Archived News starting from 12-02-2004 and earlier
BlogThe
BlackNova Traders game has been reset. I'll be following a 6 month reset schedule from now on, so this game will last till June, 2005. The game was reset as requested by the
overwhelming response to the survey. Settings also adjusted accordingly.
My old house (
Beta) recently suffered a leaky valve at the incoming line past the meter. A call around to some local plumbers revealed a charge of $200 to repair it. Fortunately I was involved in deep conversation with
Brian who had experience working with other peoples pipes. He offered to fix the problem for the low price of zero, which was better than the professional plumbers guild had to offer. Having never done plumbing before, I was fascinated with his expert handling of the pipes, the pipe fittings, and the blow torch that heated up the pipe connections before he smeared a load of solder all over them. Exhausted, we left the job in anticipation of the water being turned back on. Unfortunately, the first attempt proved leaky, but Dr. Plumber never leaves a job undone and was quickly back smearing another load of solder all over my leaky pipes. This time there were no leaks and my pipes were stronger than ever. Dr. Plumber: you can blow torch a load of solder on my pipes anytime.
Only 16 days after upgrading
NEUTRON I was greeted by
this screen of doom after a system hard freeze (not even a CTRL-ALT-DEL response). I again rebooted and was told my BIOS Checksum was incorrect. A short while later I had the BIOS reflashed and finished setting up the CMOS settings only to receive another BIOS Checksum error. I again flashed the latest BIOS direct from
BioStar for my
iDEQ 200n and reset the CMOS jumper on the motherboard. This time the video would not even initialize. I then decided to remove my add-on GeForce 6800 card along with my Netgear WG311T wireless card and tried again. Still no video initialization. I put my old components back into the system and still no result. Frustrated, I took all my brand new components and set them on top of the iDEQ where it currently sits awaiting a new motherboard/case combo. Fortunately my sister left her laptop so I have a working computer to use while I'm waiting. I have never had a BIOS corrupt on me before, and if anyone is so inclined I'll gladly deliver for troubleshooting. Otherwise I'll try Ebay and hopefully get enough to pay for my replacement motherboard/case. I'm theorizing my WG311T may have required too much power and shorted the system since at least 2 of my frequent reboots leading up to the hard freeze occurred during heavy network use. Defiantly getting a 450wat power supply regardless.
After an
associate informed me the latest version of
Windows XP Media Center Edition had recently been released for purchase, and my subsequent
upgrade of my
media machine to MCE, myself and everyone I work with is going crazy over this new operating system. It truly does change the way you watch television and manage media. Anybody who hears about it wants one, and if you build it yourself it's not prohibitively expensive to get one up and running. I've
updated my photo gallery with more screenshots to share when I preach to the next unsuspecting victim. Here are some useful links I've found during my obsession:
Today I finally got my
ELECTRON machine running
Windows XP Media Center Edition properly. I found this
list of accepted hardware which saved me TONS of time trying to find a tuner/video card combination that would work. XP MCE has very strict hardware requirements since it's designed to work on $2,000 machines. Not having $2,000 to spend I decided to bastardize my existing media machine into one. Unfortunately, the ATI All-In-Wonder series video/capture card I previously had in ELECTRON is not directly supported by XP MCE without a proprietary MPEG encoder by ATI, and even then it's slow (because it's software encoding). I had to
E-bay that card to pay for some new, XP MCE approved
hardware. The combination I went with is the
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE and the
NVIDIA GeForce FX5200. Total hardware cost was $60 for the tuner and $100 for the video card. My recent upgrade of
NEUTRON left me with some donor memory and a new processor upgrade as well which I also threw into the mix. After configuring all the hardware and finding the right XP MCE drivers I was still unable to watch Television due to another obscure error. Some more research and I found out I had to purchase the NVIDIA DVD Codec to decode the MPEG stream my tuner was constantly encoding. After this final hurdle came the
big payoff.
As you can see it's now a very advanced media management device. Although the hardware/software and labor cost was much higher than I expected (still way less than $2,000) it was definately worth it.
I'm a sucker for online web analysis tools. I have checked to make sure my site is
always available, has
valid HTML, a
valid CSS layout, and a
valid RSS feed. Well now thanks to
WebSiteOptimization.com I can work on making a
fully optimized website, although this latest analysis tool is somewhat subjective, with no real standards in place to uphold it. Nevertheless, it's a web analysis tool and I just can't stand to look bad in the eyes of an automated certification tool.
After getting my
wireless network up and running,
my next project was upgrading my average-spec main PC
to one better suited for gaming (specifically,
Doom 3). I bought my system
over a year ago and swore my next purchase would be a 64-bit system, but there still aren't many 64-bit apps worth the upgrade yet. I decided this is my stop-gap until I'm ready to take the 64-bit plunge. Everyone in the geek world knows Doom 3 is the defining game for system performance. It's system requirements are insatiable by any hardware yet available. Previously I could only run it at 640x480 with the lowest detail setting (as low as you can go in the game) but after the
upgrade I can now run a respective 1024x768 at medium detail settings. (A "B-" performance machine from a "D+"). If you have used
PCMark04 you can use my
compare url to see if you are a winner or a loser. Winners are defined as those who own a system that can beat my score, if your system cannot beat my score, you are a loser. I've archived my
old system details for NEUTRON (Primary PC) and replaced them with the
new system details. I'll again make a claim that "Next year is the year of 64!" and probably retract again when it becomes next year.
After brainstorming various methods to send a network cable through my walls, I was informed by a co-worker that wireless had now reached speeds of 100+ Mbps. Since my main complaint about wireless was the speed (followed by security) I headed to Costco to purchase the
Netgear Wireless Firewall/Router. Initial setup was a breeze and it easily has 300% more features than my
previous router. Unfortunately I do not yet have a wireless card to test the speed/range with yet, but that should soon be solved. Anyone looking for a cheap RT314 Router to compliment their cheap 60GB hard drive let me know. Additionally, if you are a war driver head on over to my place and hack your way into my brand spanking new wireless network.
After an attempt to view the contents of the D: drive took over 15 minutes I had a feeling something was wrong with the servers fixed disk. While the
Ranger upgrade was in process, I ran a full checkdisk on the drive. Sure enough, I was greeted with a bad block alert and fortunately only lost a temporary video file. To be safe, I cloned the drive to a backup while I shop for a replacement. Anyone looking to buy a cheap 60GB drive with a few bad blocks let me know.
Today
Ron and Jen came over for a visit. With them came their housewarming gift of pet rats, consequently named Ron and Jen. The rats proceeded to poop smelly poop all over anyone that handled them, which gave Missy an instant bond with them. We started the visit off right with some quality mexican food to give everyone plenty of ammo. While the girls went shopping, Ron
tore up the Ranger in his quest to give me the ultimate OEM stereo upgrade. I looked on and helped when I could, documenting the whole process. When he was done, my base model ranger had a 6 Disc MP3 head unit with dual subwoofers and top-of-the-OEM-line speakers throughout. We decided to risk the mexican food and climbed into the enclosed cab for a test drive consisting of various heavy-bass songs. We cranked the subs enough to grow the crack in my windshield and marked the install a success. After a few episodes of Law and Order we saw the original Ron and Jen off, and took the other Ron and Jen out for some more poop adventures. Thanks Ron and Jen! (both sets)
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