Archived News starting from 01-15-2008 and earlier
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The recent comment war between the
Morlock and
Stavos has vaulted him to 599 total comments according to the
counter. While technically he has posted more from various aliases, for the sake of suspense we'll pretend the counter is accurate. Comments
became available 4.25 years ago which means I get a line of love from the senator about 3 times a week, just enough to get me through each day. In addition, without the 599 comments Lisa would have left me for a more popular blogger as my comment/blog ratio would drop to 1.95 which is below the minimum of 2 to 1 required by Lisa and agreed to in our marriage contract. My victory over the
spam bots,
Morlock bitching, and
southern comfort along with his own
Evader dream have made the comment experience more enjoyable, but the banter of Stavos is what truly keeps the appearance of interesting information being dispensed. The world waits patiently for the 600th comment with anticipation.
Part 1 of the
Jan LAN Dual Core was attended by the Flatlanders and Cheffords, both having been absent for over a year. The *new* regulars consisted of
Stavos,
Excelcier, Tom and Dan, with a brief visit by the
Morlock who was too lazy to bring his computer. Stavos made up for his lack of Portal cake with ample
portal decorations while my portal cake
went over well and fooled everyone. Excessive monitor loaning forced me to play on my 110" projector which worked well after the initial motion sickness passed. Games started with Unreal Tournament 3, followed by Crysis, then Farcry, then Call of Duty 4 with a round of Starcraft for the late-nighters. Memorable moments included Dans mid-game upgrade to my spare GeForce 6200, Toms revenge hunting of Cheffords, the flatlanders COD4 teamup and projector shenanigans, Cheffords cool T-Shirt, Excelciers excessive belching, and my intoxication and subsequent obnoxious banter. Part 2 looks to be double the attendees and therefore double the fun. Enjoy the
timelapse from the
GnomeCam.
Stavos recommended a
portal cake for tomorrows LAN party a few days ago. Not being one to wait for him to fail to execute said plan, I found a similar enough cake at Kroger to dress up into a
close approximation. Not to be outdone, he will be bringing various portal themed decorations to complete the experience.
My recent gift of
Transformers Monopoly had me itching to play, and with Keith in need of treadmill transportation I decided it was the perfect opportunity to trap him and Schwartz into
playing a game. The Transformers theming was cheesy at best, and Hasbro didn't even invest in a new mold for houses/hotels, so we were left calling purple houses energon cubes and red hotels anti-matter. Despite the lack of appropriately themed development pieces (the fault of which lies entirely with
Stavos, the original purchaser), we managed a full 3 hour game. The end of which declared me the superior Jew by $200 after counting up assets. Yes I counted up assets, winning is that important.
This year
Duane threw an
80s/Tiki themed new years party consisting of various 80s movies/commercials playing on TVs throughout the house, girly drinks, and
appropriately themed costumes.
It turned out to be an excellent way to welcome in the new year. A notepad "prize" in my popper gave me the opportunity to write how I really felt about everyone at the party, which I then folded and passed to each individual. An enjoyable visit to the "Brighton We Are Awesome Club" also means getting lost on unlit backroads during your departure, which I did at 3am during heavy snowfall and a high probability of drunken man-rape. I managed to make it to the highway unharmed, only to be "that jerk" passing everyone in the unplowed lane all the way home.
The laziness of a southerner famous for never answering Xbox 360 chat requests prompted a
comment about
Gravatars. Intrigued, I took a look at the
implementation page and discovered the easy way to solve my "create your own evader" problem and prevent a pellet gun attack from said southerner. Just choose "GRAVATAR" for your Evader and make sure you enter the same email you used to create your Gravatar and you'll once again be hip with the internet. I also took some time to build some
statistics on the results page which quickly and accurately indicates exactly how much I'm loved by 10 people.
My recent
adventure with Vista Backup yielded a
modest gain in data transfer performance thanks to the fourth drive in my RAID. My disk performance boost came just in time to help keep me well above
Senator Kelley's new configuration. His recent upgrade to 64-bit Vista bested my video performance. The data transfer crown for Michigan is all that keeps me going, and I can't let him have it. Perhaps the California champion could run
HD Tune for me and pass along the screenshot?
Since there is
no 64-bit connector for Windows Home Server, I enjoy the irony of having to manually back up my most-likely-to-fail 64-bit Vista RAID 0 workstation. The 3 drive RAID has served me well until recently when I started running short on space. A spare drive I had on hand in case one failed was the perfect solution, and after reading a
very happy tutorial on the
Complete Backup/Restore tool in Vista, I was full of rainbows and bunnies about the whole process. The backup was surprisingly fast and wiping out my RAID was almost as satisfying as recreating it with the fourth drive, bumping my failure potential up to 4 times as likely vs. a single drive. The happy sunshine restore procedure worked great until an ugly "wrong size/number of drives" error refused to let me restore anything. A 2 hour odyssey of trying various disk/size/volume/partition/drive letter combinations to satisfy this error yielded no results. Fortunately a google search located
this rant of people who also found the restore procedure less exciting than advertised. Apparently the folks in charge of this feature for Vista decided allowing you to restore to something other than the exact same drive configuration as you backed up from would frighten and confuse the average user. Since the point of a backup is to allow you to recover from a drive failure, you would think mapping your old volumes to new ones would be a common sense feature to include. Instead, after researching the recovery console command line, I pieced together the magic command to restore to whatever drive configuration you please:
wbadmin start recovery -version:12/23/2007-05:59 itemtype:volume -items:c: -backuptarget:h: -recoverytarget:c:, replacing the version/drive values as needed. Obviously this is much easier to remember than providing a simple dropdown to select which drive you want to restore to.
This morning I woke up to a 42°F day which makes for great packing snow. What's the best thing to do with packing snow? Fire snowballs at unsuspecting passers by of course, but building a
gigantic retarded snowman is a close second (I'm the retard on the left). My goal was to make one larger than my inflatable one, but lifting 50lb snowballs without them disintegrating was beyond me, so I
fell a few feet short. Lisa provided needed approval, and the
Morlock promised equal opportunity violation for both snowmen. Enjoy the abomination I've created until it melts.
Evidently,
Engadget read my
recent blog post and decided to create Evaders for their comment system as well. They're calling them avatars but it's obvious they stole the idea from me. Nobody else comes up with this stuff.
Stavos, co-creator of the evaders, is already pursuing legal action against them.
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