Archived News starting from 08-01-2008 and earlier
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After sacrificing as much time as 12 full days of my life to the
game, I finally got the top rank in Battlefield 2142 today, as thousands have before me. Much longer than the measly 46 hours
required for Call of Duty 4. I'm now free of computer games until
Starcraft 2 comes out sometime in the next year.
After passing on one too many motherboard deals,
this one finally got me to cave.
Duane and
Stavos had me converted to Intel architecture awhile back, but the quad cores are still too expensive, so I settled on a more affordable
Core 2 E7200 for now. The beauty of
this motherboard is that it accepts both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, so I was able to recycle the memory and every other component from my
old system to create the
new one for less than $200. The upgrade finally put me in the
10,000 3DMark club, and the onboard ICH9R RAID controller
boosted my I/O by at least 10MB/s across the board. Surprisingly my Vista rating remained the same, suggesting all the gains were due entirely to the faster front side bus. The upgrade also introduced me to the new
LGA 775 CPU interface which initially blew my mind. Instead of pins on the processor, there is a "Land Grid Array" of pins on the motherboard that match contacts on the CPU. Initially fearing homeland security would arrest me for using such fascist technology, I quickly remembered I had blown $200 on an unnecessary upgrade putting me back into the more accepted blind consumer category.
My new
WNR3500 router arrived today, and as predicted it made me forget all about the recent outage from the previous one. After a quick configuration, I was up and running with a
sleek new black case and blinky lights at 60% blink capacity. The raw power of the router managed to completely disable the network card in my media center pc, which remains a mystery and seriously cut into Lisas TV time for the evening. Fortunately the machine has dual-nics and a quick swap solved the problem. Once Lisa stopped watching TV on the wireless Xbox I was treated to 100% blink capacity. Apparently it goes into "antenna dance" when there is no wireless traffic, probably designed to hypnotize you into buying more Netgear equipment. Rest assured all traffic from this server is now fully blinkified before reaching your computer.
Todays 13 hour outage enjoyed by all websites on this server turned out to be the fault of my $50
WNR834B router, and not the l33t h@xzor skillz of
Stavos as was previously thought. After careful review of the router logs, it became apparent the reason for failure was megabit limited LAN traffic speeds and a lack of flashing blue network activity lights. Fortunately both problems are solved with the
WNR3500 gigabit router presently on order. If you're thinking the Netgear marketing machine has blinded me into sinking even more money into faulty equipment you'd be right, and while I may never know why the router decided to ignore all WAN traffic at 4:30am, I do know in less than 3 days I'll have a shiny new one to help me forget why I ever cared.
After constant badgering by
Keith to get a
twitter account resulted in my rejection of it (similar to my rejection of the Ikea cult), I received an email from my non-blogging and non-commenting wife suggesting I create a twitter account. Taking it like a slap in the face, I immediately started making fun of her to which she simply
twittered a response. The irony immediately shut me up, and I accepted the fact that soon I will be the only person on Earth who hasn't been to Ikea and does not have a twitter account.
Thanks to the shenanigans of MorlockPrime and Stavos, there are now over 2,500 comments I can print out and roll around in during my feel good time. Not surprisingly, over half of these comments are completely unrelated to the post they are tied to, but quantity always counts for more than quality. 2,500 comments on your blog translates to roughly $250 internet dollars that I plan to divide equally between them, so enjoy MorlockPrime and Stavos! You're each $125 internet dollars richer!
With the recent news of
EcoBoost being chosen as the primary short term fuel savings technology for Ford, I'm primed for excitement about potentially owning all-boosted vehicles. The Ranger is already
slated for a 4 cylinder, and now the Mustang SVO
may make a comeback. With my choices made years before their available, it was only natural to snag
EcoBoosted.org and whomp up a forum where I can spew my obsession to an interactive audience. By the time the technology is mainstream, I'll have spewed out enough rants to scare off anyone but the most hardcore, which means it will be
Stavos and I as exclusive members. Engage jealousy now!
Cougarfest 2008, the yearly event I started for 1999-2002 Mercury Cougars ended yesterday. Since it was the 10th such event we named it Cougarfest X to be both eXtreme and Mac OS X compatible. This year it returned to the Indianapolis hotel that tolerated us lighting fireworks off the roof
two years ago. This year was relatively free of illegal activities, focusing instead on
RC car Jumps,
glow golf, and other
things that are funny only when intoxicated. Some
scary shots of EternalOne and
Lisa singing country Karaoke pretty much sum up
the rest of the event.
Today was
open track day at Waterford Hills race track.
Despite the fact that
Leinnintiger was the one who alerted me to the event, he was nowhere to be found the entire day, which made me sad. Fortunately my
neighbor was excited enough to join me instead as his dad works there, and at 10:00am we were off and racing. One of the workers at the event drove me around the track a few times prior to my sessions to point out the best places to enter and apex the turns. It definitely helped me carry my speed along the track all day. I was surprised to find myself passing other cars when I was sure I'd be waving people past all day. I also experienced
brake fade for the first time in my life, and it's definitely a scary experience. Since all 3 of my sessions were just hot laps, there was no timing, so the only measure of how well I was doing was based on who I passed. I was in the mid-level experience group, but I'm sure I just got lucky and started behind the lower experienced racers.
Session 1: Passed Alfa Romeo Milano and a Honda Prelude
Session 2: Passed my neighbor's SVT focus, got passed by a firebird and Sti
Session 2: Passed a Jetta and a Mustang GT (think he was a novice driver).
Also got this
horrible attempt at an on-track video thanks to my lack of any proper camera mounting equipment. Track racing beats AutoCross hands down. Needless to say I'm already signed up for the
next event.
With my illegal Ohio fireworks already expended on previous shenanigans, July 4th was looking grim for entertainment. Fortunately my neighbor was up for a
round of disc golf to pass the time. Afterwards, we discovered the Hamburger Hut on Grand River and Delaware, where we told the waitress our life story while recovering from a drunken stupor. The missing fireworks were replaced with a burning tree, which prompted a trip to the new development for wooden palettes for more fuel to feed the fire. It was then decided wooden palettes make better fires than dead pine trees and
road closed signs.
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