andy’s place…

I love randomness…. always have, always will.

Random Link 1

Random Link 2

Random Link 3

Which will you click first????

So, I haven’t posted in a while, been on the road out at the cabin.  No internet, no cell phone, just trees and some work to do.  We did get some touristy time in though.  1880 Train, Bear Country USA, Old MacDonald’s Petting Farm, Keystone, etc…  all for the nephew Jamie.  He seemed to like it all, although he got scared before the 1880 Train.  I can believe that.  Trains are cool and all, but an early 20th century steam engine (They bought a 1929 one earlier this decade) might not be the most comforting site to see while you are nervous and away from home.  But he settled down, and I had a nice 2 hour round-trip ride through the middle of nowhere.  9 miles takes a while, and the screaming 1 year old next to me (not the nephew) didn’t help, but I did get to relax for a little while.

Bear Country has been significantly improved since I was a kid, lots more critters than before.  Old Mac’s farm was alright, but not the best in the world.

Missed a LAN party on Sunday, but I wasn’t that concerned.  There will be more.  Hopefully the guys will rent a conference room in a local establishment sometime for a day/weekend and set things up there.  And speaking of LAN, I’m still trying to get my plan for a new machine put together.  About the only things I have locked in are 22″ widescreen, 4 gb of ram, 2 HDD’s, and a P182 case.  The PSU, mobo, proc, video card, sound card, HDD sizes, and brands of pretty much everything are still up in the air.

So call me un-American, but once I heard that we, as a species, needed to do sex-checks/testing on athletes, age checks, etc… I decided that the Olympics were really beyond saving, and therefore not worth watching at all.
It’s a shame too, as I used to like watching some of the events.  The running stuff, boring.  Javelin was ok (spear throwing, what’s not to like), gymnastics was incredible… but I gave them all up.  No more.

I tried to get excited for Phelps, but I couldn’t.  Glad he did what he did, incredible performance, but I didn’t watch any of it.

Just another thing as I get older that is removed from my life, either by force or my choice.

Well, at least now that they are over, my late-night talk shows are back on.  Robot Chicken reruns to fall asleep to were getting old…

Well, now that I’m back and somewhat back in the swing of things, I’ll get to a post.

The weekend was pretty busy.  Friday, headed out to the Hills to our family cabin for a weekend of work.  Hit up the races on Friday night.  Good racing overall, what I paid attention to at least.  No good crashes, which disappointed my little nephew Jamie.

Next morning, it was time to begin adding on another bedroom, namely mine.  Step one was the bad one… knock out a hole in the foundation.  That involved me, a sledge hammer, a hammer drill, and a flat bar.  Oh, and a lot of complaints from me.  Several hours later, it was all finished, and it went to floor joists, walls, and backfill over the next day and a half.

Then the fun of a 3 hour drive with my brother, who can’t sit still in a car….

Two weeks, I’m back out there again for more of the same…

I completely forgot motherboard…

I haven’t seen much for these in a while…   Intel, Gigabyte, Asus, Abit?  Who anymore?

Sound card…  any reason to go PCI Express for one?  Or just PCI?  I’m leaning towards PCI…

Any other little cards worth the time?  Physics card?  TV Tuner?

So, with all this extra overtime I’ve been getting, I’m debating on whether I will build a new machine or not.  I’m letting some get stored away for a rainy day, since I keep having bad expenses come up and drain my savings, but I’m starting to get comfortable enough that I might start buying a component or two here and there until I have enough to get serious and finish it off.

So I’m looking at re-doing the whole thing.  I might be able to save a sound card, hard drive, or optical drive, but otherwise, it’s the whole show.

Looking for any opinions for the following:

First purchases will most likely be the components that have the least chance of getting out of date:

Case

• Thinking about an Antec 900, 1200, or P182.

Monitor

• Thinking about a Samsung 22″ or 24″ widescreen.  Which one, I’m not sold on.  The size of the 24 would be nice, but getting into a nice 22 is the same money as an eh 24, so a nice 24 would be a little steep…

The rest of the components:

CPU

• Thinking a Core 2 Quad, just determining clockspeed… 2.66 is the current thought, but I’d like the 3.0 if the price comes down.

Memory

• 3 Gb will most likely what I get.  4 would be ok for getting 2×2GB, but I have no intentions of going 64bit for a while, so I hate wasting, but it really isn’t wasting…

Hard Drive

• Probably do two, a 10k Raptor for OS and games, and a 500 or so for bulk data.  I’ve been a WD fan for years

Video Card

• Looking at either a 9800 series or a GTX 260.  Probably in the 300 dollar range or so, depends on the price/performance numbers

Sound Card

• Whatever Creative is putting out, I can deal with.

Optical

• Cheap dual layer burner is good

Keyboard/Mouse

• I really don’t know…  The G15 looks nice, but 100 bucks is a little steep.

Thoughts?

So, I finally broke out of my anti-theater shell and went to another movie.  Before The Dark Knight punched out of my local theater, I jumped in for a matinee today, and I don’t regret it.  Probably one of the better written movies in terms of tying things together.  The Joker, yeah, was good…   not enough of him on screen though.  Too much on Dent and Wayne…  by the way, I’m not entirely sold on Bale as Wayne.  Maybe I’m just more a fan of Keaton holding the role…  maybe it’s just me…

Well, back into my shell for another 1-2 years…  Casino Royale was the previous theater trip I made…  I might go see Quantum of Solace, not sure yet.

This has been one of the longest weeks for work and personal in recent memory…

Monday was spent heading to Sioux Falls and Vermillion for work.  5 AM start on the road in heavy fog is a blast, then go to a site where I’m restricted, heavily, and install a 350 lb router.  Well, since it took 6 hours to get the power hooked up, I went to Vermillion for fiber cleaning and last minute work.
At least Monday evening was good… Mike, Sonja - I like the house!  Finish up the lawn and we can have a poker night for sure!

Tuesday, more travel, Madison and Brookings for the same thing, fiber cleaning and wrap up.  800 miles in 2 days (in fact, I have 2996 miles of work travel in July).

Wednesday through Friday have been long days in the office, basically 8-10 hours of config work to make sure this thing works next week.  All of it being mind racking config work, as its all new to us, but if this fails, it will be all over the news.  We can’t have this…  Plus all my regular work at night.  It’s getting old…

The weekend, I get the dog to watch.  She likes to get up way earlier than I do…  thankfully, she naps a lot, so I can too…

Pray that Monday-Wednesday work out well…  I don’t need anything to go wrong…

Sitting here, 11 hours before my return flight, I’m looking out my window at the memorial I just left.  National WWI Memorial and Museum.  Well worth the trip… and the price of admission.

The rest of this town though, eh.  It’s nice, it’s clean, but where I am there isn’t much to do when you don’t have a car.  Everything closes at 6 PM minus a few restaurants, drinks are far too expensive to use as entertainment, and the TV sucks.

My last resort for entertainment, the free Internet in the lobby, got ruined by this infestion of wannabe cougars and soccer moms selling crap jewelry and bringing it all to a convention here.  So the lobby is flooded with these yap-yap-yap, where are you from, that’s pretty, I should sell that BS  and a bunch of drunken women taking every seat in the sports bar.

Oh well, it lets me sleep more.  5 AM wake up call, 9 AM flight, back home by 2:30 on Thursday, and back to the rat race again…  more REED fun than you can shake a stick at after pointing yourself in the eye with it.

What a day…

5 AM - Get up, and get ready in a rush, only to find out that since I have been gone so much lately, I let my grocery supply dwindle, so I had nothing for breakfast.

5:40 AM - Walk into the 24 hour Wal-Mart to buy breakfast… Cheetos for breakfast is solid.  Pound half a Mt Dew in the airport before the security checkpoint.

7 AM - Plane is late to take off.  I’m getting worried since we already have only about 15 minutes to get from the concourse I arrive at to my departure concourse, which is clear across the MPLS airport.

9 AM - Somehow, we still arrived early.  Blaze through the airport on a tram that went slower than my running speed (if you’ve seen me run, you know), find the next plane, and listen to someone talk all through the announcements of boarding times and then wonder when they will announce the boarding time.

11 AM - Surprising amount of room in the DC9-50.  First flight with beverage service of the day.  Northwest changed their policy to only provide beverages on flight hops of 1 hour or more.  Pierre to Minneapolis is two 42 minute hops.  Dammit, I, I mean you, paid good money for my ticket, I want my “free” ginger ale you bastards!  Is it sad that I’m excited that we might fly through a thunderstorm?  The gal in the seat next to me was a little worried about me after I said that.  Now I know what it feels like to be Midget…

12 PM - We must have some rookie pilots in the area.  Air traffic ahead of us is so slow that we are damn near stalling the engines of the DC9-50 and already are doing S patterns to slow down.  When we finally get to the runway, the plane bounces (which is awesome), and the pilot stops with the plane’s nose in another runway.  FAA violation for the win…  oh, and no storm.  grr…

12:30 PM - Got the baggage, then have to watch someone I’m with figure out the way to get a shuttle, then tell me that the “pickup” spot is the civilian parking instead of the booth labeled “Shuttle Pickup”.  He suffered more though, black shirt in 98 degree heat while I stood in the shade of correctness

1:15 PM - After paying only for a one-way shuttle pass because someone thought it would be cheaper to take a taxi back on Thursday (23 miles in a taxi is never cheaper than 12 bucks, sorry), we make it to the hotel, and I nearly forget my baggage in the van since I wanted out and away from Toothless the Magic DriverMan.  I got it though, and off into the awesome hotel.  No sarcasm here, this place is nice.  35 foot waterfall from the gym area, large rooms, awesome bed, good atmosphere, and it’s connected to a skyway mall…

2 PM - Wandering the skyway mall with someone that points out everything is fun….  you should try it sometime.  Oh, and all the while, we are supposed to be finding the location of my class for Monday.  We had to divert to the Science Hall, Planetarium, Extreme Theater (walked by it), and a few other spots.  Mind you, these were cool, and I have some great pictures for later when I get them posted up, but it wasn’t the purpose of the trip.  We finally found the place though, short skyway walk away, and a hop across the street.  Should be easy in the AM.

4 PM - On my own, wandering the rooms, gym, pool area, shops, and such…  snapping more pictures, and yacking on the phone.  This is actually what I enjoy in a trip.

7 PM - Hit the lobby, wait for my company to arrive to go eat.  Everything is closed on a Sunday night, so we find a hotel restaurant and bar after wandering for 30-45 minutes and reading every sign along the way, wondering if we, in our travel apparel of jeans, shorts, and one WoW t-shirt, will qualify for the Hyatt Skies restaurant, which should be a business attire place if memory serves me.

8 PM - Finally eating, and sadly, in Kansas City, MO, I had the best Mojito I have ever had.  Isn’t that a shame… not the coast, but middle of the plains KC has the best one.  Too bad I had to enjoy it while the bar TV’s had the ESPY’s on, hosted by Justin Timber-Douchebag and his magic army of fairies.  It’ll be over soon though.

9 PM - I’m here in the lobby writing this post.  Took a while…