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Weekend of upgrades!

April 16, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Well, put the latest performance review’s positive outcome to some new hardware this weekend.

First off, bought a new case since my old one wasn’t cutting it with the RAID drives and keeping everything cool. These were on smoking sale at Fry’s so I bought a limited edition Antec P182 – which comes in a wicked-cool gun-metal color.

I can’t say enough about the great fan layout which is super-silent and keeps everything very cool inside (each fan is 3 speed 120mm with external speed control and external removable lint traps for easy cleaning). The style, silent operation, excellent airflow, and functionality (the front audio jacks actually work on this case – finally!) are complimented by the ability to mount any board and its ample drive bays (each drive mounting point has rubber shock mounts and the drive bays have a silky smooth slide operation) which accommodate my 1.2 terabyte RAID just nicely. I have a feeling I’ll be using this case for years to come.

Next up was to finally replace my old laptop. I finally sold my old Dell Inspiron 8000 (P3, 1gig ram, XP, etc). It was a great laptop – the first model to have a 3D accelrator in it (gforce 2) – but weighed a ton and was just too bulky with its old 15″ rectangular screen (they didn’t have widescreen back then). I actually got $450 for the whole setup – about $100 more than I thought. However, compare that to when I found the paperwork and discovered I paid $2700 for it when it came out in 2001 – ouch.

Swallowing that lesson on technologies’ steep capital depreciation curve and vowing not to spend over $1000 ever again, I used the cash towards a new HP dv2000t. It’s a 14″ widescreen Core 2 Duo, 1gig ram, 120gig hd, 128meg nvidia gforce 7200 graphics card, dvd-dl burner, built-in webcam, vista home premium, 802.11/b/g, works, and usual bundleware. I found a $200 off coupon (thanks NotebookForums) and got it all for $800. I really fell in love with the glossy finish and style of this laptop after looking at many 14″ notebooks. Outside of a Mac, I think it’s one of the nicest looking laptops around. I settled on the 14″ because 15″ simply got too big for me anymore. This one was super-nice sized – fits in carrying satchel’s pockets very easily, was very light (tiniest power supplies I’ve seen), was more than powerful enough to play simple 3d games, ran Photoshop CS2, Visual Studio, Office apps, Dreamweaver, etc. On top of that, you don’t even need to boot it to watch dvd’s, just use the touch buttons on the surface. Can’t wait till it arrives in 2 weeks.

An interesting side note is that I got much more for my old Dell laptop on craigslist than what it was selling for on ebay. Similar laptops sold for $275-$325 on ebay, but I had bidding wars all the way to $450 on craigslist. Probably because you meet face-to-face with craigslist (ebay is full of laptop scams), but also people seem to really *REALLY* want used laptops on craigslist. Got a number of starving arts/student types. Interesting.

Fun 3D puzzle game

April 12, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

GREAT little conceptual/visual 3D building blocks game. Find out it you’re right brained. Quite fun – beat it in about 30 minutes, and on puzzle 8 – even figured out how to do it in 12 blocks instead of the 16 they think it took. 😉

http://mathsnet.net/geometry/solid/houses.html

What a fun flash game!

March 22, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

This is one of the better flash games I’ve played in a while – quite fun and really great graphics. http://www.gettheglass.com/

Notebook graphics card benchmarks

March 20, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

So, I’m in the market for a nice low-end laptop but there are about a hundred different kinds of graphics cards in those laptops. Even from the same vendor there are very cryptic model, performance, and feature specifications.

Question is: Which ones are actually good? It’s useful to know specs, but that doesn’t actually tell you how fast are they really (i.e benchmarks). Turns out, there is a great website that collected all this info in an easy to compare table. This has been needed for a long time:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

We are always in relationship

January 29, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

I had a friend ask when it’s OK to sever a relationship – if there is a priority or hierarchy we need to follow when building our relationships and when we cut them off. They had came up with a list of ‘inviolable offenses’, and challenged others to do the same. Here was my response:

This is an interesting view. Personally, I look at this very differently. I would say we never really sacrifice relationships. Instead, whether we like it or not, we are always in relationship with each other.

I would classify relationships as an always present reality with two axes. One axis is the amount of physical interaction/contact with the person (letters/phone/in person/etc). The second axis is the interpersonal boundaries we have in that relationship – such as emotional, physical, spiritual boundaries. We modulate our relationships with others by moving back and forth on those axes, but there is always relationship. Certainly as finite beings with a finite life we cannot exercise even 1 millionth of the possible relationships we could have in this world. It does, however, mean we are in a relationship with the traffic cop, the garbage man, the people that utilize the work we do, and so forth. We might only have the most minimal ‘setting’ on both our relational axes, but it’s still there. As proof, one notes that even in the most mundane interacting with a traffic cop – which might only last half a second and there are no words spoken – we still have boundaries, shared goals, communication (verbal and nonverbal), etc. On the other end of the spectrum we are in very deep relationships with family, spouses, children, and God.

You can even have relationship if one of the axes is set completely to zero as in the case when we choose to stop physically seeing/speaking with someone. As in the case of alcoholics or others that need help, one might indeed be using the cutting of physical interaction as a communication device to help the other towards really loving (though that’s not always the real spirit its done in and this method should only be used after everything else has failed). In this way, you’re not so much ‘cutting off’ a relationship as communicating to the person your boundaries or approval/disapproval.

While this is a really cursory explanation, for me, we are all one large family in this world with relationships always ready to spring up – with one father/parent/God in heaven that we all share. I try to remind myself at each moment to look at everyone I meet as a distant relative. I certainly have a lot of estranged aunts, crazy bachelor uncles, and second-cousin’s one-hundred-times-removed. When looking at the people on the street, in shops, in cars next to me, in the pew in front, at work, or in the old folks home as family with which I’ve only begun my relationship with (and *will* be spend eternity together with a large collection of them), things become much different when looking at the world.

The snow and driving in Oregon

January 22, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

We got snow here in Portland last week – first in several years – which made me happy. Got a few inches – nothing anyone from the Midwest would fear. I ran a few errands before everyone got out and went home to sit it out. Sit it out? Why would you do that? An inch or two of snow? What a wuss. Well, this will explain why. This was filmed about 5-10 blocks from my house just last week:

The ‘best’ one was about 40 seconds in. As a whole, Portland has by far some of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen. I’ll include all of Oregon by extension. They can’t drive in snow and they can’t drive in rain either.

My personal favorite drivers are the ones that buy expensive Audi’s, Subaru’s, luxury SUV’s with AWD then go out into the snow feeling like kings of the world because ‘Hey man I got AWD!”. They then zip along at dry pavement speeds but don’t realize that when it comes to braking – they have the same braking ability as other cars on ice. None. If the surface conditions deteriorate, that heavy car actually makes the distance increase 2, 4 and 10 fold faster than you can say slip-n-slide.

Still, it was entertaining (and terrifying) to watch the many Jeeps, Range Rovers, and expensive cars I saw flying sideways through red light intersections because they didn’t realize AWD doesn’t they physics of braking distance on snow.

More fun was watching them slide for hundreds of feet with their wheels locked and pointing anywhere but into the skid. I was skeptical of anti-lock brakes at first, but after experiencing the ability to steer while braking into a skid they sold me instantly. Our locked up friends, however, slid for dozens of feet without steering or letting go of the death-hold they had on the brake pedal which left them bouncing off poles and other cars in sadly comical fashion. I would laugh it off if it wasn’t for the fact each smash reminded me that we all pay for this in higher car insurance rates and they might have killed someone. I went home and moved my car away from intersections and off the downhill sides of streets so they wouldn’t smash my parked car.

You’d also think Portlanders could drive in rain – but you’d again be wrong. The chronic tailgating out here turns roads into a game of bumper-cars after the first rain after the summer because they forget that roads build up oils and residue when it doesn’t rain for a while.

Another fun Portland driving past-time is what I call deadly politeness. These drivers are so over-cautious and over-polite they actually cause dangerous road conditions. A prime example is the inability to merge into traffic any faster than 35mph. These guys will slow down at the top of merge ramps so they can look all around and merge into traffic. Result – the on-ramp backs up, the traffic they are merging into has to slam on the brakes or swerve to change lanes at the last second to avoid hitting these fools who are daintily trying to merge into 55mph traffic at 35mph. You can only imagine what the results look like at the top of each ramp. I saw a semi nearly jackknife and then rightly laid on the horn and gave the car driver an over-generous rating of one finger up when he tried to merge into 65mph traffic at 35-40mph. I know because I was stuck behind said car driver on the on-ramp and got ready to tell the officer the guy in the car was 100% to blame. He just popped over in front of the semi on the top of the ramp. “But officer, I signaled” would have been his claim – if they found all his pieces.

State of sound in Vista

January 22, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

If you want to see what the progress is like for Vista drivers for Creative Labs audio/cameras/etc, here’s the link. Not too promising.

On a bright note, Intel just released good drivers for it’s built-in sigma audio cards which are used on a fair number of it’s motherboards. You get 5.1 surround but absolutely no bells or whistles at this point. Stuff like EAX and other features are not supported on the creative or sigma drivers. Seems this is hard to do for some reason.