| Scientists have recently discovered bacteria that... wait for it... freaking live in ice. Assuming that they weren't contaminants, which is a real possibility given their itty-bitty-even-for-prokaryotes nature.
Living in hundred thousand year old ice... now that's a neat trick. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| You ever see an article that just made you wonder profoundly about the sanity, or at least proof reading abilities, of the people that put it out there?
Yeah, I just saw this little gem go by on my newsfeeds... just read the first three words in the article and tell me, honestly, if it inspires a facepalm for you.
People really need to pay more attention to the language they're using. O_o | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Show of hands for people still using ICQ?
I dunno about you guys, but I hardly have any use for it any more. There's hardly anybody that I can exclusively contact over it, and pretty much everyone that I talk to regularly also uses other IM services...
So why am I hanging on to this thing? Pretty much the only regular communication I get is weird add request/advertisements in what looked to be Cyrillic... which was funny at first, but now the novelty of it has worn off it's just annoying spam. So I'm thinking of chucking it.
Thoughs/comments welcome. :) | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Yeah, so Lisa was looking to celebrate her new job by picking up SSB:Brawl. So we decided to go hunting for a copy last night.
Long story short, we burned about 90 minutes playing it before her workday finally caught up to her and she had to turn in. It is... seriously shiney in the graphics department. I think perhaps glazed would be the best description. XD
That girl has some serious new-release ninja-ing skills. :)
So if you're planning on showing up at my place this friday... we'll probably have some Brawl. Still need those GC controllers though! And don't worry Andrew... we already unlocked Captain Falcon (accidentally). I just hope I'm not on the receiving end of him too much. ;^_^ | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I had one last ditch tactic to try and avoid spending money on desktop repairs... which was to manually try and re-seat the CPU and hope that it made better contact.
The result?
Complete waste of time... and I had re-do the thermal paste job on the processor, which is always a pain. Of course, when I take it in to get diagnostics done on it... that may have to be done over AGAIN.
Blah.
On the other hand, I definitely know my way around the arcanities of my CPU cooler mounting now, it was way easier to deal with this time. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Posting this from The Blanket Covered Omen.
This has to be THE most ridiculous trouble shooting solution I have EVER come up with.
At least that I'm willing to admit to. ;) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Not happy with being pretty certain about what the problem was, I did some more reading...
One of the things that can cause intermittent problems is thermal expansion... and it fits reasonably well with the symptoms I'm observing. Especially given that the problem has gotten worse now that the case has improved ventilation... so I'm back to square one in terms of certainty... I can't be sure what the issue is anymore. Grr.
The problem is that there are too many variables, and without an actual diagnostic procedure (requiring parts that I don't have) there's no way to know for sure. So I'm going to call around to some of the maintenance places around here and get some diagnostic quotes.
Meanwhile, in the interest of scientific inquiry, I'm going to put a blanket over the thing and watch what happens. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| NOT.
Okay, I know I'm not exactly the world's most frequent poster, but six weeks is probably a bit much even for me. The last month has been one gigantic cluster-fuck, at least as far as me getting anywhere near my desktop is concerned.
Flash back a few weeks. I get the flu near the beginning of February, and I'm in bed for about a week... and don't really have any energy to speak of for at least a week afterwards. But then I'm feeling better so I can get back to work, right?
Nope.
New flooring's being put in the house... my office becomes completely unusable. Thinking it probably won't take very long, I just pack everything up. Oh, but I'm going to regret that later.
Fast forward another week... after some delays, my office is finally back together, and now I can put everything back together... right? Nope. My desktop has been a little finicky about starting up for a while, but the issue has been pretty stable... it works reliably once it's up, it just takes a while. I had preliminarily diagnosed the issue as being the power supply... so I took this opportunity to swap in a spare PSU I got from Lisa to confirm my gut feeling...
Only to be proved wrong. No, it looks like the actual problem is the motherboard. Which I might have been fine with if I was still dealing with the old problem of having to wait 30 minutes to start up...
But now, even when the Omen starts, it doesn't stay up. It "reliably" resets after a few minutes... rendering it unusable.
This pretty much takes us to the present day. I've been hunting around for a replacement board that won't force me to dump any of my components. Socket 478 boards aren't easy to come by these days, so I'm limited to second hand sources at this point. I have a few leads, but as always with second hand material, I can't be certain of what I'm getting until I've got it.
My only other option would be to try and replace the motherboard with a more modern one... but that would mean replacing at least the CPU, probably the RAM and possibly the GPU. Which, when taken together starts to look pretty expensive. So I'm going to try my luck getting a shiny new (used, so not really :P) board roughly the same as what I have now.
Wish me luck! | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| *hangs head*
I officially fail at important dates.
Yeah yeah, I know. AGAIN.
I even had this one marked down on my desktop calendar, but I had to turn the damn thing off last night because it was interfering with something.
One of these days, I swear I'm going to get a memory upgrade. For my brain. ;;-_- | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Merry X-mas everyone. I hope you all got to spend time with at least some of your loved ones this year.
Oh yeah, and may you find yourself in the company of cool swag come morning. :) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Please.
For the love of god.
Get your shit together people.
I'm really getting a bit disheartened at the level of illiteracy on display here. Learn your own account name, please. This is getting just a little bit ridiculous.
Holiday cheer to come in approximately 30 minutes. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| As many of you have noticed, I'm extra old today! I'm not sure who to thank more, the people that noticed or the people that didn't (yet). ;)
Hope everyone's having a good holiday season, pass on best wishes to all your families for me. ^_^ | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Life imitates art. Or at least anime.
Anyone who's seen all of FLCL probably knows exactly why this article from Scientific American immediately made me think of it.
The universe is a scary place sometimes, and not just because of the high energy radiation. O_o | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I feel a bit bitchy today. But there is a reason.
I don't know how many of you have run across this info... but apparently there is a not unheard of defect in the DS Lite. Google has a bit to say on the subject. To clarify: The part where the right shoulder mount comes off? Yeah, that's my problem. If you're worried this might happen to you, skip to the (almost) end where I talk about... dun dun dun... Symptomology! There's some hope though, I've posited some actions that might mitigate the progression of problem after that paragraph.
I already contacted customer service... I dunno where their call center is, but the response was pretty fast and the representative seemed pretty knowledgeable. My beef isn't with that guy, though I realized maybe I could have gotten a better service contract out of him than I did. Anyways, that's another issue entirely. Man, I'm not just bitchy, I'm rambly. I'm ramblitchy.
Just fantastic.
( Blah blah blah... the physics of why I think that this could be predicted, if not prevented. )
Symptomology:
Okay, if you're reading this part you're either really interested or skipped here because you read my note at the beginning. I can tell you the following things to look for: first, visually you'll notice some fine cracks in the case, usually to the inner side of the right shoulder hinge. You'll also notice when the display locks in place, that the action feels less "crisp", or you might describe it as "softer." That second part is a really bad sign, because it means that the shock is being absorbed by fairly heavy flexing of the plastic anchoring in the shoulder, which means it's already damaged internally, likely torn on the inside.
Preventative Treatment:
Best I can come up with at the moment is to try and absorb some of the force before it gets conducted through the right shoulder joint and in to the lower half of the DS. This means steadying the shoulder so that it can't move or flex against it's mountings to the lower half. Another means of mitigation would be to avoid closing (and thus re-opening) your DS whenever possible. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I probably would have noticed that The Meaning of Liff had been transcribed and put online (link) if I had actually ever bothered to look for in online.
But on the other hand, if I had, I wouldn't have this pleasant feeling of having discovered something interesting by accident.
Hmm... I wonder if there's a word for that in there. :P | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Now, I'm not sure if I've written about this before, but I've taken reasonable pains to ensure the smooth functioning of my home system. I have a solid routine implemented in addition to the stuff WinXP can be persuaded to do on it's own. That's in addition to the hardware redundancy I built in to this machine, using a RAID mirror to reduce the chances of a crashed disk adversely affecting my ability to, say, meet an important deadline. :P
Given that, you can understand that I might reasonably be miffed at an entirely unanticipated hardware failure, one that I've hitherto never experienced before. Hard drives and system information you expect to get screwed up... they're the vulnerable elements of the system. But I've never actually had any silicone go bad on me before.
Until last night, at any rate.
Somehow, in spite of all my precautions last night, something caused damage (and being physical damage, it is of course totally irreparable) to my onboard (on mother board, that is) Ethernet controller. At first I figured it was just Windows being screwy, but after fairly exhaustive testing, plugging in and unplugging pretty much everything I could think of, I was forced to draw the conclusion that the physical controller chip itself has been toasted. I don't even know how, which has me worried.
If this was caused by a static-control error on my part, then I probably don't have to worry about further damage to the system, provided I'm more careful about mucking around in it. And here I thought I was being careful enough. *sigh* But the other, more worrisome possibility is that the fact I was in the case had absolutely nothing to do with it. I've had some power issues on machine startup, but up until now I thought they were essentially harmless, if annoying. Now I'm not so sure. If any of the other hardware goes bad, I could be in real trouble.
For the moment, I'm running my network connection through an old 100-MBps PCI card, which was lying around in an old case we haven't gotten rid of yet. I suppose in that sense I got lucky, since I did have spare hardware to restore functionality. If this had been RAM, or the CPU... that would have been impossible for me to replace out of our mostly out-dated inventory, and would probably have put me through considerable expense to replace.
Oh, and the reason for all this? The glorious, glorious task of securely wiping old hard-drives so they can be donated. That's right, we aren't even selling the damn things, and for my troubles I'm now operating a compromised system. Ah well, I only need to get another few month's of functionality out of this system before I start working on Omen Mk. 2, but still... I'd like to be able to pass on a fully functional system to someone else when I do that. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Taking a short break from my crash course in resumes and cover letters to look in to replacing my IM Client. I've been using Trillian for a long time, but I've become increasingly dissatisfied with it's somewhat ill-behaved 3.0 release. Not to mention the fact that it really takes up way more system resources than it should. So I've been hunting around a bit, but nothing really caught my attention.
Then, of all places, there was a note at Apple Geeks about an IM client they really liked for (wait for it) Windows. Miranda IM was the software in question, and it looks to fit the bill... small and fast, yet pretty (after appropriate customization) enough for a dedicated Mac-addict? Sign me up.
So I'm going to give it a whirl. If it plays nice with various things like my firewall and doesn't hog lots of resources, I may just have to stick with it unless something even better comes along. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| My mom went in for knee surgery on Tuesday, because her knee has been screwed up for a long time and it's been getting steadily worse the last couple of years. And of course, as some of you may not know, doctors sometimes make the worst patients, so I gave her strict instructions to follow my dad's directions with respect to analgesia. Less pain = faster healing, for a variety of reasons ^_^
Her stay at the hospital wasn't too bad, but there were a few gaffs that left my dad fuming at some of the staff. It's all over now though, so now we can look after her properly.
It'll be about three weeks before her new knee feels better than the old knee, which is a pretty short time span. It'll take about 6 months or so for her system to adjust to it completely, but everything after 3 weeks from now will be an improvement from how things were before, so it's not so bad. ^_^
I'm just glad she's home, that there were no complications, and especially and particularly that she's away from idiots that might try to give her medication she doesn't need that will make her feel really sick. Ugh. >_< | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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