Oh, if you ever stumble across the following error message (and you will stumble across it)

Just insert an unaltered Color Correction (HLS) effect on top of your effects stack in question and it’ll be good. According to other bloggers and Creative Cow there’s nothing else you can do. As if it was your fault anyway…

And it even worked! But I was getting drowsy and just wanted to check on my sophisticated texturing work with normal maps, specular information and even Phong exponent values. And I wanted to check in order to sleep well without worrying whether it will work.

After the VTF shell extension sent my Windows Explorer to eternal rest I had to reboot. And to log into Steam again. And now it feels like updating without ever getting finished. At about 39% it says something like “Steam is temporarily unavailable. Please try later”. I don’t want to compile my model later, I wanna compile it now — I am an inpatient grouch! And thanks to overprotective Valve Software, Inc. I can’t without that piece of crap always running in the background! Gaah!

Oh great! This time Steam closed even without the error message… And I can’t start that thing in offline mode because for that you have to switch it when you’re online with Steam in the first place. Who comes up with that kinda bullshit anyway?

Well.

I must go to sleep. I am getting way too angry when I am sleepy. Hopefully Steam will work tomorrow or else…

At the local Walmart equivalent Media Markt I browsed the very small shelf of HD-DVD / Blu-Ray Discs. While there were about 500 identical Spider Man IIIDVDs perfectly aligned in a sheer endless row, the HD-DVDs were not even alphabetically ordered because you would see them through in two minutes. About 20 of the 50 HD-DVDs were Harry Potter so I settled for Prestige, a flick that Lisa recommended to me. And she’s always right with her flicks! 29.90 € away!

And because I wanted to play the thing back on my PC too I needed some HD-DVD player software. I remember having read in the forums that the new PowerDVD from CyberLink is capable of doing the same thing, so I checked the sparse selection. PowerDVD 7 for 29.90 € and PowerDVD 7 Max for 49.90 €. Hm… the packaging looked nearly identical, the only difference was the Max writing and a small HD logo on the back. That looked good enough. I took the box, sealed in shrink-wrap and off I was.

At home I opened it and, surprise, I wasn’t the first one. Somebody obviously returned the damn thing after redeeming the CD-key which made my efforts to install it useless.

The next day I took the box back to the store, answered some concerned questions about the reason ¹ and took a new box, this time making sure it was sealed properly and only once.

Installing it under Vista was a pain in the ass, somehow I managed it by an odd combination of keeping a crashed setup-routine in RAM, setting user-permissions on the fly during install and by kicking other stuff out of my memory. After an hour it finally worked. Even entering the CD-key was useful this time. I was so happy that I just wanted to watch a little Prestige.

Disk not supported.

WTF? Then I searched the forums on the web, googled for “hd-dvd player software” but, shockingly, without any proper results. While searching for the feedback option at the CyberLink website (which really isn’t well designed and logically linked) I stumbled across the fact that only Power DVD Ultra plays back HD-DVDs and Blue-Ray discs.

The website offered me the possibility to upgrade my version to Ultra for as little as 62 €. It didn’t matter by the way, whether I wanted to upgrade a Max, Deluxe, Standard or OEM version (all in different price categories), the amount to pay remained the same. That kind of price policy really made me angry, while other companies treat you so well ². Let’s break it down for some of the fast paced and hence slow people out there:

So the worst case would be paying 22 € more than purchasing the Ultra version in the first place. Imagine 121.99 €! FOR A FUCKIN’ PLAYBACK SOFTWARE! Still I just upgraded to PowerDVD Ultra. For 54.577705 €. And I tell you how:

The English version of the CyberLink website offers all their overpriced and jelly-bean-colored software in US dollars. Even when you’re a customer from Europe. In that case the upgrade cost 79.95 USD, VAT included! That way I paid “only” 4.57705 € too much. I just hope that they won’t charge me with the additional amount when they find out I am a EU customer. On the other hand: So what? I won’t pay a single cent more than stated on the invoice I just received — period.

And still… the 4.57705 € are nine and a half cups of coffee at the vending machine. And still… it’s only a fucking playback software — nothing more.

Hm. Looks like I got ripped of majorly by CyberLink. Those bastards…

EDIT: Guess what’s not installing on a Vista system? Aaargh!! I feel like a money piñata that’s whacked open!

EDIT: Thanks to west coast customer support times my problem got solved while I was asleep in my time zone here. Yes, it took quite a while manually deleting keys from the registry but at least I am able to watch HD DVDs by now. Let’s better not spoil the precious moment my considering how much I had to pay for it.

I am writing these lines while I wait for the Opera Browser to finish downloading to my Wii. And I tell you: The most awkward thing is to enter your credit card details with a Wiimote to the latin inspired muzak from the Wii Shopping channel. It doesn’t feel right. And 5 € for a simple web browser are just too much. But I am on my spending spree so why not? Hey and I still got 500 Wii Points left for a nice NES game I can get for free everywhere else but obwiiously not from Nintendo. Sons-of-a-bitches!

And frankly I don’t know why I’ve downloaded the “Everybody Votes” channel…

And these line(s?) are written in painstaking manner on the Wii. Never again. Although I notice that I get faster with every word. Only the rumble function when hovering over any key on the virtual keyboard gets more and more irritating…

Of course I had a very stressful week thanks to the exam season. And on Tuesday I accidentally deleted my video archive on Titanium, my biggest hard disk. Totally. I only wanted to delete the DivX Videos folder that pops up every fucking time I reboot, it’s my personal fight against the windmills. But this time I had selected the whole video folder: 200 gigs of a good 2500 meticulously ordered videos — of course Vista would dump the files because they were too large for the Recycle Bin ¹, but I just hit Enter without really noticing because I thought it was the DivX folder. 100% my fault.

To cut a long story short: I learned Avira UnErase works with 32 bit systems only. So I had to power up my notebook and began to evacuate my deleted files from Titanium. I set up a LAN to my desktop PC so I could copy the large files from the tiny notebook hard disk. Needless to say that restoring the files ain’t a high speed task. It was like copying 200 gigs file by file via USB 1.0.

Shortly before my first lecture today I jammed my freshly received GeForce back into the motherboard, this time not as slave but as master in the SLI. On the way I solved more or less the problem with my not functioning external box of my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum. Obviously it is a power problem: I have a 700 W power supply but obviously even that’s not enough:
It has to power 6 SATA disks, one DVD burner, one Striker Extreme Motherboard, 3 HDD-cooling Fans, one sound card, one additional HDD-fan used to cool the graphic cards and, of course, two GeForce 8800 GTX power gobbling graphic monsters. One day about two weeks ago the fans stopped working — just great. And now, when working on the guts of my PC I found out, that the power on the sound card came from one of those not working fan cables.

I used a cable that came directly from the power supply and now it works again! Yay! But it wasn’t easy finding an unused power outlet. Luckily I don’t have a floppy drive and it plugs into my soundcard. But before running off to my lecture I am just sitting in and writing these line while listening to Cool Jazz the PC wouldn’t start anymore. It’s one of those days I guess. I just hope I can blog these lines sooner or later. If you can read this IT WORKED! EDIT: …with one GeForce only. Grrr!

Look and Feel

Definitely Nintendo-inspired. The cards are popping up, shuffling and turning in a very playful manner, neat hints help you with your first patiences. If you don’t like the cute and round look you can change the decks with a single hit on F7. There you can select between various kinds and decks, from colorful Web-2.0-y to a serious classy look. Only the background is a little to grassy green for me, I prefer the old EGA dark green color-fill (#00AA00).
Did I mention that you can finally play in fullscreen mode on your 1920*1080-screen and still find the cards? Thanks to the vector-shapes they always have the same proportions.

Gameplay

One and most important new feature: When moving the visible cards from a hidden deck the first card turns around automatically: No more clicking is required but done automatically. This will definitely ease some of the game’s enjoyment.
Long employed office workers, students and bored housewives, Solitaire veterans with one word know: You don’t have to drag every card yourself to the upper stacks (once they’re there), you can use a double click. And here’s another subtle optimization to the original: You may now use a right click too. This will save you half of the mouse clicks better spent in FPS
When you try an illegal move a little pop-up on the lower left will inform you what can be done and what can’t. Further there is a hunk of sound effects, so you might want to turn up your volume or tun it off completely.

After the game

Now here’s the catch: Windows Vista presents you your statistics after each game: How long it took you, how many game’s you’ve won so far and what your lose/win-ratio is. Mine is terrible, because I spent more than 900 seconds of the game writing this review.

Installing Software for Vista itself is a completely new pain in the butt: The driver CDs and DVDs only support *any* other Windows. I am more or less out of any drive(r) because Vista 64 bit seems to be so awkward to code, that most of the hardware manufacturing companies make a big circle around it.

I was happy and proud of my two EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX cards I wanted to use in SLI mode. Here’s a little secret, nobody told me before about SLI: Only one screen is supported. So my nifty dual screen solution just lost its appeal. Did I mention, that the first time I switched into SLI mode Windows wouldn’t start anymore?

After installing and running the the 3DMark06 in SLI mode to really show off with my score I got some bad graphic errors. I ignored them for a while, but it only got worse. And in the middle of the canyon demo the system shuts down. “What the…?” I checked the temperature of the two 8800 GTX’s and they were nearly melting. And I didn’t dare to check the temperature of the Soundblaster X-Fi Platinum that is sandwiched *between* the graphic cards.

But now I gotta get some sleep. News will follow.