Archived News starting from 02-11-2008 and earlier
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A commercial on TV brought me to
this site which apparently gives creepy blondes $560 for gold, or by the look on her face for some other service, but that's beside the point. The important thing on this website is the "Patriot Act Compliant" symbol below her. Since the patriot act is a law, you're automatically compliant or you're operating illegally, so while it's technically a logo that says "we don't break the law" it's obviously much more assuring and brings out the urge to trade gold in all of us. By this line of reasoning, I'm also putting a "Patriot Act Compliant" symbol on this site, and I encourage everyone else to as well. Let's help make the web a safer place for abiding by the law and trading gold.
Faced with a stuck
anemometer yet again, my
weather station has been convinced we're enjoying windless days in hurricane-like winds. My usual approach of squirting it with hot water from my super soaker only worked for a few minutes before the single-digit temperatures froze it up solid again. Shooting it with my airsoft gun and taping together broom handles to reach it probably provided ample entertainment for my neighbors, but had no effect on freeing it. Fortunately I was able to witness the actual problem during my shenanigans and discovered my furnace exhaust blows directly into it, providing more than enough moisture to freeze it up solid on cold days. Realizing I'm not yet obsessed enough to climb onto a snowy roof to relocate it, I'm admitting defeat until spring. I've already informed
NOAA and
AccuWeather about the problem, both of which I'm sure were becoming increasingly concerned.
Faced with a stable and reliable Media Center 2005 machine, I had no choice but to completely wipe it out in favor of an untested and unnecessary upgrade. Microsoft profitably decided to require new extender hardware for Vista Media Center, rendering my original
Xbox Extender useless, so a
$100 Xbox 360 finally brought me into the year 2007. Risking a roid rage from Lisa, I began reloading with 64-bit Vista only to discover 32-bit video decoders won't cooperate with 64-bit applications. With the
only 64-bit DiVX decoder available rated unreliable at best, I eventually admitted defeat and reloaded with the 32-bit version. Having lost the sex appeal of 64-bit, I could tell Lisa was less impressed with the 32-bit solution, but it was sufficient to provide her with "American Idol" and prevent a full fledged roid rage. The upgrade also put us on par with the flatlanders in the media center operating system category, which we had been lagging behind on for several months. Lisa and Melanies heated arguments regarding vertical vs. horizontal scrolling user interface design are finally a thing of the past.
My slow progression through
Crysis ground to a halt yesterday at the end of the "Relic" level. After clearing the map of four nano-suited korean soldiers who attacked me one at a time rather than a collective group (suicide tactics?) I was rewarded with absolutely nothing. The VTOL extraction I was promised never occurred, even with the latest patch applied. Today I found out it's a
pretty common bug, one
Stavos and
Duane were not lucky enough to experience. Jealous? I finally just downloaded someone elses savegame to get me to the next level. Defiantly the first time for me to have a game bug actually stop the entire storyline.
Last weekend, Lisa was diagnosed with severe Chronos disease and spent 3 days in the hospital. While I tried to figure out what I would need to do to accommodate her inability to exist in a linear-time based world she corrected me and told me it was actually
Crohn's disease. The treatment involves taking steroids, so my concern for adapting to non-linear time turned to fear of her ever increasing muscle mass and resulting
roid rage episodes. After a full week of steroids, I'm happy to say she has not yet snapped me in half, thanks mostly to skipping her anti-whine and anti-complain pills which means most of her time is spent whining and complaining instead of beating me up. My 90-day warranty on Lisa expired Jan 6th, so if she doesn't get better my only option is an eBay auction which, given her condition, would probably not even cover shipping. Fortunately she's still smokin hot and makes me dinner so I'm sticking with my investment for now.
After seeing
this deal on a second 8800GT video card (for
SLI action) I was launched into a 3-month
order fiasco which I later discovered was
fairly widespread. Needless to say I'm done with Dell, but the 3 month wait got me all hot and bothered for SLI, so for a mere $20 more I ordered from another store and got it 3 days later. Once I had both cards
installed and configured for SLI, I ran
3DMark06 and was immediately disappointed. Different SLI configurations (alternate frame render, split frame render, single GPU) didn't help either. My driving goal of running Crysis on "Very High" detail was just not possible with a mere 7% gain, which means the cost/benefit to SLI (at least on my motherboard) is too low to justify keeping the second card. Thus ends my
upgrade rampage as I enter my patient wait for
Phenom systems to become affordable, and finally free me from my
socket 939 prison.
Back in
August, while moving my sister to Chicago, a huge bee got lodged in the grille of my truck. With the
bee attack still fresh in my mind, I decided to leave it there and promptly forgot about it. Today after washing my truck for the first time this winter I noticed it was
still there 5 months later.
It's so well preserved I suspect it may be a dormant host for the
t-virus, and I'm curious to see how long it will remain intact. I'll be sure to provide regular updates on it's condition, including any signs of infected zombies near the truck. I'll also continue to reuse the Transformers Bumblebee graphic as often as possible.
The highlight of
Stavos' and I's trip to
NAIAS 2008 was easily the
whale car from Mazda. It was called something else, but whale car is the more appropriate name. Runnerups included the
Avenger Stormtrooper,
Bumblebee (disappointingly he did not transform and shake hands), the
autonomous vehicle (with emergency stop buttons), the
whale race car, a few
hot chicks and a
32" rim equipped car. We tried driving a
crazy chinese car with no windows, and Stavos got to
taste the good life before
filling up indoors. We also had a run-in with the Russian mafia coat-check, who told jokes without smiling and made cryptic threats about the safety of our jackets, but sadly did not think to get a single photo with them. As with every year since 2002, the event itself was not nearly as fun as the shenanigans played out on unsuspecting event goers, including the attempted
simulation donuts at State Farm insurace, putting Stavos on the "do not insure" list, and confrontation with a die-hard NASCAR fan who raged after we beat him at his own game.
Part 2 of the
Jan LAN Dual Core was held on the coldest day of the year. Fortunately with 17 people attending, the computers were more than sufficient to heat the entire basement. The LAN started with some Crysis, but the majority of the event was dominated by Call of Duty 4, with attempts to get Unreal 3 and Team Fortress 2 never panning out to the entire group. A few brief games of FarCry was the only real competitor to COD4. My existing
megabit switch was showing it's age with painfully slow file transfers, so a new
gigabit switch is on it's way for the February event.
GnomeCam timelapse is
here, thanks to everyone who braved the cold for the event.
After
Duanes 1000 watt power supply epiphany, and EternalOnes persistent complaints about my 500 watt soon-to-be-dual-sli system, a
$50 rebate on the Cooler Master
Real Power Pro 750W was all I needed to make the upgrade. Like my
last two upgrades, this power supply has
80 plus certification, and shaved a full 50 watts off my base power consumption. I expect EternalOne to immediately offset this savings within minutes of reading this, but until then I'm saving the earth again.
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