Had a busy few days (I always seem to be saying that lately). My nephew was staying over recently and as usual we talked music and got in some gaming. Multiplayer Civilization IV to be precise. It’s really the first time we’ve given it a proper go multiplayer and it works reasonably well. There’s still a few timing issues fighting wars against human opponents but it’s nowhere near the mess that Civ 3 was. It also settled a question that I’d been pondering for a while related to the in-game “Powergraph” used to compare your military strength vs your opponents. I had suspected for a while that it was more about raw unit numbers than technological superiority and if true, that it really didn’t tell you anything particularly useful regarding whether or not you could beat an opponent in a fight. As it turns out, my thoughts appear to be correct after managing to win a war despite having a much lower power rating purely by being a generation ahead in military tech.

I’ve also finished the “F.E.A.R Extraction Point” expansion pack. It was surprisingly long for an expansion. Overall it was a fun ride although the ending was a little anti-climatic.

My Powermac G5 had been crashing a little lately. It would just freeze within 30 seconds of being started and nothing would fix it short of a reboot. My intuition told me it was RAM (Some of which was cheap “Legend” brand RAM) but considering it’s been running fine for over two years it seemed unlikely. Anyway I pulled the two high spec 1GB Corsair sticks out of my Windows box and swapped them into the Mac removing all the old RAM. Problem gone completely. For now I’ve swapped the other stuff into my Windows box and downclocked it to ensure stability but with only two slots in the PC and a desire for speed/stability, I really need to buy some more RAM. That’s twice now buying poor RAM has caused me problems, this’ll teach me to stick to RAM I know to be bulletproof like Corsar, OCZ, etc.