Weekend!

A while back, I bought the new Doom for PC back when it was on sale and I found that I could run it, assuming that I ran it on the lowest settings. This was okay for me because, hey, the other option was “not playing it” and I wanted to play it.

It looked pretty good. We’ve reached the point where new(ish) PC games running on the lowest setting now look as good (or better) than PS3/360 games and, hey, that’s pretty good. I mean, I grew up playing the Atari 2600.

Well, we had just started reaching the point where new games were not games that I could play due to my computer being optimized for being a workstation dedicated to stuff like writing blogs, watching Netflix, and playing GOG games. Around this time, co-workers started talking about how the new NVidia card was coming out but it was only 30% better than the previous card that came out and they were discussing Overwatch and how they weren’t sure whether they wanted to invest *THAT* much money in an increase of only 30%.

I was thinking about my card and I looked up my specs and checked out a couple of things and asked their advice and they told me that the new card made all of the previous cards go down in price a notch or two, so I did some research and found that the card that would best help me was about 1000 times better than my current (optimized for Excel!) card. Given that that was not a typo nor hyperbole, I figured that it was time to take a deep breath and take the plunge.

Tonight, I got the thumbs up to go ahead and install it. After almost breaking it twice, I realized that I was now officially too old to do this sort of thing and got one of my 20-something friends to help.

And so, this weekend, I will be seeing how these games I have been playing on the lowest settings look on the “optimized” setting.

Before getting back to the GOG games, I’m sure.

So… what’s on your docket?

Okay for those who wish for more details about the Nuclear Medicine Stress test, they follow:

Showed up on a Friday for the second stress test where the nice nurse told me that this was going to be downright easy. They’d inject me with a particular drug that would open up all of my various vessels and they’d take an EKG for 3 minutes while I was walking a leisurely pace on the treadmill. I would feel flush, I might feel dizzy, I might get a headache. “Drink caffeine… It helps”, I was told. “I gave up caffeine for Lent”, I whined. They shrugged and injected me with the drug and I walked on the treadmill and felt flush? I guess? I didn’t feel dizzy, sadly. And the headache, I didn’t get… oh, wait. There it is. Oh yeah.

After 3 minutes of that, the Nuclear Medicine guy came into the room carrying what looked like a bulletproof lunchbox. He opened it and removed what looked like a 1950’s style metal syringe. He gave me the drug in that and then we went into the Nuclear Medicine room and he had me lie down on my back in what looked like a bare bones MRI machine. 20 minutes there, then 10 minutes on my stomach. I turned my head from that side to this one halfway through lying on my stomach and he admonished me to stay still. So I took a nap.

They woke me up and that was it.

The next Monday, I went in for my “only the nuclear medicine” part of the test and they gave me the shot and he had me lie down and that was that.

I got some results earlier this week which seemed to indicate that things are looking good, insofar as “we caught this really early” is looking good. Tomorrow I go in and talk to my doctor about what the readings really meant and hammer out what “looking good” *REALLY* means, at the end of the day.

So, if you ever get told that you have to take a chemical stress test, it’s not so bad. Don’t worry about it. But don’t move your head.

(Image is “Play” by Clare Briggs. Used with permission of the Briggs estate.)