Archived News starting from 03-29-2005 and earlier
BlogMy previous laptop having expired, it was time to search for a good deal on a new one. Low and behold,
TigerDirect has a
refurbished eMachines M2350 for $650. At 2.2Ghz with 512MB RAM it's light years ahead of my old one and "reasonably" priced. Onboard LAN, Wireless and modem with 4 USB 2.0 ports and one IEEE 1394 (firewire) make it fully connected (as compared to the single USB port and no onboard anything on my old laptop). After searching in vain for a better deal, I concluded nothing comes close for the feature/price ratio. I bought it yesterday and through the magic of TigerDirect ground shipping it arrived today. I promptly raped the pre-installed crap off the drive and now have a fresh clean laptop ready to join me on whatever adventure may come my way.
Today 10 Cougars and 15 people
descended on my barn for a celebration of car modification. I quickly learned a barn alone does not warrant a good car modification area. Proper tooling is another important ingredient I was missing. The lack of proper tools scaled our plans back, but we still managed to cut a giant hole for my new intake mounting and install a pair of new speakers in another Cougar. The next meet will definately occur on a warmer day, hopefully with better tools.
The Capaldi Racing facelift got me all hot and bothered to get this site redone. Plus Stavos reminded me I said I would be done before spring so it was high time to
bake up a new look. I started out with XHTML and CSS as my main ingredients, then added a dash of DHTML and JavaScript which made the flavor slightly bland, but still tolerable. Having curdled the XHTML document, I decided to go ahead with some inline style and image spices in an attempt to counter the nastiness. A few hours baking at 256 degrees and
VOILA! The beginnings of the new look. I'll tell you now it doesn't work in Mozilla or anything other than IE, and I'll probably still get comments telling me that. Despite not following all the instructions, the
new version is completely
XHTML and
CSS standards compliant.
After almost 3 years of the same look I decided it was time to update the
Capaldi Racing website. Leo helped me with a costly repair once upon a time, along with various other Cougar parts and events he donated and participated in. As a result I pledged webspace to him indefinitely. The
old site was showing it's age, and Leo has moved on from a Cougar to a Focus as his primary race vehicle. Fortunately it was designed after my "template epiphany" so turnaround time for the face lift was less than an hour. I'm quite happy with the
new look and am asking for opinions:
Old vs.
new .
A follow up to the
Jan LAN, yesterday was my last planned LAN gaming party for the winter season. I decided to to point the
Gnome Cam inside for the event, resulting in an interesting
LAN time lapse collage of photos. A total of 15 people with
10 present at any given time showed up, but I still have more leftover beer than I'll ever drink!
Here are event photos and below is Stavos' LAN Panorama. I also combined the images into a
video collage for your viewing pleasure.
This
past weekend I was at Cobo Center in Detroit showing off my
Cougar to thousands of adoring fans. OK in reality I was next to a very loud truck with lots of TV monitors and occasionally people were able to tear themselves away long enough to ask why anyone would supercharge a Cougar. My answer was different every time, and I let people believe it was a factory option when they asked. To be fair, my
window sticker may have thrown them off. Missy came along this time and flashed anyone carrying a clipboard who came near my car. This may explain how I managed to win 2nd place in the Ford sport compact category. After that random people started asking how much to have her pose on their car and I didn't see here again for an hour or two.
Project Carrot Auction was a
moderate success with a total of 10 bids resulting in a final price of $6.50. While not the $10-20 I was hoping for it more than pays for the bag of carrots I found it in. The carrot went to a distinguished english gentleman who informed me he plans to keep the carrot "in a warm place close to his person." He also opted to pay for the carrot with an inflatable cat which we agreed would be of equal value to the carrot. I have a
picture of this gentleman, but be warned he's very disturbing.
Keith and
Stavos are both avid video over clockers, but I never saw much of a need to over clock until my
embarrassing benchmark results in comparison to Keiths setup. A disciple of the church of "less is faster" when it comes to software installs on windows I avoided installing a 3rd party over clocking application and never got to over clocking my video card. Recently, however, I found
this article which has registry modifications to enable the NVIDIA clock speed utility already installed as part of my video driver. I quickly found that 400Mhz core and 800Mhz memory clock speeds were the fastest I could safely handle, which is about 20% faster than factory configuration. The
benchmark reflected an 18% speed improvement which was noticeable, and most importantly, free. Geeks just get a kick out of knowing they are getting the most out of any kind of electronics component.
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3DMark Score
(3DMarks) | | 3264 | |
| 3867 | |
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