Archived News starting from 07-10-2010 and earlier
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My Cougarfest 2010 adventure began in Steeleville, IL for a visit to my
grandparents, followed by a stop in Washington, PA to visit Lisas
grandparents. Next was a visit to
Gettysburg for some civil war education before finally landing in Harrisburg, PA for
Cougarfest. Adding in the trip home, we managed to rack up a total of 2200 miles, something I advise against for anyone planning a vacation. Aside from driving, the 104+ degree temperatures made outside activities almost impossible before 6pm, so next time I decide to have a long distance vacation I'll just teleconference and save the miles.
On our way back from a round of disc golf in 85 degree heat, my neighbor and I decided to stop and check out the old
Northville Psychiatric Hospital. In high school I frequented it quite often daring my friends to enter and risking my life in the tunnels that connected it to adjacent hospitals in the area. Fortunately the worst I ever encountered was animals or the harmless type of homeless people. This time around my knowledge of the desperate homeless kept me from entering the building, but the outside was interesting enough. In the 12 years since I last visited, the deterioration had increased dramatically. The odd whiff of rotting drywall suggested the basement had become a flooded chemical cesspool. The huge swaths of grass suggested kids today are too busy playing video games to dare each other to visit the building and risk getting knifed. While I doubt it will be demolished any time soon, I'm glad I was able to tour it one last time. Maybe I'll go back with a few beers one day and actually enter it.
By popular request, here is my rant/rave post about the new Xbox 360 S. Fortunately I timed it with
the most detailed article about it to date, which takes the whole thing apart and reveals the inner workings. The hippie in me is happy standby power is only 0.6 watts (1/4 or more of past models) but the real kicker is its new, shiny, and Microsoft told me to buy it. So yes, I admit to having one on order for the outrageous $299 retail price. I'm not proud of it, especially since the only real upgrades to my existing console is more drive space and wireless; neither of which I need. Of course this is no surprise to anyone, but I thought I'd add the post to keep the universe in balance. As for Kinect, I'll try to fool myself I won't buy it on launch date but everyone knows the truth before I even try that reality shift.
My holdout for an SSD RAID died today after a sweet deal on 2
Velociraptors came across my deal feeds. With SSD prices staying well above $1/GB almost 2 years in, I don't see them falling to affordability anytime soon. Add to that my
power suck every time I turn on my 4 drive RAID array and you can see how spending $300 for 2 300GB
VelociRaptors makes sense. The power savings alone should have the upgrade paying for itself in 23.6 years! Having completed reality warp, it was time to
benchmark the upgrade and eliminate my buyer's remorse. Sustained read almost doubled from 126.1 MB/s to 236.9 MB/s with burst rate now a crazy 2,467 MB/s. I credit the 2005 era SATA 2.0 3Gb/s interface upgrade from my previous 2001 era SATA 1.0 1.5Gb/s. This means in 2015 I should finally be in position to afford a SATA 3.0 6Gb/s solid state RAID at which point I'll finally be able to extract all the porn on the internet in less than an hour.
Today was a
meeting of the Cougars; the cancelled model and make of automobile, not the 40+ female sex addicts. The event was planned and executed by my lovely wife Lisa, who provided a bounty of consumables for all to enjoy. A game of croquet quickly degraded into a game of "keep the guy in first from winning" and concluded only after 4 of the 8 players dropped out from boredom allowing the final shot to be scored. The rain then forced the party into the basement, successfully eliminating 10% of my unwanted liquor stash while enjoying Zombieland and The Italian Job. A 4 player game of Blur ended the evening, and occupied a good portion of the morning before reducing the number of obsolete vehicles parked in my backyard back to one.
With Google recently introducing
Latitude History, I can now track my total travel distance from this point on. I'm now not only telling Google where I am at all times, but helping them create patterns in my movement in case they want to share the data with some robbers. Fortunately my attack cat is prepared for this possibility and has vowed to vomit on them should they act on the information. In the meantime, I've got 225,622 more miles to the moon.
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.
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