Rant 413 / Teleporting Mouse... Again!

I have a pretty good confirmation that it's my network adapter that had been giving me all my PC problems. Solution? Temporary solution is to use my USB modem. Sooner or later I will need to buy a new network adapter. Obviously I'm not diligent enough to buy the type that needs to be screwed in. A USB network adapter should work fine.

I used to have one, but it has died of old age. =(

Anyway I'm blacklisting D-Link. The only two products I have ever bought from them keep giving me problems. The first was the router, which died from unknown causes. This network adapter in my PC is the second.

The USB modem has a much smaller bandwidth than what I'm used to. It's not that it's slow but it can only handle so much. Even today I've managed to use too much bandwidth just by opening and refreshing too many tabs, causing it to die for a few minutes.

I'm going to need a new network adapter pretty soon, or I will have to start using my laptop for surfing the net and leaving my desktop for gaming alone.






Found a free Flash game that's basically a trading card game. Gameplay is very similar to Magic: The Gathering, but one major difference is that creatures do not block each other in battle. It looks quite new due to the fact that it only has about 20 cards for each colour. On the other hand, it has a dozen colours plus one colourless faction.

With a limit of 30-60 cards per deck, it offers a huge variety of cards to experiment with. In fact, almost all the colours have cards that use mana of different colours for their abilities. Hence mixing of colours is strongly encouraged.

Forming a great deck with just 30 cards is easy, since smaller decks are simpler to plan. Having a 60-card deck that is just as good or even better is a much tougher challenge.

When I first tried I thought it would get boring quickly, but in the FAQ it says that rare cards can only be won in the slot-machine-minigame that you get to try when you win a round. When I beat a round of a certain difficulty, I get a certain number of tries on this minigame. If all 3 slots display the same card, I get one of that card.

So far I haven't won anything I can't buy.