Über PC Named LSD

Friday, October 31st, 2008 | Insanely long, Rants | No Comments

I seemed to have a lot of technical ranting in here so I decided to break the post up by themes.  If you aren’t into the technical ranting or start to lose interest just skip to a different colored text. 

<ultimatepc>
Even before I got back from New Zealand I had started to purchase the pieces to build my ultimate home computer.  Believe it or not I am not a gamer, but I still needed to build a giant PC with the newest shiznit because I run so many things at once on my system.
</ultimatepc>

<boasting>
Right after I got back I went and ordered all the missing pieces for my computer.  Spending more money than I had because to me a computer IS my lifeblood.  I purchased 2 monitors (one 24″ and one 22″ that was also a HDTV) an insanely large computer case with water cooling. 

The rest of the computer was a QX9650 (quad core, extreme processor 3.0ghz per core that can be overclocked and has 12 megs of cache), 4 gigs of DDR3 1600, an Audigy X-FI sound card, Some fancy 802.11n Wireless card, a nice Radeon video card and 6 terabytes worth of hard drives (though I owned most of them already.
</boasting>

<technical rant>
Here’s the funny thing.  I fix computers for a living, tis all I do.  I am VERY good at it.  However when I built this and turned it on the first time It was working, however it started randomly resetting.  I surmised at that time that it was either the really expensive power supply or that it was not grounded properly.  The grounding being the more likely. 

<thanks>
Still, a HUGE thank you to my friend Kevin who helped me with this.  Because even though I had “tried everything”, I didn’t try everything twice… He also dealt with me bitching about how he was doing things and didn’t back down.
</thanks>

<name>
I needed a name for this computer but I had already named a different computer Evil.  I briefly thought of naming it “Woman” because it is awesome but has been a huge pain in the ass all at the same time.  I decided instead that I would get over the computer being a bitch and just name it LSD. 

Why?  Because it started as a bad trip but is now awesome.  I figure it’s “all tripped out”.
</name>

<XP-vs-Server2008>
In a side note, I have installed both XP Pro 32bit and the 64 bit Server 2008 (supposedly 12% faster than vista) on here and I have done my own comparison tests. 

By far the fastest computer I have ever used, though it seems sad that vista/s2008 both run slower for me.  I mean what a cruel joke for Microsoft to play.
</XP-vs-Server2008>

Is My Sister Trying To Tell Me Something? (spoiler: explosions ensue)

Saturday, September 13th, 2008 | Life, Rants | 1 Comment

I’m sure most of you that frequent my site know my sister died last October. What you don’t know is that Sept. 13th is her birthday.

Well, I plan to throw a very large party in her honor. However I was thinking the party wouldn’t start until 2pm. Seems it started a little early when everything died all at once… With a bang….

All the video players on my site were converted the other day to use an API somebody made and it requires the videos to bounce through their site and get back to mine. Well, the guy broke something and then went to bed I think. So at exactly midnight all my video players died.

That’s nothing. I was too busy to notice the video players because I heard a LOUD bang in the living room, when I was strangely for once in my bedroom and somebody else was using the projector to play my ps3.

The loud bang was the sound of my projector bulb EXPLODING.

This bulb costs just under $400 and I have been telling all my friends about how it might just last forever, since I have reset the timer twice and it probably has 6 or 7 thousand hours of use on it. I figured the “possible explosion” thing the guide book warned of was bullshit.

I can’t open it right now and see how bad the damage is and see if it was contained inside the bulb or if the projector itself is somewhat fucked because we have just got it mounted on the ceiling using some crafty shiznit and it will take effort to pull down.

So my thought is that my sister is haunting me, and she knew that I would eventually come to the conclusion that the bulb would have died soon anyways, so I couldn’t be upset about it.

However I am throwing a bigass party in her honor today and would have appreciated it if the projector would have been usable for the party. Or maybe to keep it interesting the bulb could have exploded at 11:59pm on the 13th while people at the party were watching it. I mean how often do expensive things explode at a party?

cheers & fu (hey, that’s my sister’s favorite camera pose)

Also here’s some new music for you. I stuck this and some new “magic” on the music player. This playlist is called Pain. So despite the things that have gone down at midnight I will try to throw a great party tonight. Should have a lot of people here throughout the day. Hopefully they are content to eat, drink and be merry and don’t feel like having a 12 foot video screen to entertain them.

Packers Vs. Vikings

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 | Life, Rants | 2 Comments

Packers Vs. Vikings. It’s kind of like the age old rivalry between Pirate and Ninja. I mean anybody who goes for one group/team will clearly not change their mind unless they are a fairweather fan.

I have 3 roommates. Now somewhere along the line it got determined that we should bring a VCR in so that we can screw a cable into the back of it, and use that to output to my projector. This means that now anybody can watch mindless television shows with shitloads of commercials and brain rotting time.

I tend to NOT want cable or satellite to be hooked up. When it’s not I am much more productive and though I still download a ton of tv shows, none of them have commercials and all of them are not just being on for the sake of being on.

I am not much of a sports fan either. I mean I don’t mind sports, but don’t actively follow it. Too busy trying to create the world’s greatest website I suppose, but I just never got into it.

Well my projector is now projecting football games onto the wall. With the projector now on the ceiling it projects to be at least 10 feet wide. I have taken a picture to show this, however due to how large it is I had to angle the picture just to be able to show something besides the tv show itself.

Yeah, it really is that big. I assume most football fans would wet themselves to see such a rivalry like this projected onto a giant wall. However that is not where the real rivalry comes from.

Our house contains 2 Packers fans, and 2 Vikings fans. I mean that’s the weird thing about Arizona. Very few people who live here were born here. Talk about havoc, I mean every single play somebody cares.

To me it’s more of a people watching event, since you get to see how both sides react to the same situation and how once again perspective is everything.

Well, my only worry is that it will drain the bulb of my projector. I have reset the timer on it twice now. It continues to display a pretty damn good picture despite having thousands of hours worth of use. Perhaps the whole “light is only good for 3000 hours thing” is total bullshit just trying to get me to buy a new bulb. I mean the actual instruction book tells me that if it is used past it’s time limit or if the timer is reset that it might EXPLODE.

Oh well you will see something angry post about that when it happens. For now I will just let it go. I hope I just don’t end up with cable turned on all day while I try to work. I always end up watching some educational program, or some program about people being haunted that causes me to be unproductive.

Rearranged

Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | Life, Rants | No Comments

So I got home and my roommates thought they were being clever and rearranged the living room. I get it… They wanted to have the couch so it was looking directly at the wall where the video gets projected.

However to do this they:

1) Threw my projector on top of a bunch of stools and flipped it upside down so that they could stick the couch in front of the projector… (It had been on the ground in order to get the full wall to be used for projector). Not to mention how safe I feel that that nobody will sneeze and knock over the tower of stuff that is holding my $2500 projector up.

2) Moved the couches into a place that totally eliminates the possibility for me to have my computer in the same room as the projector.

Now this was one of my main things when I moved in. Must have the ability to have my computer within an exact proximity of the projector and stereo and the ability to have a chair in front of it that can rotate and watch the TV.

I suppose since my desktop has been out of commission for awhile they have simply forgotten that I needed those things, but just last night I acquired something that Should let me hook up my desktop again. Once it is running I will need to have a f’n chair to use my computer.

Okay so fine, they forgot about the desktop and a chair. Fair enough. However I have already told them on more than one occasion why I can’t move the projector up off the ground. Seems that nobody was listening.

A projector spits out a specific angle when you shoot the beam forward. If you go and throw it up on a tower it will still be outputting at the same angle, which means it will be displaying the picture Mostly on the floor. To fix that you tilt the front of the projector up at an angle.

However when you do that it makes it go into a trapezoid shape where the top of the shape gets much smaller in order to compensate for being tilted at an angle.

This means to make your picture a rectangle again you need to go in and crop it to the smallest point of the trapezoid. Also noting that if we were to tilt up the projector up as high as it needs to go the fan would get in the way.

Now they didn’t notice because they were playing a super-wide screen blue-ray movie. Which means that despite most of the projection angle being on the ground they are still getting most of the picture towards the bottom of the wall. However they basically cut down the size of my tv by about 3 feet (and made it so i can’t watch it and work on my computer).

I almost went out there this morning and grabbed my computer, projector and ps3 and moved them into my room.

However I did not because I’m sure they were too stoned to realize they did either of these things… but still I will feel like a dick telling them they need to change it back.

Now IF we could hang the projector from the ceiling it wouldn’t be on the floor and the dog wouldn’t be getting in front of the beam. Still couldn’t have the couch there, but we can’t put the projector on the ceiling because there is a giant fan/light on the ceiling. If we could do that and flip it upside down it would project at the same angle that it did on the floor and would cover the entire wall still.

So I am at a quandary. I am rarely let things annoy me for longer than an hour, but nothing I say about this will make them happy (move stuff back, move it into my room, shove couch forward another 4 feet which is blindingly close so i can have room for a chair behind the couch and cut down size of picture by 3′ etc.. etc…. ). No matter what I do or say I will be the one causing the problem, and it’s total BS.

Update: Still not moved back. Roommates have agreed to remove the fan so projector can be on ceiling and say I can move the couch as needed when I build my computer desk and add a chair.

Fucking “Rockstars”

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 | Life, Rants | 2 Comments

2 nights in a row there will be no sleep.

Last night I got to bed just before 3am. They were recording some new songs. However it doesn’t seem all that smart to START recording drums/guitars/vocals at 8pm on a Sunday.

Tonight dude came home from the bar with an after-party. However it was just a big sausage fest where some dude stole my lighter.

There was only one single girl who was pretty alternative and didn’t know when to stop talking. However I was a bit amused that she got Andrew to agree with her on her anti-christian views since he makes a big point to tell me how much time he spends at church.

Bah… Anywho, Mike&I were watching a movie when they came back. Actually a rather interesting one called Pathology… But they came back and killed the movie.

Dude promised he would have everybody out by midnight and then after 12:30 he had to start a movie. Well sort of… It’s actually a shitty British version of Jackass.

Anyway, I have had a lot of Brandy and in another glass or two I will be able to just pass out and bypass that whole need for quiet thing to go to sleep.

In other news I am REALLY far on the new theater design / database entry etc… I expect I should be able to launch the new automated theater design before the end of the week.

One of my good friends just got back from the Army. Of course he lives in Atlanta so I probably won’t be seeing him anytime soon, but it’s nice to have another friend to talk to again.

Okay, seriously “Dirty Sanchez” is not nearly as funny as Jackass. Just an FYI. Total weak-ass ripoff.

NZ Prices Sucketh Ass

Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | Life, Rants | No Comments

Well no place is perfect. However trying to transition from an extremely large country to a small one I figured I was at an advantage since $1 USD is worth $1.28 NZD. I figured this made the country very affordable, especially since the cost of petrol/gasoline was lower here.

Then I figured if you looked at the way their taxes work it was even better because though there is 12% tax on goods, it’s actually included in all items so you do not have to add it at the sales counter.
Everything looks fairly inexpensive given these factors. However you can do all the conversion you want and you will never find anything close for prices on computer stuff. Seems that everything I already knew I would want in a computer doesn’t exist in NZ, or it’s in such small quantity that the prices are jacked up.

No problem, I am an internet guy. I have ordered shit from Japan, China, Europe before and gotten it shipped to the US for extremely reasonable rates. I will just do the same here right…

WRONG

First I went on newegg.com. I am happy to pay jacked shipping rates from newegg because they are the shit and even w/expensive shipping they would still be cheaper than NZ sellers. Well that’s out because newegg does NOT ship internationally. Fuck.

Ok, amazon is universal. I checked their site and they themselves say they ship to NZ and they have tons of other people selling on there who have their own shipping rates who will ship it if they don’t. Well I spent a couple hours adding items to a shopping cart because most sellers won’t ship Most items to NZ. Seems even though amazon says they ship to NZ if you look at the item descriptions virtually all items say “this item is only available to ship to the US”, and then if you add the item from a seller who will ship it there you will pay a TON in shipping. I added $685 worth of stuff and there was $723 in shipping charges (before I cancelled my order).

Ok, it’s gotta just be that I know American sites and not the right NZ sites right? Talking to locals and none of them know any good sites to buy from at all except trademe.co.nz. That’s their only site. It’s like ebay / craigslist (if craigslist charged to list). So I did some internet research and found somebody else bitching about newegg not shipping to New Zealand and read through the suggestions people gave on there. The only helpful one was pricespy.co.nz. Which is the same as pricewatch.com in the fact that all the best rates are listed there from all sorts of different companies.

Well all the best rates STILL SUCK. Fine, I cave I must buy at shitty prices so I will go to those sites. Hmm, seems a trick to show up as the best price on pricespy is to list your prices on your site NOT including GST. Which according to Vicki isn’t legal, but I believe it is for websites since they still calculate it at the end. Still lets total everything I want up in 1 cart. Ok I still have $2400 NZD worth of stuff I need ($1867 USD) on one site here, and that is also assuming I drive there to pick it up and not pay to have it shipped. Might as well… Small country. Ok what does the same list of shit cost on newegg you might ask…. $1194 shipped to US.

Ok, lets just take advantage of friends/family and have them reship. Well that might work for the small parts like kbd/mouse, but for the 2 monitors, full tower steel computer case, psu, etc.. It would cost family $763 to ship it to me.

That’s slightly more than it cost me to ship myself here!!!

I have already purchased a processor and motherboard from my friend who works for Intel who has shipped it to me which kicks ass… Also I still have 6TB worth of hard drives that I took with me. What I didn’t know is the processor and video card I want require me to get a 750watt or greater PSU, that combined with a case and a water cooling system which seems needed for the quad core speed I am getting, makes the things that didn’t used to cost shit cost a ton. I used to buy $40 case that came with PSU.

Ok, I have started spouting too much computer jargon, which means I probably need to stop talking.

Stage6.com To Shutdown, Theater To Be Ruined

Monday, February 25th, 2008 | Rants, Site Updates | 2 Comments

There is an announcement at stage6.com saying that on Feb 28th they are permanently shutting down. What does this mean to you? It means that ALL of my anime/documentaries/tv shows/stand-up/etc.. will be destroyed. Not that there just won’t be any new content, all the old content that’s already here will be ruined.

There will still be movies from “other sources”, and FLV files for various sections, but who the fuck wants to watch everything with FLV’s? To survive I probably have to embed the veoh player or something lame into the site.

This is truly a sad day for all who like high quality divx movies online, and what’s worse is I have been putting a lot of time into automating my theater and writing tutorials on how to find movies on stage6.com so that I could have other people help me maintain the content instead of just me doing everything all the time. Grr…..

Below is the notice that is posted on stage6.com:

–Tom

Disease is not your problem…

Friday, October 5th, 2007 | Helpful, Rants | 4 Comments

Alone. It’s not a problem when you are used to it. So long as you just focus on something else, anything else, then it just becomes something that you are.

You cannot stay alone though, friends won’t let you, family won’t let you and most of all life won’t let you. Life isn’t about what you want, it’s about what other people want and how they will treat an accept you. If you are alone you will have nothing but your memories and fantasies, because all we really have is our memories. So you spend your time alone thinking about others. Experiences you have had with others, or ones you would like to have.

So you try to live for yourself, to not care about the circumstances of other people who have let their memories and fantasies become too dark. Yet you cannot escape it, because as soon as you escape it will come back. As you get older you meet more and more people, and make more and more friends. All of them have their own dark memories and dreams and though they may not want to drag you down with them they have no choice.

A life lesson I learned all at once one day in my youth: You can’t bottle up your problems and hope that they go away. They become all you subconsciously react to when similar situations occur. You need to have a way to release your shit and change your focus.

When you study the mind you find that altering one emotional memory simply by changing the perspective in the memory can cause you to act subconsciously change everything around you. That if you go and change say 5 emotional memories to be less intense that suddenly you can make it through your day without any problems because the things you associated with those memories are no longer stabbing you.

Yet even knowing the utter simplicity of how to change a life just by fucking with memories a little bit, still doesn’t make other people want to change. They will make rationalizations for all of life’s problems because they are too scared to change.

My father had electroshock therapy many years ago because no drug would work for him. He would get a new drug and would get 90% of all the symptoms and they became worse then the depression. So extreme situations call for extreme measures. Well funny story. A little electricity running through the pathways in the brain and he was a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON for a few days. I mean they had simply weakened the paths of his shitty recent memories by intensifying other memories. He came back and sat down at the dinner table with us as if he always did that (he always ate in the living room). He went through the shit in his closet and said “Why are we keeping these? (to a box full of the cardboard things that fall out of magazines that he had been collecting just “in case” he needed one) and then he threw them away. He was scared because there were many things he couldn’t remember, but suddenly he was a good person that you would want to be around.

If you were to have tested him at that time you would be able to see that the chemicals and everything in his body would have changed. Not because of some drug that made it change, but simply because he forgot the negative crap that made him fucked up in the first place. Well electroshock is no great cure because as he kept going to the therapy he no longer lost any memories and instead just came back shaking because he built up a tolerance in the brain but not in the nervous system. The lesson however is the same. Life is what you focus on, and if you take a shitty perspective on the things that happen it will fester and eat away at your brain until you cannot remember what it is like to not feel shitty.

Disease is not your problem, it’s the effect of the shit you think and do. So own up to your own life and start thinking about better things, and looking at different perspectives on things that pain you. As soon as you start to feel shitty take a deep breath and then focus on ways to not feel that way.

Do your elbows taste good? Mine do…

Sunday, September 30th, 2007 | Rants | 1 Comment

To answer my own question I need to first figure out where the fuck the mosquitoes are coming from. I live in AZ and there is no grass or a pool here. So no water, no mosquitoes… so now I am even more confused.

Ok so next, why the elbow? I mean not just one but both elbows! Ok well the skin is thinner there, and I do have damn sexy elbows… but then again, I am a computer guy, I’m always sitting and have my elbows on a recliner.

Ok perhaps it happened while I was sleeping. I mean I open my windows when I go to bed and there is a screen but maybe they squeeze through. I mean they are little satan spawns after all.

I guess they might avoid my face since I currently have a full beard and that would be a pain in the ass to navigate through.

Conclusion: From the ideas here I have surmised that they are hiding in a dark corner of hell however they are still too big for my screen so they go in through the doggie door with the dog that is always going in and out. Then they come and sting me all over everywhere (though they still prefer my sexy elbows) and I just have enough self control to not scratch it except my elbows because I still don’t scratch that but rather I am either moving my arms/elbows or sitting in a recliner where my elbows are rubbing against arm of chair, since I rarely stay in one position for long.

What have I learned: Nothing, I still hate mosquitoes and am annoyed that they found some place to spawn here since I was quite happy to be bug free.

Damn You Cox!

Saturday, July 28th, 2007 | Rants | 4 Comments

My internet connection is moving like SHIT today/yesterday. Partly because my roommate is back and doesn’t understand that it’s better to download one or two files with less connections than it is to grab 8, but mostly because Cox High Speed has been blowing goats recently.

Yesterday I did a speed test and got “97% lower than all other Cox customers” then I yelled at my roommate and he cut down his downloads to 5, which gave me better latency but still 84% lower than all other cox customers. I checked his pc and he was only averaging 60k which shouldn’t mean shit on a 7meg connection when I can frequently download at 1meg a second from popular sites.

The connection keep dropping every 5-10 mins where my router will still be connected but I will have no internet traffic for about 60 seconds. This makes sitting in front of a PC working on a website a huge hairy pain in my ass. I mean not that horrible nasty burning pain, but still frustrating.

I would call and make a guy come out to test our frequency but I can’t rationalize it because 1) i don’t pay for it. 2) I am moving next week and will be buying their 15meg premium connection. If that blows goats at the new place there will be hell to pay!

I want to take a break from the PC and watch Die Hard 4 but a slight miscalculation on my part ruined 3 hours of time and caused it to not be an option.

I suppose I can go running