Archived News starting from 05-24-2010 and earlier
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The early 90's were a great time. The economy was good, and the internet hadn't screwed everything up yet. Most notably because dial up BBS's were still popular and attention spans were longer than pinheads. The
BBS I hosted at the time ran on an IBM PS/2 65sx computer which was my first personal computer. Up until yesterday it was still in my closet leaking capacitor gel and taking up space. My decision to finally part with it was so difficult I decided to create a living effigy of the
failed PS/2 line by converting a desktop PS/2 I was also storing into an ATX compatible form factor. Over the years I had violated my original PS/2 several times, including a horrific attempt at a new paint job. This plus the fact that there was no way I could convert it to ATX meant my PS/2 77 was the only viable candidate. After several hours of jig sawing and drilling, I finally had something an ATX motherboard
could fit inside. I even made sure the power switch, hdd and power lights
all worked. While I can't bring back the innocence of my early 90's, at least I can now head downstairs and
pretend.
Every Thursday is bike night in Royal Oak and
tonight was no exception. Lisa's slow progression to biker chick took another giant leap with our participation this evening. After eliminating her complaint about the seat with a
top of the line replacement, she concentrated on helmet and leg pain this time. She did tolerate the heavy stop/go traffic on the way quite well, and was only mildly disinterested in the whole event. After starting in the "I'll never ride a motorcycle" category, she's definitely made tremendous strides to acceptance.
After several occasions of dropped connections and conflicting IP addresses, I decided my hex core server needed a new router to reach its full potential. The
ASUS RT-N16 was
on special and matched all the features of my
WNR3500 with the addition of USB sharing/printing which I'll never use. The real clincher was the promise of a "powerful CPU" and "Support up to 300,000 sessions." The Engrish wasn't limited to their promotional materials; it's all through the configuration screens, making setup an adventure. After brushing up on my mandarin, it's now up and running with the "powerful CPU" routing packets from my hex core server faster than light (that's right, I've invalidated the mass–energy equivalence). Don't be surprised if your NIC starts smoking after visiting this website.
With my last processor upgrade to this server
one month ago, it was time for
another new one as AMD just released their 6 core
Phenom II X6 processor. Why 6 cores? Aside from the tremendous processing demand placed on this server, I thought it was time to dedicate a core to each of the 6 people that actually spend time visiting this site. How's that for a thank you. Here's a
reference diagram to use when choosing the core to serve your request, so don't go stealing CPU time from someone else's core! The most demanding task of browsing
Cougafest albums has almost
no effect on CPU usage now, and surprisingly the wattage consumption is the same as the old Athlon X2 so I pass the hippie requirement as well. Most importantly, this CPU features a
turbo core that not only sounds cool but ramps up the more popular cores when a task isn't fully multithreaded. This will fit nicely with my upcoming turbo car.
After learning Blackberry OS 5 did all kinds of futuristic things like automatically changing your time zone based on where you are, not flashing the charge light all night long and having a browser that's semi-useful I was disappointed to find out Verizon has not yet released it for the 8330. Fortunately I found
this post on how to steal it from Boost mobile (another CDMA carrier) and force upgrade it. Almost 2 hours after I started, with at least 2 instances I was convinced I bricked it, I'm finally running the latest and greatest Blackberry OS. That puts me at about 2008 for mobile technology and features, can't wait for WinMo7.
A long night of Starcraft (some would say too long) started off with a
brutal defeat by the
Senator and TomTom against
Excelcier and I with me contributing so little to the game I was effectively useless. A quick team changeup yielded a
victory for the Senator and I after I embraced the
transformers to compliment
mr. pants. Then
TomTom and I made a comeback after an initial air drop rush looked to squash us in the first few minutes. The final game was another defeat, so it will not be mentioned other than to say Excelcier touched me in appropriately during the game.
Facebook took another huge step in taking over the world today with their stupid simple
like button API. You'd be nuts NOT to include this feature on your blog/soapbox as it not only puts more
pieces of flair to make you look important, but it also plugs your blog/rant on their facebook feed. The 3 lines of required code is brilliant, and will soon be on every page on the internet until the traffic finally kills them and the fad dies off. Until then, add the like button!
After
Enorym showed me the
Eco Gauge, my existing
air/fuel gauge started to look a little outdated. Not satisfied with the sensible feature set provided by the Eco Gauge, and determined to have the latest multi-purpose gauge technology, I discovered the
interceptor gauge. In addition to displaying air/fuel, it has close to 100 other measurements to spit out; acting as an ODB II scan tool in a standard gauge form factor. I was fortunate to have the
photo taken with my gay neighbor in the background sucking down a cigarette and staring at me. While I haven't tried the 1/4 mile timer or data logging features, the cyclic scan of 8 parameters alone was worth the cost. Knowing things like my intake air temp and fuel sender rate has opened my eyes to a whole new set of things to panic about on my car.
With spring here and my hippie needs approaching peak, I decided to invest in a
Energy Detective to monitor my electricity consumption. After
installing the sender unit, the receiver just needed to be plugged into the wall and my router. It has a web server built in, so now I just need to type http://power on my local network and I see
this but with my data. Not satisfied with a local-only solution, I quickly exploited the API and created the new
power page with a failed attempt at gauges that I hope to remedy soon. I expect heavy traffic, but this will hopefully eliminate the constant questions I get about my power consumption. It also reports to
Google Power so the corporation that owns the planet can also keep an eye on my electrical usage.
Despite the best efforts of my
ex-girlfriend, I received and activated my Starcraft 2 beta key today. As the download progresses, I bask in glorious nerd envy until someone figures out that now all you need to do is pre-order a copy to get a key. I pre-ordered mine over a year ago, and Amazon finally coughed mine up. Probably out of fear of what someone who keeps a pre-order for that long might do in retaliation if not appeased. Now is the time you grind your teeth in jealousy.
UPDATE: Just won my first game,
check out my replay! (pretty sure you can watch replays on the "leaked" beta, then you can pretend you're winning!)
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