I got back from Wyoming on Monday, but have been too busy/lazy to update this thing with stories of hedonism.

Commence fist shaking, Dana.

A few paragraphs on the matter, though. Yellowstone Park is still beautiful, especially since there was a good five feet of snow on the ground and it was 70-some degrees out at the same time. It was absolutely surreal, even the animals seemed confused by it. Didn't see any meese (yes, I said meese) this time around, nor any wolves, but plenty of bison and mule deer, and a crapton of sheep for some reason. Oh, and a black bear who kept waking up and was like, "fuck you guys I'm trying to sleep" to the tourists. For more: check out the photos, plenty of good stuff there.

Other than that, there really wasn't much else other than sitting around Uncle John's cabin with my uncles and cousins, drinking beer, shooting the breeze, watching my dad get bruised as he fired shotguns while I was laughing at their foolish shooting behaviors even though I wouldn't touch the damn things while they were loaded, basically hanging out. A trip like that is good, there's not a lot of effort in your travels and you get to relax more.

Met some cowboys out there, friends of my uncle. Now, cowboys may seem pretty similar to rednecks, but they're plenty of notches above them in terms of friendliness and keeping tradition. I respect that. Around here, anyway, you can just make up excuses and take up horrible habits and it's somehow acceptable. Out there, you be a man, dammit. If you're working class out in the west, you have to be tough.

In more current news, I have my new computer in about a week before it was supposed to be here. Thing's great. Liquid cooling, mostly quiet, super fast (even on Vista). I immediately freaked out when I played Halo 2 at first (shut up it was free) because it was slow and buggy and twitchy the whole way, and thought the worst. Then I played the Portal Demo they give out to Nvidia owners and it was running at least 100 fps. After that I bought Audiosurf and Team Fortress 2, both run at amazing, consistent speeds. I think the worst I ever got on TF2 (joined Robby in a game, he was pretty happy) was around 40 fps, but I was definitely running pretty fast most of the way.

I confirmed Halo 2's horrible PC port was, indeed, a horrible PC port and I'm not looking back at it. Hell, the cutscenes even looks worse than the Xbox version, it was like playing Hexen on the N64 only not as fun. So fuck Halo.

Figuring out Vista has been a challenge, but I think I can get used to it. There's simply too many new features and I think the computer's not as fast as it could be with them running all the time. It runs fine, even with just 2 gigs of RAM (out of a possible 8 on the motherboard), so I think I made the right choice on the CPU and video card. If not, liquid cooling is going to make overclocking barely an issue. It doesn't need it now (it's a 2.66 Core 2 Duo) but at least I know that making the jump to 3.00 ghz will be easy.

Only real thing I have to do left is get all my music on my computer. I did that via my iPod but all the files are encoded oddly. I'm going to have to end up using the external HDD my dad has to move everything over, because I sure as hell am not going to manually change the names of 3,300 music files.

Oh, and Photoshop too, I guess, but that's why they have uTorrent, amirite?

Then I suppose I could move my 500 gig drive out of the old compy and into the new computer, but there's still over 60 gigs left in the hard drive after all this which is plenty for now to not have to worry about it. Atomika is selling me his 19" flatscreen monitor for the decent price of $125, and then I'll be set.

IBuyPower was a great choice. You could argue it being pricey, but they got it built and sent out quickly, and it works great. The only thing is that they forgot to package the included speakers, which kind of sucks but it's not like I don't already have some.

On a side note, the diet sort of took a back seat during the Wyoming thing I didn't lose a pound in that ordeal. Not to worry, as I got a different plan that you all shall see on Monday.