they're just going to get cheaper... and so will the games! Honestly, I'm going to wait for the platforms a bit longer, so lets focus on the PC. I recently (and reluctantly) moved to Vista in order to get DirectX 10, but honestly, I'm glad I did because I couldn't wait any longer to play a couple of these.

First up is Mass Effect... and holy shit is this an awesome game! I hadn't heard much about it prior to release, so I was a bit surprised that I missed it. Not only does it look amazing, but it runs great even with all of the eye candy, but as we'll soon see, only eye candy doesn't necessarily make a good game. Mass Effect need not worry though, this game has got it all. The scope of the game is amazing! I've tried describing it a couple times to people that have never played it and the best combo I can come up with is Oblivion meets KOTOR... essentially a full blown space RPG. The amount you can customize your character is fairly in depth, the story is very addicting, and just the free reign you have to explore the galaxy is amazing. Did I mention you can also land on random planets and explore in an armed rover at your will? Yep. It kicks some serious ass.

Continuing with my recent summer cleaning event, I also have an AMD Athlon X2 5000+ CPU and Heatsink for sale. The heatsink has never been used and the cpu was recently pulled from a computer I built not long ago. It was time for an upgrade, so there is nothing wrong with it other than I was looking to beef it up a bit. It has never been overclocked either, so no burn in to worry about. Check out the ebay auction and feel free to bid on it if you're interested. All the specs and specific details can be found there.Thanks!

A couple of weeks ago I met up with an old metal buddy of mine and we got the chance to catch up on what each other had been listening to recently. After going on a full out rant on how certain bands that used to be amazing absolutely bore the shit out of me now *cough* Soilwork, Zero Hour, Iced Earth *cough*, he mentioned how he was really into this relatively new band Textures and their latest release Silhouettes. Knowing that we have similar tastes in music and that he wouldn't promote it if it wasn't seriously good, I had to check it out... prepare to be brutalized, this is your new obsession.

Right from the beginning this album is just begging to kick your ass, and it does with some really poignant moments. Silhouettes is a cross between melodic death and progressive metal with some really great thrashy metalcore moments thrown in. Honestly, it's a very hard sound to classify since the band is so versatile. Either way, the band has really matured on this album compared to earlier releases. Hearing all of them for the first time I could really see the way they've evolved over the years and the current sound is definitely their best.

After about two months, an official patch to bug #448014 has been released. Interestingly enough, the patch is the same that was proposed weeks ago and released by CentOS as a quick fix. What I'm wondering is, why was this held up in QA for such a long time if the fix was already known? Understandably there has to be a bit of enterprise grade checking before such a fix is released, but such a long time? Either way, I'm glad that this issue is resolved. I'm still waiting on a fix for bug #454675, but using the older nss_ldap package from 5.1 seems to work fine for now.