"On the DVD front, you'll have to wait for Tuesday to get ahold of this year's best picture winner, 'Slumdog Millionaire.' But last Tuesday saw a handful of new releases, perhaps most notably the complete 'Andy Richter Controls the Universe,' the unjustly neglected comedy starring the once and future Conan O'Brien sidekick."
I think I have a trip to Fry's to coordinate now.
Looking at a bunch of paintings that a woman made wherein she is having sex with all the U. S. Presidents (up to Ulysses S. Grant) in chronological order.
I didn't know Millard Fillmore was a freak like that.
I'm up late tonight building a WiX installer configuration file from scratch for a project. This isn't precisely how I'd normally choose to spend my time, but the alternative is to head out with the gang tonight to see Watchmen.
Frankly, I'd rather stay here and fight with obtuse XML syntax. Why, you may be asking yourself, would I opt to not go see a movie based on my favorite comic series of all time?
Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished.
Tonight, too, shows an unpleasant side of my compulsive nature. I don't want to continually tweak a file, rebuild an MSI, and install it on my laptop to see if the bits fall where they should. I don't want to repeat this process over and over again, and yet I do, adding and removing lines, until it's juuuust right. I've come to the point where the WiX file is pretty much as good as I want to make it, and I'll show it off tomorrow to get some feedback. Until then, even though there's icing I want to put on the cake right now, I'm going to push it to the back of my mind.
Instead, I'm going to do what I'd rather be doing: going upstairs with a tall glass of white wine to dick around with the core voltage on my gaming PC and not coming down until morning.
I warned you that wind turbines were bad. But you didn't believe me.
The documentation on Arctic Silver 5 says that there is a 200-hour break-in period after application of the thermal grease. If the system is permitted to come down to room temperature repeatedly during that time, it will improve the chemical structure of the particles in the compound. It suggests that this can enhance your cooling results by about 2 to 5C.
Current results after a day of turning the computer off for a few hours every so often: after 15 minutes of sustained 100% CPU utilization, my cores are running at 49C, 37C, 41C and 44C. Pinch me, I think I'm dreaming.
Video Game Allows Players To Rape And Force Abortions | The Frisky: "The player stalks the female character in the subway station as she waits for the train—I'm already creeped out—and can virtually 'pray' for a gust of wind to blow up her skirt and reveal her underwear. And that's just the beginning. Players can grope and fondle the female avatar's body, and while she will always try to fight off the player's attack, he will always succeed in raping her."
Subject matter aside for a moment, if you can never lose the physical confrontation then it's not a game, it's a fantasy. I'm not even 100% sure it could be called a "simulator", because you can still crash the plane in a flight sim. It's probably more of a masturbation aid than anything else, and let's face it, those aren't sold in the same section of Amazon.com as Fallout 3, nor should they be.
Full disclosure: After Microsoft laid off the Aces team responsible for about 20 years' worth of critically-acclaimed flight simulator titles, I bought two copies of their last release in the perverse hope that I could see how they handle it when the player tries to fly a passenger jet into a skyscraper.
Encounter With A Starving Pickup Artist: "The Philharmonic begged me to join them for a couple of years, but it's just not in my nature to follow, you know? I'm a lone wolf. Hence the shirt.... [It] sums me up as best as a screen-printed piece of fabric can represent all that comprises a man's soul. I am a pretty complicated guy so I'd say it does about 80% of the job, at best."
I know this guy, I swear.
In Fable II, a game that I've gotten back into for the sole purposes of buying real estate and sacrificing villagers in the Temple of Shadows, you can save yourself a lot of time and instantly span great distances by teleporting from one region to another via the Quest > Regions menu.
This is a huge time-saver, but today it reinforced an important lesson every spanner needs to know. If you've just finished a bloody battle with some enemies, put your sword away before spanning into the middle of a crowded town square. The villagers do not enjoy seeing you wearing your warface and brandishing a weapon within the city limits. My wife divorced me on the spot and according to all the frowny faces and minus signs floating around my stats, that little stunt has made me history's greatest monster.
Later, I would go on to discover that you can't do a pied piper of Hamlin thing and convince all the town's children to follow you to the sacrificial floor in Rookridge. They just can't travel that far.
Yet.
I have to say I'm impressed with the Zalman 9900 CPU heatsink and fan I invested in this afternoon. I've been having poor performance with my 9700 and my lackadaisical thermal compound skills. So I've been wondering what to do about it. I've tightened the screws around my heatsink more than once. This is no small feat considering that the Zalman 9700 contains about 150 razor-sharp copper fins organized in a radial pattern around the fan. I've bled for this project on multiple occasions.
So after all the tightening, retightening, undoing, repasting, taking the motherboard out of the case, taking the video card out to get the motherboard out of the case, and so on and so on, I finally caved and got a newer, more expensive heatsink.
Not content with a new heatsink, I also invested in this legendary compound called "Arctic Silver 5". It's recommended by my one coworker who is entirely too blase about the fact that he's been winning the bitter ongoing CPU temperature rivalry I spontaneously decided one day that we had between us. Arctic Silver is apparently the Cadillac of thermal grease and has nigh magical properties. 3.5 grams costs about eight dollars.
I squirted a big gob of it on my chip as directed and clamped the new 9900 on. After debugging the mysterious issue of my machine power cycling itself whenever it moved, I was able to get it steady enough to run some benchmarks. Currently I'm seeing my cores run at 43C, 33C, 35C, and 37C when idle ( less than 5% CPU utilization), and 53C, 43C, 47C, and 50C when each core is sustaining 100% CPU utilization.
By comparison, my old heatsink and grease were giving me the hotter of those two measurements even when running idle. In truth, I think the problem was due more to the grease than to the heatsink, but I'm much happier with the 9900's mounting bracket than the 9700's. The screws are actually located where you can reach them, and without guaranteeing that you're going to turn your knuckles into shredded cheese.
What is a reporter? What is a journalist? What is veritas? These are the questions you must ask yourself.
I watched the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer interview on The Daily Show from earlier this week. For those who haven't seen it, I can summarize it briefly: Jon Stewart spent about fifteen minutes systematically tearing into the host of Mad Money for his role as a keen Wall Street mastermind who played dumb when the banks and securities firms fell flat pulling all sorts of fiduciary voodoo that made billions vanish and permanently eroded the value of many long-term investors' portfolios.
Back when my parents and grandparents were all kicking around, America had men who got stories. I particularly recall Edward R. Murrow as a great example of the quintessential reporter. He wasn't a showman, he didn't spend a lot of time of making his scoops seem sensational. The real story usually unfolded in a closed-set interview. Two men, two cameras, and a couple of packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
I think that the American media has moved away from getting the story, mostly because the American media is now more interested in getting ratings than in getting to the bottom of a mystery. Jon Stewart — a jokester who got famous in the 90s hosting a shoestring-budget talk show on MTV after You Wrote It, You Watch It got canceled — very deliberately and with the help of a team of crack researchers sat down and figured out a very solid argument: CNBC in general and Jim Cramer in specific have all contributed to the economic meltdown by focusing on glitz and sensationalism instead of actually, y'know, reporting on actual financial news. Perhaps Cramer isn't the best example of an economic powerhouse. Even though he has a keen mind and ran a hedge fund for many years, he spends his days now pushing stocks on TV and throwing plastic bulls and bears around, dancing and playing zany sound effects.
Stewart in contrast is an excellent critic of the media. He is, after all, the man who went on Crossfire and begged the hosts of the show to "please stop hurting America." This makes him probably the best person on TV to ask hard questions, even on a show as intentionally irreverent as The Daily Show. This is our new face of journalism. We traded Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite for Katie Couric, and in doing so we lost something. Hopefully, Stewart can get it back.
Please watch the uncensored clips of the show while they're still available. It's not a "Stewart beats up a loudmouth" kind of event, even though many are saying that's the case. This is the first step of an established professional newscaster, comedian though he is, taking up the vox populi and actually pointing out the hypocrisy where it exists. It might not be a Woodward and Bernstein-level of deep thoat investigative journalism, but it's clearly a newsman asking hard questions and not just letting the guest off with a plug for his TV show. I can only hope we've turned a corner on the era of Barbara Walters asking "What kind of tree would you be?" on national television. I never thought Jon Stewart would be our next Murrow. Here's to hoping he isn't the last.
theglen: 1250 things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG: "82. Victory laps after killing the dragon with my 1d2 bow is considered in poor taste."
So I should be asleep by now because I have a tax preparation appointment early tomorrow morning. Nonetheless I felt it important enough that, before my head hit the pillow tonight, I buy Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire expansion and start it downloading. It's ten bucks, I can handle it.
Now, even back in Hawai'i I was fully prepared for the pay-per-download experience. I have a Steam account, and Valve has slowly gotten me used to the concept of not worrying where my installation CDs are anymore. That being said, this new Sins expansion isn't hosted on Steam. It never will be hosted on Steam. It's Unsteamable. The reason is that Stardock has their own online game store. Instead of "Steam powered", theirs is "Impulse driven". The momentum jokes are legion.
Impulse is, sadly, not a Steam clone. It's more of a Steam also-ran, in the sense that when you buy a game on Steam, the following events happen in order:
1. You find a game you want to buy.
2. You enter your credit card information and click "Purchase".
3. You can start downloading the game.
4. When the game is fully downloaded, you play it.
5. Elation.
Here is my experience thus far with Impulse:
1. You find a game you want to buy.
2. You enter your Paypal information. A bunch of blank IE windows pop up every time you hit "Next".
3. You get presented with a page saying that your order is pending and that you will be sent download instructions in e-mail shortly.
4. Time passes.
I see little gain in having an Impulse client installed and running on my gaming machine if it can't actually get any Impulse games faster or more easily than buying them through a third-party website. I can put my credit card information into any game studio's website and wait for any of them to process my order and send me a download link. Steam makes all of this fairly self-contained: you can buy from the online store or you can buy through the local Steam client and if all pretty much looks and feels identical. Most importantly, Steam makes all of this pretty much instantaneous. Once you submit your credit card info, your account is charged and you get instant access to the bits.
Impulse, on the other hand, seems to be an elaborate new kind of web browser that doesn't get you your games any faster than IE or Firefox. I must have been mistaken then when I wrote that Impulse is a Steam also-ran. It's more accurately an Opera also-ran.
Jim Rogers: Let AIG Go Bankrupt, Not America - CNBC.com: "Japan's economic 'lost decade' was caused by trying to bail out the banks, and the West risks running out of money if it doesn't let the bad banks fail now' Rogers warned.... 'The idea that you have too much debt, too much borrowing and too much consumption and you're going to solve that problem with more debt, more consumption and more borrowing? These people are nuts.'"
No one asked me how many billions of dollars I would have given to AIG last year, but it seems to suddenly be the popular "See I Told You So" attitude to say "Zero. Zero billion dollars to the company that mismanaged their assets so terribly." It's a free market, baby. This would have fixed itself and Uncle Sam wouldn't be out $700 billion for their troubles.
Terminally Incoherent: "I can almost guarantee that it will make you uneasy by slowly smuggling in disturbing themes and images into your subconsciousness. Not only that - it will make you think, question its every line and search for deeper meanings on every page. Sometimes they are there, sometimes it's just the author taking you for an intellectual ride and leaving you stranded at some abandoned dead end."
I stayed up late last night getting home from a Rat City Rollergirls event, and as a result I was still up when the clocks sprung forward by an hour. Now it's almost 1 PM and I'm like "Hey, where had the day gone?"
Nowhere, actually. But it still feels that way.
"Last month, he wanted us to change the high school's motto from 'Many Kinds of Excellence' to 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,'" PTA member Cathy Perry said. "I asked if it was Latin, and he said that it was the eldritch tongue of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. I don't know from eldritch tongues, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea."
I particularly enjoy the fact that this Onion article makes appropriate use of Howard Phillips's own favorite literary technique of italicizing the last part of the last sentence in a paragraph for emphasis.
It's the written equivalent of that unfunny uncle at your family gatherings who insists on verifying that you fully comprehend the significance of the punchline to the dirty joke he just told you about the women who could put comically large things in her vagina.
Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum | The Onion
"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated."
After spending enough time around computers that are doing everything in their power to self-destruct, you start to learn little quirks and tricks to get more information about the computer than it will seem to yield upon initial inspection.
Lemma: as a rule, Windows's Event Viewer is a piece of junk for serious forensic use.
I came home last night to find that my workstation had locked up at some point in the week while I was gone. I got it back up on its feet tonight, but I don't have any really good way of pinpointing precisely when the explosion happened. One of the biggest flaws of the Windows platform is that they have gone to great pains to keep your ordinary average user from ever having to touch a logfile. They've been so thorough in this crusade that they've ensured that basic logfiles are denied to even extraordinary users.
Fortunately, I enabled NTP on my workstation on 2009-01-06, so I have a record of my CPU's time offset and frequency for every period of time since then. I have a full day's worth of datapoints on 2009-03-02, but only about 6 hours' worth of data for 2009-03-03. Therefore, and without any criminal necromancy, I can pretty much clue in that whatever the problem was, it happened shortly after 5:45 AM UTC on 2009-03-03. If I recall correctly, I was sitting shoreside at the time watching the sun set over a glass of wine and some seared ahi tuna. One of the many joys of being so close to the International Date Line, I suppose.
Back from a week-long vacation, and I come home to find that my computer is completely missing its Windows registry.
Gone. Unresponsive. Can't boot.
I restored the BIOS to fail-safe options in order to get a POST and am now running the Western Digital diagnostic. I may be rebuilding my system again this week.
Good thing I unloaded all that stress I had. Boy, wouldn't want any of that getting in the way of catastrophic data loss or anything.
