Friday, November 18, 2005

Potter-mania has gripped my office its iron fist of whimsy. As I walk about, accomplishing my daily tasks, knots of people gather in the hallways to discuss the boy wizard and his potential escapades, with the biggest knots gathering around those evidentally exalted individuals who attended last night's midnight screening and, in doing so, gained the ability to see into the future of those who haven't yet been, and also perhaps to cure cancer and revive dead pets. At least, that's what it looks like, just based on the amount of hullabaloo that's hullabalooing hereabouts.

The Wife and I have our own tickets, purchased by the F&SN Critic and his wife, safely tucked away in a hidey-hole in preparation of their tearing this evening, because of course we're going on opening night! There was a time when the thought of not seeing a movie, any movie, on opening night was as foreign as a Brooklyn cab driver, but that time is long past for me; indeed, I can count the number of movies I've caught on opening night in 2005 on one hand and have enough fingers left over to, I don't know, make some kind of vaguely-deformed claw-shape with or something.

We shall be in line, sans wizard hats but with expectations firmly in hand, probably something like two hours before the movie's start time, in order to beat all the other absurd freaks and secure our queue primacy. And the showing itself, at 21:40 or something around that, strains my aching, rapidly graying head. Who on earth wants to be out that late? Hold on--I must take up my cane and wave it angrily at a horde of passing youngsters whose audacity at interrupting my much aged diatribe cannot stand. YOU DAMN KIDS! PULL UP YOUR PANTS AND GET YOUR RAP MUSIC OFF OF MY LAWN!

In an age not long distant, we would gladly camp out in front of theatres for hours on Friday evenings to catch the 23:30 showing of whatever lame bit of cinema had that week caught our interest, and now the thought of being out past eleven makes my bowels tense. Truly, I am old. My AARP membership card should be arriving in the mail soon.

Work calls to me, and I must bury myself in it so that I can be granted sweet release upon the sun's setting, and ride force thence to the theatre. Magical deeds are afoot, dear reader--magical darkness, a must!

Posted by Keeper @ 03:06 PM CST [Link]

Monday, November 7, 2005

I feel pretty smart today. I was called upon to answer a question about Macs (yes, they can get to our NAS-hosted file shares) and to help out with the security structure for a user-administered server (it was a mess and I fixed it). I can happily say that today has been a good day.

I received my new shiny toys and assembled them, and all appears well. Rendering performance is way up, but game and benchmark performance is down, because apparently I've been running my RAM out of spec this entire time. I set it properly on the new motherboard and immediately lost a noticable amount of performance in Battlefield 2, so this 3-3-3-8 stuff just doesn't cut it. This also explains why any attempt at overclocking the past two computers in which this RAM has been used has ended in immediate failure. I've purchased some new quick and shiny OCZ stuff, which should arrive later this week, at which time I will become more powerful than Hammer Bros.-suited Mario inside of Kuribo's shoe.

Posted by Keeper @ 04:46 PM CST [Link]

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Argh. I got home from work a couple of days ago and tried to do computer stuff, only to find that my computer had failed me again. After replacing both hard drives, I am once again experiencing hard drive errors--Error 51 in my System log. However, Error 51 is now preceeded by another error--error 9, which appears to be coming from my motherboard's SATA controller.

After chasing down both errors and reading about what it means when they occur back-to-back, I have come to the conclusion that my motherboard is broken. This would also explain its recent "I won't POST until you turn me on and then press the reset button" behavior, which is definitely weird. Then, shortly after reading that, the computer dropped a STOP error on me (0x00000023), and then upon reboot, started making a siren-like beep error code (low-high-low-high repeating without stopping) that isn't in the motherboard manual.

So, time to replace that sucker.

I went down to Fry's to peruse their collection of hardware. I am somewhat limited in my new motherboard choices because I own an AGP-flavored Geforce 6800GT, so no PCI Express for me. I also am totally done with VIA chipsetted motherboards (the SATA controller is VIA, and this is the third VIA-chipped motherboard that has given me some form of shit), so I needed a Socket 939 nForce 3 motherboard. This proved to be too tall an order for Fry's, and thier brain-deficient salespeople refused to believe such a beast existed, instead telling me that all nForce boards were Socket 754.

Screw them. I got home and ordered a new motherboard from Newegg, and then in a moment of insanity also ordered a dual core Athlon 64 X2 3800, because I can.

Plus, Fry's price for the processor was $359.99. Newegg has it for $322, and no tax. Even when I upgraded my order to overnight shipping, I still saved twenty bucks on the thing.

Parts should arrive tomorrow. w00t!

Posted by Keeper @ 02:26 PM CST [Link]