musings from the sleep deprived

Well, work came through. After several months of forms and approvals and waiting for order fulfillment, I finally got my new powerbook. Read more

This was something I was intending to post in my long term wish list, but my wife beat me to it, bless her heart. Read more

Remind me not to install anything that has a release date of ‘Today’ ever. Again. Read more

So, with a tiny little bit of financial windfall love coming from ye olde employer, I treated myself to a new monitor.
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So I’ve been in this job now for nearly 7 months. Almost 8 now, in fact. I think i’m now fairly accustomed to the rigors of the job, what it entails, and where my ‘talents’, such as they are, come into the most use.
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So after receiving the part mentioned a couple posts below, I ended up trying to put it in, and failing miserably. The distance of the holes from each other was just slightly too wide for the motherboard mounts. In frustration, I finally just called Asus. They indicated that they would send me a new one (of a different, more robust variety) for no charge. All I had to do was call their RMA department on Monday morning. So, I did so, yesterday morning when I got home from work, and they are sending one out to me.

The only additional comment they made was that, instead of mounting ‘straight’ on the chip, this one had its mounts on the corners of the fan, and, as such, would be turned 45 degrees when mounted. Frankly, I don’t care if its standing on its head if it keeps the damn thing cool. Well, ok, and its 15mm or less in height. So I do care. So vaht … big deeeel.

So the northbridge fan on my motherboard pretty much failed right out of the box. The chip does put off a fair bit of heat, and I found that extended use of high graphics stuff would basically render the system unstable. Read more

So I now have a couple different friends who are swearing by liquid cooling systems for PC cooling needs. I decided to go and do the research for whats available, how much it all costs, and what the options are. Read more

Something that has been fairly elusive so far is a clean way to integrate WP and Gallery together. With Gallery2, this was apparently made a whole lot easier. Read more

So thanks to Troy I took a look at the next version of the Gallery software. Man, that conversion took about 10 minutes, and its already a whole lot easier to deal with than the old version. Read more

Yeah, so I do this thing. Every time we get started on some new online game, I go completely stats hungry on it. Its just what I do. I’m a numbers freak. Games with more complexity in their stats and character information aren’t confusing or a ‘put off’, instead they appeal to me. Read more

I’m weak. What can I say. New Shiny. I also got the dohickey that lets you turn it into an FM transmitter and play tunes over your car stereo. I’ve yet to test this, but I’m sure it’ll work just fine. Read more

I was pondering something yesterday, and it has continued being a background thread in my brain since then. It occurred to me that time tends to distort, and often completely obscure our ability to remember precise order of events, or specific memories. That’s all good. Expected and normal. Read more

I go through this about every six months or so. I’m a slave to my machine and its interface. I want things to look good, and be functional, and have all the information I want readily at my disposal. So there are a few tools I use for this adventure. Read more

So every once in awhile, a misdiagnosis of a problem is a godsend. A few nights ago, I was seeing problems on pebkac, so I logged in to take a closer look, and every single command I typed was failing miserably. Suspecting that the box had been rooted, I had the machine turned off until I could take a closer look and do the necessary cleanup and such. Read more