They say Aquarius is extremely calm, extremely rational. But somehow, come summer, I turn sentimental. Maybe only warm sunshine and scorching heat can melt a heart of cold, glassy stuff. Only when summer arrives each year do I suddenly feel like a living creature. Every year, my personal emotional eruptions happen in this blazing summer — the days when school lets out for vacation. Lately I’ve been feeling down, tinged with a faint sadness. I’ve realized I’ve wasted so much of my youth and accomplished nothing. Right now my biggest wish on the work front is to build an interesting game product.

Woke up and the cat wasn’t at my feet. Weird. Come to think of it, I didn’t hear anything getting smashed last night either — could the cat have run off? So I flipped 180 degrees out of my groggy haze and got up to check whether the cat was still around. As usual, I pulled out the ham-sausage-slicing knife and slid it out of its sheath to make a noise. Normally that’s enough to summon the cat, who shows up demanding ham sausage. This time, nothing.

When you’re in a bind and ask for help, if you’re sincere, the other person will definitely sense it. Don’t expect to get help by using a flattering tone in a moment of crisis. Experienced people all understand: the more unusually ingratiating someone’s tone is, the more that person is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — and the more vicious they turn once the mask drops.

My Weibohttp://t.qq.com/RhettGao — come take a look.

Special notice: none of the images below may be reproduced or modified in any form.

The day before yesterday I installed win7 on the N80vn. The machine got restored N times, then I formatted the recovery partition too, and after it finally installed, the problems never stopped. Yesterday: N blue screens plus N crashes, and my RP (luck) hit rock bottom. Today it crashed once, and after a reboot it wouldn’t start at all — the hardware self-test failed. Frozen forever at checking nvram… The one bit of luck in all this misfortune: before reinstalling I’d backed up the few projects I had on hand to the desktop, so I switched over to the desktop for the time being — at least its win7 is perfectly stable. I heard about Allods, which is all the rage lately. They say it’s the next WoW, so I’ve got to play it when I have time. But the laptop has to go in for repairs first…

Yesterday I went through the hassle of reinstalling the OS on my desktop. I’d been torn between Windows 7 and Ubuntu, but in the end it was Windows 7. Whenever I mention Windows 7, my friends’ first concern is always compatibility. The last stretch of time I used Windows 7, as I recall, was back at Qoolu, and every night WoW, CnC3 and RA3 all ran without a single compatibility issue. Older games are a different story, though (why do I always start with games…). EA games from before Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, Warcraft, Diablo and the like are all unsupported. Oddly enough, it is compatible with StarCraft — the “garbled graphics” version, that is. Taobao and online banking, naturally, are not compatible.

Been swamped lately with a few websites, running myself half to death, but my resource pool is finally about to free up. Recycling worker thread 0… recycled successfully, resources released. Recycling worker thread 1… recycled successfully, resources released…

I put together a World of Warcraft arts expo blog, dedicated to collecting material about Warcraft culture http://www.flashj.cn/wow/ It mainly covers character biographies, books, diaries, letters...