andy’s place…

So, the dull weekend brought forth one good thing, a newfound liking of the show House.  Never really sat down to watch it, but it was on in force, and the remote was… there (you can’t see, but I’m pointing far away), so I gave it a shot.  And it passes inspection.

A smart-ass main character with no shame in his body (all went out with the leg), an aussie (adds points to about anything), a hot young doctor, a neat set, and a token.  Adds up to a winner for me.

Now that the DVR has another show to fill up my evenings, I have more time to make plans.  My cousin’s wife (family shrink, literally, she’s got the degrees to back it) reminded me of the good it would do me to get out of town for a couple days to SF or RC.  And of course she reminds me of all the other things that would do me some good, like a woman, a maid, hobbies, etc… but what does she know :-).  Regardless, I’m trying to put together enough of a task list/shopping list to justify a 1-2 day trip to SF.  Any major events happening down there that I could try to correlate my trip with?  And not a drunk bus thing, that would be bad for Andy…  and you I would guess.  Given that the average weight of most of you is sub 175, you are easily tossable around the bus…

Should be a simple weekend.

Friday night - Weekly gaming session, if we have enough people.  Those bored, fire up some CoD2 (it’s 20 bucks for crying out loud).  Mix up a drink, and get a chance to shoot me.  You know you want to…

Saturday - Sleep.  Maybe laundry and cleaning, but sleep mostly.

Sunday - Grandparent’s 60th anniversary breakfast gathering.  Then, whatever I didn’t accomplish on Saturday.

Simple life is good…   What are you folks doing for the weekend?  Actually being social, or lazy like me?

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…

…seriously complain about an outage of a free service?  Twice in the last month or so, I’ve heard repeated whining, bitching, and moaning about how people were inconvenienced or affected by the Gmail or Google Apps outages.  Inconvenience, ok, I can buy that.  It can suck to not have access to your email for a while, but if it is not your business email, it’s not that big of a deal most all of the time.

Now, for the real complaint:  People that base their business on a free product/service, and bitch when they can’t reach it.  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why is it that most of the people that say this allowed to write?  If you are basing your whole show, your livelihood on a free product/service with no SLA, no guarantees, no real support system, then I can’t feel bad for you at all when I see you in the unemployed line (ok, I don’t want anyone there, but you get my point).

Now, maybe I’m a little biased in that I work in a shop that has money… lots of it in comparison to many shops.  I hear $100,000 for a purchase and say “that’s cheap” on a fairly regular basis.  And yes, I expect some Linux/Open Source people to tell me that they do this “free” thing all the time, but that has a support system of sorts.  While I may disagree with the effectiveness of this approach, it’s still support.

Gmail/Skype, etc… and basing your show on this?  I’m glad you are… every time an outage occurs, it’s just that much easier to compete in the market, as you just eliminated yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally had an almost boring day at the office… unbelieveable.  7 weeks of non-stop this-and-that, running around, balls-to-the-wall speed, and the one day it’s not, I really didn’t know what to do with myself.  I spent most of the day finishing random paperwork, and cleaning my office and the one next door that I use as my storage cube.  And if tomorrow morning goes well, I won’t have to worry about really much of anything for the rest of the week.

The beautiful thing is that I’m also maxed out on annual leave, so if I can’t find much to do in the next few days, I can just punch out for the rest of the week and really do nothing…  sit at home, watch movies, reorganize the junk in my 2nd bdrm, maybe mail that shirt of Seth’s back that he left several months back (It is washed btw)

So many choices of what to do when you have nothing to do…  I still got paid for it though.

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?