All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Okay. So we didn’t have any sort of massive implosion again with the Pats this week. This is welcome news. Running backs are actually running, and the Pats seem to have realized they should focus a little bit more on the running game. The defense played very well, and the team as a whole didn’t have that terrible soggy feeling they did last week.

Yeah, I’m a fair weather fan. Sorry. I still split my loyalties between the Patriots and the Raiders, although this year there certainly isn’t much of a decision involved in who to root for.

Strange Goings On have been reported to me from Named Sources, yet I cannot confirm or deny any allegations until I figure out what the hell is going on. This has nothing to do with sports, by the way. Well, I suppose it does. Everything has something to do with sports. Football in particular.

Oh, and big NYAH to the gambling community who had Cincinnati as 5 1/2 point favorites over the Patriots. We covered the spread on THAT one, ya wankers.

Yes. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? The wails of anguish and pain?

Those are people like me. People who had fantasy football teams that had high draft picks.

People who used that high draft pick to draft Shaun Alexander.

People who have now found out Shaun Alexander has succumbed to the Madden Curse and suffered a broken foot.

Oh, the humanity.

Okay. Let’s clear things up and call a spade a spade. The Patriots stunk against the Broncos. Why did they stink? I have no idea. They came out as flat as I’ve seen them come out in seven years and they never got any better. The offense, at least. The defense had a little fire, but not much. The offense hung their heads, shrugged onto the field, and played with no intensity or emotion. Brady’s stats may look good tomorrow, but he lead the charge of flatness — shrugged shoulders, passes so bad local pundits are speculating he might be injured, and zero passion. When a quarterback is that flat, it’s hard for an offense to rally around him. Never mind our rookie kicker’s missed kick. You want someone to make you feel bummed out in that game? Just watch Brady’s body language.

This was simply horrid. I’m a Patriots fan, but I’ll say it: the Broncos deserved that win, and guess what, they deserved to win even bigger, because on that side of the ball, players were playing with intensity. Tatum Bell alone had more testosterone in his veins than our entire offense.

What a sorry excuse for a game. The Pats better shape up, or they’re not making the playoffs, and nobody’s going to shed many tears over it, either.

Okay. Just found this lurking around. Eudora must have thrown this poor fellow in with my spam filters, and he deserves more than a two-month old post about fixing your firewall with a filed called sharedaccess.reg. And he deserves a response.

His name is Molinar and this is what he had to say:

Just passing by, but this post makes me shiver: if a program requires me to do this kind of stuff and open up my PC like this, it’s not getting into my ‘puter, to peer or not to peer.Seriously, applying semi-random changes to the registry? From a file found on the internet? and furthermore it requires your firewall to be disabled? Sheesh, hell no.Or maybe I read it wrong. I hope so.

Okay. First, I’ll clear a couple of things up. Sharedaccess.reg is, I believe, the original, clean version of your registry settings regarding your firewall. And you only are going to be using this if your firewall is malfunctioning. My particular version comes from a fairly legit Windows tweak site (read the hyperlink, follow it). If your firewall is up and working or up and not working by choice, then don’t download this file. But it saved me. That’s all I can say. I do not doubt your approach as a purist, Molinar. Purists make more money than me and end up managing networks much faster than I do, I’ll tell you that. But the simple answer to why I posted this is: I am not a purist. By default, if you’re getting a patch from my site, and I don’t say it’s from Microsoft, you better check it. A purist does that. I just fly by the seat of my pants. I get my desktop hijacked 8,000 times and have purists tell me over and over that there’s not solution except reformatting and reinstalling the OS and I just LOVE the problem and I sit there for hours until I have erased every trace of the hijack/trojan/worm/nasty thing.

Okay. That’s beside the point. The sharedacces.reg file works. I’ll vouch for it. Sure, tweaking your computer without really knowing what you’re doing is dangerous. But you can’t debate the fact that some legitimate Windows software can be more dangerous than a lot of innocous spyware out there. 🙂

So, point taken. Caveat Emptor with the file. It worked for me and it continues to work. But I like playing with fire — as an explicit example, I hardly ever use a firewall (go ahead, hack me, I’m not worth anything). This patch *will* restore your XP firewall to its original settings. But if you’re worried because it’s doing gnarly things to your registry, don’t worry, just look somewhere else. My one goal in sharing the file is to help people who fell into the same problem I did and needed a fix. So I took advice from ANOTHER board somewhere else that referenced this and decided to share it. I take no responsibility if it turns your powerful high-end PC into a toaster with a LCD screen.

Here’s a topic that’s always bugged me. Read all about different people’s takes on cleaning their LCD screens over at this fellow’s blog. Personally, I’ve broken the golden rule and used Windex and paper towels before, but generally I, myself, take a damp cotton rag, wipe the screen down as best as I can, and dry it with a piece of flannel or a dry cotton rag.

Frankly, for all the outcry against Windex and paper towels, I’m guessing that unless you want your LCD monitor to outlast you, it’s not the end of the world to use them. But that’s just my opinion with no disclaimers. Windex has ammonia in it, and ammonia is some nasty stuff.

Okay. It’s finally here. The first update for Madden 2007 rosters. Now, I don’t know where you go to get it for a PC version, but those of us with consoles — just log in with the network adapter and it will download them automatically. Be sure to save.

There are still some problems, like, say, Deion Branch is still starting for the Patriots, but at least it’s better. Trust me. Would I lie to you?

I went completely apeshit buying incense online. Ever since Pier 1 has decided to cut back on it, I’ve been getting desperate.

So first I ordered a bunch of twenty-stick packs online. Okay. Good. That’ll hold me.

Then I light the nag champa and realize how much I love the stuff (an acquired taste, I suppose). So I go straight back to where I bought the original incense and order like 500 nag champa sticks. They arrived today looking like a brick.

If there’s ever a devastating circumstance that drags the word into the Dark Ages, rest assured, dear reader, that while governments fail and people resort to cannibalism — I will have some incense around to lighten the mood.

Two quick football notes. First, I cannot believe the Patriots, after dominating the Jets, let up and let them score 14 points on them. Second, I think that comeback by Eli Manning in the Giants game was phantasmagorically fantastic. I like Eli. I just don’t like him when he’s playing us or screwing with our schedule.

One last thing…my fantasy teams, which have not been doing well (DAMN YOU LARRY JOHNSON, DAMN YOU SHAUN ALEXANDER) face an interesting situation in one of my games this week. Seven players have a bye week. I had to juggle REALLY carefully to get that schedule back on track.

Ah well. That’s all for now.

A little while back, I said I finally “caved” and bought an expensive video card. Well, let me tell you right now, my nVidia GeForce 7800 was worth every penny.

It speeds ALL sorts of things up, it really does. You need the RAM for it — I’ve got 1.5 gig, which is just a bit over what it probably wants — but RAM is cheap.

The games, of course, are stunningly beautiful. Especially first or third-person shooters. The ambiance in F.E.AR., for instance, is unbelievable.

So, anyway, it’s worth it. All my tightwad tactics came to nothing. It’s also really easy to install — just goes right in your AGP port where your old card (assuming you weren’t an idiot and bought a computer with a PCI video card) went. The only slight hold up is that you need to free up a power cable (they fit into the ends of hard drives, those thinga) and power up the card mostly because of the internal fan it uses to cool down when it’s processing memory-hungry applications.

Ah well, that’s all. 🙂

That’s all that needs to be said. Sort of.

Miami 0-2, everyone was sure they’d win the division, or tie with New England.

Patriots 2-0 and put on quite a show today, especially with their new dual-back offense.

I’m not a gambling man, but I’ll take the Pats winning the division easily.

I feel football is more important than 9/11 candlelight vigils. So sue me.

Okay. So now us Patriots fans know something important: Laurence Maroney is the real deal. The kid can dance all over the place. We also know Gostkowski can kick a field goal. So we’re solid on that.

So why did we look so crappy for so long against the Bills and barely eke out a victory?

I don’t know. Some are saying Brady is looking for a Branch and can’t find one (since Deion’s hidden somewhere deep within the fires of Mount Doom insisting he get a Ring of Power if he’s going to show up).

There’s no doubt in my mind Brady forced a few throws, and his interception wasn’t fun to look at. Nor was the first play of the game, the fumble return by the Bills.

Okay. Here’s what I think. I think our offensive line didn’t get it together until sometime in the 3rd quarter. I think our defense once again went out there and won the day with that safety. After all, that’s the two points we won by.

That’s all I’m going to say. The rest should be obvious. Okay. I’ll say it. We need to get the offense in sync, especially our passing game and our offensive line. Our running game is looking good, but that ain’t all there is to football.

All in all, I suffered four or five heart attacks during the game, and have had to seek medical attention.