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Archive for May, 2008

Playing catch-up

May 24th, 2008 1 comment

It’s been some time, so we’re gonna break it down West Virginia-style. Show me what you got!

  • I may or may not have mentioned, I got a new job! Actually, I know I didn’t mention it, because nothing was finalized until just a few weeks ago, I didn’t want to jynx anything, and then things were insanely busy for the last few weeks at CSC and then of course the first week at AIG.

    I’m not gonna say anything rude about CSC, since that seems tacky and possibly actionable at law, but I will say this: wow, what a difference. AIG is just a completely different environment. In some ways that’s great, and in some ways it’s not so great, but the aggregate result is general awesomeness.

  • I’m finally going over to the dark side. Or was I already on the dark side, and now I’m going over to the light side? Hard to say, but it is certainly the whitest piece of electronic equipment I’ve ever owned. I, of course, ordered it on a Friday afternoon before a holiday, so I’ll be lucky if I have it by mid-June.
  • Speaking of computational power, I got permission to buy MYSELF a new lappy by fixing my wife’s, a 2-year-old Dell Inspiron B130 that had developed the following inexplicable behaviors:
    1. Getting hotter than a melon picker’s taint in August. Seriously, if you turned it on and sat it on your bare legs, after a while you’d start to smell singed hair and be like, the hell? OW!
    2. Ridiculous slowdowns at completely random times. Work in Photoshop for 45 minutes? No problem! Attempt to open up Wordpad? Oh, that’s gonna take me a few minutes. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
    3. Heat-related shutoffs. Basically the box would just turn itself off, and then turned it on after it cooled, you’d get this nice message saying “I turned myself off ’cause it was too hot out!” Really great.

    I did a little googlin’ and found two possible solutions to the problem:

    • Take the lappy apart and blow the dust out of it. I took it apart as far as I dared (didn’t wanna break anything) and didn’t see much in the way of dust, but I sprayed it with a can of air anyway. No effect.
    • Undervolt the CPU so that it absorbs less electricity, and thusly, less heat. Turns out this model CAN’T undervolted. Yay!

    So I was getting pretty pissed, and finally went to the Dell website to see if I could find instructions on complete disassembly of the system, and found a thing saying “if your B130 is overheating, here is how to take out the heat sink and clean the dust out of it.” What? Why didn’t Google turn this up? Google, you have led me astray!

    So I took the heat sink out, and sure enough, there was a clump of cat hair in there big enough to roll into felt and make a hat from. I got that out, blew some can o’ air in there, and put everything back together. Now there’s no heat problems at all. I’ve had this sitting on my junk for the time it’s taken me to type this out (maybe 20 minutes) and nothing’s afire! Woo!

    As an added bonus, the CPU processing power has gone from about 1GHz to 1.4GHz. I guess processors have ways of detecting when things are too hot and just slowing everything down. Ain’t a problem no more, this puppy’s whirling like a dervish.

    So in short, if your compy is too hot and it’s burning your groin, pop the heat sink out and clean it.

The end.

Categories: dear diary, wtf Tags:

My jam, it is flavafull

May 7th, 2008 4 comments

So I finally broke down and got myself a recording setup. It is PIMP. It is centered on a PreSonus Firebox, which connects via Firewire to my HP desktop. I also got microphones, mic cords, a pop filter, and 2 mic stands which of course have not yet arrived so I had to hold the mic and a pop filter like a putz to record my first jam. This is just an experiment, really, just the first 20 or so bars of William Byrd’s “Nunc Dimittis,” Gradualia I No. 4, whatever that means. We’ve been singing it in Cathedral Compline Choir for the last few performances, so I had a handy copy, and when transposed down a third it actually fits reasonably well into my voice. I’m still learning, but comments are ALWAYS welcome. I hope to heck this works:

Well, dang, it didn’t. I was trying to embed it in a thing so you could totally just click and be all WHATUP. Darn. Oh well, here’s a regular link to it.

Update: I got it working. Check it out! You can still download it from the link above if you wanna throw the awesomeness on your Ip Od.

Categories: artsy fartsy Tags:

Throwing down a few links at ye

May 2nd, 2008 4 comments

Did you notice I’ve started using titles on my posts? I totally am! The reason is this: I felt that the Chase Utley post from last week needed a title, so I turned them on. That’s it. I guess I could turn them back off, but meh. At least this way the RSS feed will be a little better organized. A few quick things, and then I have some fun links to share:

WebMD may well be the best organized, fully-featured, almost unconscionably useless website to be found on the Intarwebz today. I have some kind of problem wherein my left foot feels like it has a broken bone in it, so I went to WebMD, entered my symptoms, and was presented with a list of something like 15 possible problems, such as “stress fracture in foot” (Really? You think?) and “sciatica,” which I thought went out with gout and scurvy. (Actually, I know two middle-aged gentlemen who are suffering from gout. I keep begging them to start dressing up like Benjamin Franklin, but they refuse.)

I went to the doctor, who said it might be a stress fracture, so she had me go get an X-ray, the results of which have not yet come back. On the other hand, the X-ray technician was a stone cold fox. If I wasn’t so lazy, I would TOTALLY stalk her.

A few weeks ago, Charles and I went to the Brandywine Zoo (Sarah is frantically trying to finish her “case study,” which is sort of like a master’s thesis, but not really, so we try to stay out of her way) because they had advertised that Curious George, in mascot-sized form, was going to be there, and also because if I have a chance to see a capybara, I am going to take that chance. Sadly, apparently every other parents in New Castle County had the same idea; the line was, according to other folks nearby, THREE HOURS LONG. So Charles and I went over to the monkey house, which is separate, and stood outside and watched simians leap from tree to tree.

Screw you, Curious George, I wanted to see a rodent of unusual size.

Teh Linxorz:

  • This is beyond creepy: Coffin Calendar. Click the picture in the middle. MIGHT be a little NSFW, as some of the ladies are en lingerie. (I don’t speak French very well.)
  • You may remember last fall when I posted a completely nonsensical post involving Christianity, homosexuality, and why some people seem to think the two are incompatible. The comments got a little wild, and then there was a follow-up post that did nothing to stem the tide of ignorance coming from my fingers. What I really meant to say was this post by Rev. Wendy Porter, who was an associate priest at my pops’s church for a while, and has since moved back to her old Atlanta stomping grounds. Sadly, while she was in the area, we didn’t really get to hang out, because she’s cooler than the other side of the pillow, if that pillow was in a freezer. Also, I was dismayed to log into facebook and discover that she’s YOUNGER than I am; there’s really no reason to think she’s OLDER than I (she certainly doesn’t look any older than about 25), but my worldview up to that point had no place for Episcopal priests who were not at least five years my senior. Also: no one who is younger than I am has the right to be that eloquent.
  • It’s common knowledge that groin injuries are always HILARIOUS if they are happening to someone else.
  • This guy is a total winner:

    Peckman, 54, who is single and lives with his parents . . .

    You don’t say?

  • One more game that I was unaware of the other day, but is taking up FAR too much of my valuable time: Armor Picross 2. Simple puzzle game with a Sudoku feel that will not allow you to stop.
Categories: link day Tags: