Archived News starting from 01-23-2005 and earlier
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foot of snow fell lastnight getting me all giddy to go for a drive in it. Fortunately I didn't have long to wait.
Duane called requesting assistance with his car which had blown a fuse and I was off. The nice thing about a foot of snow on a Saturday is that the timid tend to stay off the roads leaving me free to play. After assisting I returned to find that Missy had already blown off the driveway. To show her how much I appreciated it I made her videotape me doing drifts at an unnamed parking lot. With my snow fun satisfied for the day, we were off to see the homoerotic play 'RENT' with some friends. Getting lost in Detroit during winterfest before the play put us in the right mood for the perormance. Afterwards I returned to find
PlasmaTeam waiting at my house for web assistance and general brohaha. So ended my day of snow.
I recently started renting my old house, Beta (see
Alpha/Beta classifications). Saturday night, during part 2/2 of the
Jan LAN party I got a call from
Stavos alerting me that there were two cop cars, a fire truck and an ambulance parked in front of Beta. Concerned, but not alarmed, I decided I would ask my renters about it today while I'm installing cabinet doors for them. After emaling the renters about the time I would arrive today I found out the reason for the emergency vehicles. Apparently a homeless person had stopped in my neighbors front yard and succumbed to the cold. The renters in my house found the man and called the ambulance and police.
Here is the news article. A very horrible experience both for the gentleman that died as well as my renters who found him.
Before the
LAN Party, I was under the impression that
RAID disk controllers were only useful for redundancy and stability. That changed after the rantings of
Zorka regarding his new Serial ATA RAID0 array. RAID0 stripes across multiple drives and actually load balances the work between them, resulting in a performance boost. After running a
base benchmark I discovered my single
WD1200JB drive was half the speed of his array. Like an annoying mosquito the potential gains I could achieve from a RAID0 setup kept buzzing in my ear. I finally gave in and bought an identical
WD1200JB drive, which has an 8MB cache and decent specifications (and is affordable) but nowhere near the speed realized with a faster Serial ATA drive. Still excited, I setup both drives as master on separate IDE controllers. I debated using the same controller with a master/slave configuration but using my experience from single drives decided separate controllers would be optimal (if you know something I don't please email me!). The
GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard in my computer has a built in ITE 8212 GigaRAID controller that was just waiting to be configured, which I did. The setup was simple, and wiped my existing drive clean (yes it was backed up silly!). After a little research I found the "Mass Storage Driver" required for WinXP (why do we still need to load 3rd party drivers from floppies?) and reloaded the computer with the new improved RAID0 array. While the load seemed somewhat faster, nothing spectacular occurred. However, the
new benchmark results was definitely an anticlimax. The new setup gave me an extra 20MB/s average read speed (significant) but actually went down in burst and random reads. However the graph does show a more sustained rate for the RAID as compared to the single, which is hopefully an indication of better archive decompression speeds (my primary need for speed). While the RAID0 now means I'm more vulnerable if a drive failure occurs (complete data loss instead of a bad block) the cool factor and marginal improvement are enough to justify the risk. Yes I know what you want now, so here it is:
an animated benchmark comparison. I used
HD Tach for the benchmarks, send me yours so I can gloat or cry accordingly.
The
Jan LAN Party was last night with a pretty good turnout. Highlights include the attack of the walking eyeballs, anti-wall destruction league, suicide jeep jump and toilet throwing fury. A blown fuse, clogged toilet, and odor dispersing fan signaled a successful event. Part 2/2 follow-up is next weekend.
Contrary to what the
weather station may be reporting lately, my house has not been surrounded by a wind-proof bubble. Nor do I have magic fairy gnomes spinning the wind direction sensor, both of which would have to occur to generate the readings it's been reporting. In fact, the recent rain followed by the freeze immobilized the wind speed sensor which apparently isn't as well protected against rain as the wind direction sensor. I know these reading put many of you in a panic so I thought I would clarify the situation. If anybody has good aim launch a snowball at the thing next time you're near my house. Maybe that will free it up and we can once again resume our normal lives.
Tonight I finished setting up my
WM-918 Weather Station consisting of an
Anemometer,
Rain Collector, and
Thermo-Hygrometer. The end result being some very detailed measurements of the weather occuring around my house. Of course, no new toy is worth much unless you can generate an interactive website from it, so I give you the
AtomicInternet Weather Station. Currently just a hacked piece of HTML which I hope to soon integrate with the
Gnome Cam for a full weather experience. Those of you sufffering 70 degree weather can now experience the virtual dreariness that is Michigan.
A visit from my
floridian friends created a change in my new years plans. Originally slated to occur at the
haus o' Downey, the last minute change turned out
better than expected. We drank, we danced, we played foozball/air hockey and best of all, we violated the light-up deer in my front yard. I hope all who participated enjoyed themselves or used alcohol to forgot. The downside of the floridians leaving is the temperature is sure to drop down from the fabulous 63 degrees we had today. Anytime you come to my house make sure you demand that Missy wear her sailor mercury costume, for my benefit (and yours).
Among the things Santa delivered to me for Christmas was a quiet power supply and a
K7N2 Delta2 Motherboard. Both vital components for the new, faster
ELECTRON media machine. My old
Asus A7V board was maxed out and could only run at 4x AGP, 133Mhz FSB and limited my Athlon XP2500+ processor to 1666Mhz. Despite the choice Mhz number, it wasn't fast enough. Especially after seeing
Steve's MCE machine equipped with an XP2500+ at full speed. The
new configuration is definately much faster and quieter. I have a few more silencing upgrades left before I'm done. One neat thing about this motherboard is when it goes into suspend the whole computer shuts down. Fans, hard drive, everything. Once MCE signals a wakeup it all starts up again and records whatever show is scheduled. Definately a good feature when you're cheap on electricity like myself.
Today was a major snow day as you can see from the
webcam. Last year I had a 4x
2 pickup truck which was
a lot of fun. This year I have a new
4x4 pickup which is mathematically
twice as much fun. I was able to prove this hypothesis today when instead of doing small circles in the snow I was able to perform four wheel drifts in ever increasing larger circles. Unfortunately my fun was short-lived as the parking lot began to fill up, but I can now confidently recommend 4x4 vehicles to anyone who wants to drive like a maniac in the snow. As is tradition,
Stavos and I will be out making videos again at some point this year.
After my server alert network called and left me messages I realized this server was down, and had been down for over an hour. I left work and came home for lunch to find the cable modem flashing and laughing at me (integrated taunting voice chip). After contacting
Road Runner I learned the outage was area wide with no estimated down time. With more than 45 minutes left in my lunch, I decided to try
using my phone as a modem for a short while to see if it would work. Surprisingly Verizon doesn't block any incoming port request and between 11:45 and 12:15 the server again had connectivity. Once I realized I only have 200 peak hour minutes the excitement faded and connectivity was again dropped.
Initial Outage: 10:00am - 11:15am
Second Outage: 12:15am - 3:56pm
Also: Happy Birthday Missy!
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