First off, odin is still quite broken. I ended up buying a new motherboard (MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum), a new processor (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+), and a new graphics card (PowerColor X800XL 256MB). Over 700$ later, I received all my parts and got to disassembling and reassembling my computer. In the process of putting everything back together, I noticed that three of the pins on the ATX 20-pin power connector of the power supply looked quite burnt. Since I know this wasn’t present after my first motherboard blew out, I’m sure it’s a cause or effect of my more recent troubles. So I RMAed and shipped off my power supply back to PC Power & Cooling today; so, with any luck, I’ll get it back by the end of the week (fortunately, they’re located in Carlsbad). I’ll be quite upset if I need to cough up more money for a power supply, but I’m already perturbed by this latest development. For now, odin has been essentially gutted with parts all over my floor.
Sigh. Last week, Sharon was using my computer and called me saying that it had hard-locked, made some weird popping noises (through the speakers) and then magically restarted itself. I figured it to not be a big deal, but, ever since, odin has been increasingly unstable to the point now where I can’t get it to boot into Windows successfully. It looks like another motherboard issue, which marks the second ASUS pos to short out on me. On top of their abhorrent customer (non-)service, I’m done with them. I’m buying a different, more stable motherboard for odin now. It’s going to be a pain in the ass, but giving ASUS more money for crap mobos would be worse. If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been online recently, now you know.
The weekend in New Jersey was pretty fun. Marc’s Bar Mitzvah went off with approximately the standard number of glitches for such things, which amounts to a success. I had the honor of lugging the Torah around after all the portions were read (it was a mere thirty pounds; not bad for a Torah). Unfortunately, I was near comatose at the lunch after Saturday services because the red-eye I took completely jacked up my sleep schedule. That was doubly unfortunate since I passed out upon returning to Sharon’s house, even though Matt and Scott were there. C’est la vie.
I started work this past week. I was going to start reinstalling Windows 2003 Small Business Server on their network, but apparently a predecessor of mine stole their discs. So I had the pleasure of calling Dell to finagle new discs out of them, which was surprisingly easy but came with a one-time-only warning. I installed the new router to decrease their reliance on their server. (Inline sidenote. Whoever set up their previous configuration was a complete moron. What they did would be good for a network with plenty of DCs, redundancy, etc. However, to pin the entire operation of all network functions on a single server, with no backup, is incredibly stupid. That’s just asking for huge problems (which already have happened at least once). When I get done with it, no more stupidity like that will exist.) Installing Windows will be one of next week’s tasks.
Last night marked my first trip to Commerce in quite a while. It also marks the first session of setting up an actual bankroll, which should be helpful to increasing my poker exploits. I played 9-18 limit for about four hours and came out about 450$ richer for my efforts; so it was an excellent session overall. Sharon accompanied me and played some 2-4 herself with success as well, leaving about 60$ in the black. We saw Andrew there, who had been there since last night, and he was still grinding away at the 100 NL games.
We also saw V for Vendetta on Thursday night, which was quite good. In my excitement, I picked up the comic and read it before seeing the movie. The comic has some different plot elements, some nowhere in the movie, that definitely make the comic worth reading if you enjoyed the movie. It’s definitely the best movie I’ve seen in quite a while (granted, I hadn’t seen a movie in theatres for four or five months prior). I’ll probably write a more detailed post about the movie and comic in the near future, because there areq quite a few interesting concepts and ideas in the story that I’d like to comment on and analyze.
England Prevails.
Some interesting things have been going on recently. Instead of writing a large diatribe that would probably just turn into one big amalgam of incoherent words and thoughts (can words be incoherent in the context of other words?), I thought I’d just put together a (relatively) brief list.
- I’ve had my Motorola v600 since June 2004. It’s a great phone; it has a camera (frivilous, but fun sometimes), Bluetooth, good voice quality, and an aestheticly pleasing and durable form factor. Unfortunately, over the past six months, it’s been getting finicky. It likes to randomly soft reset upon opening it and the exterior screen sometimes gets irrevocably screwed up without hard resetting. Also, sometimes people would call me and it would ring on their end but not on mine. I happen to know this isn’t a service issue for reasons not worth enumerating here. And most recently, starting about a month ago, the earpiece on my phone got screwed up and I could barely hear anybody on it. That is a deal breaker. So, with it being almost two years since buying it, and since I got a one-year contract instead of two (at the time, there was a rebate program, and I tend to be itching for a new phone in the last few months of a two-year contract — it *really* paid off this time), I was eligible for an upgrade. So, after looking at phones, I realized that cell phone technology has gone nowhere in the past two years. Not wanting to cough up 200$ for the same technology that I’d be stuck with for two years and after having friends rave over their’s, I got myself a Blackberry (with a two-year contract such to be eligible for the current rebate, and it damn well better last at least two years). I was looking at the 7100g at first, but after consideration, I ended going a step up and getting the 8700c. Now I have e-mail and web access over EDGE and a full QWERTY keyboard along with PIM functionality that I need. I am quite pleased with my new toy, but no more of those for a while.
- Dan, a friend of mine from my elementary school days, offered me a job to do network administration work for his business along with coding for some interesting stuff. I don’t want to say too much, but this should fill my employment void in the near-term. I doubt this will turn into anything long term (over six months), but it should be lots of fun, and it’s work until I find another job up my alley.
- I would be remiss to not note that today is Pi Day! Sharon said that the math club at UCLA is selling Π/4 pie for 2$. If I had time to go to UCLA today, I’d be all over that. But I will eat a slice of pie today. It’s a requirement. And an excuse to eat pie.
- Running has been going pretty well. I haven’t been quite as consistent in doing it as I would like, but given my fluid schedule right now (which should end soon because of aforementioned job), it’s hard to prevent. Upon commencing work, I will have some structure in my life around which I can run on a consistent basis.
- I’m leaving for New Jersey on Thursday night for Sharon’s brother’s (Marc) Bar Mitzvah. I haven’t been to one of these in a long time, and I even had to go buy a new suit, because I haven’t had the need for a suit in many years (weird, I know). I’ll be back Sunday night.
That’s it for personal goings-on for now. And I apologize for the title of this post. It won’t happen again…at least not for a while.
Originally, there was one — AT&T, f.k.a American Telephone and Telegraph. Then, in 1984 (somewhat ironically), the split of Ma Bell into its regional components completed. AT&T gave birth to seven regional Bell companies. 22 years after the break up of telephony’s “natural monopoly” and ten years after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we are now down to three companies: AT&T/SBC, Verizon, and Qwest. That assumes that the recently proposed merger of AT&T and BellSouth goes through as expected. It appears that Ma Bell is recoalescing back into its former self. This is all in an effort to be a leader in offering the key three-member combination of services: telephone, Internet, and television. This merger will not only bring Cingular Wireless under one corporate roof, but the merger will also further propel the company’s roll out of IPTV and FTTP.
It seems to me what we’re moving into a world with two main choices in what I call “content services.” The first is picking one company to provide everything you need. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Adelphia, etc. all want to give you everything including the ktichen sink. A single bill and discounted service are two big advantages that such a scheme provides. However, are you going to get the best services from such content service conglomerations? Other companies providing a single service want to make sure that doesn’t become the case. DirecTV, Dish Network, Vonage, Skype, T-Mobile and others want you to use their services, which are better than the big corporations’ since they only do one thing. Somewhat counterintuitively, these individual services are actually cheaper than their counterparts offered by the huge conglomerates.
Only time will tell whether the one-stop shop or the niche companies will win in the oncoming battle over content services.
After reinstalling Slackware, recompiling a 2.6.x kernel, playing with settings, installing drivers, and praying the graphics card wouldn’t die, I’ve got atlas back in its spot underneath my desk. It appears that the graphics card’s fan isn’t working, causing the card to gradually overheat over time. That explains why leaving it off for a day or two would fix the issue, and why if rebooting would slowly make the situation worse. Fortunately, since I use an SSH client on odin to use atlas, I don’t *need* the video card to work correctly or consistently. Despite my victory, atlas will probably not last too much longer. Obviously, the graphics card is an issue, even if I can get around it. I had to borrow one of Sharon’s optical drives (out of seaman) in order to install Slack, and the hard drive in there is as old as atlas itself, putting it at 4 1/2 years old.
This underlines my luck with hardware components. I’ve hardly ever had an optical drive last more than 18 months, but I haven’t lost a hard drive to old age yet. In fact, atlas’ 80GB drive is in odin. I recently install a new WD 400GB in odin and have moved everything of importance off of the old drive. The next step will be to back up everything important on atlas onto odin, in case of doom.
The movie and music industries have figured out how to maintain growth without having to change how their business works. Instead of getting more high-quality content made and released, they just want you to buy the same stuff two or three or four times. How do they do this? Different formats. I can buy the same content on a DVD and UMD as well as via iTunes and cable/satellite service. Music is no better. I can get what I want via a myriad of subscription music services, CD, SACD/DVD-Audio (which, admittedly, have gone nowhere). So how does one avoid buying the same thing multiple times? And without having a vast knowledge of technology? And without breaking the law?
Apparently, your body isn’t the only thing being benefited by a moderate exercise regimen. It appears that exercise makes you smarter. While most of these studies were done on rats and mice, they suggest that working out generates neurochemicals that help damaged brain cells and help grow and nuture healthy ones. The article also suggests that exercise may help combat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and rehabilitate victims of neurological injury. This article is the first of a two-part series.
Not much of interest has been going on recently. I’ve been up to my same old tricks, working on projects at home and still seeking employment. My Firefox extension has been on hold in recent weeks and will continue to be until atlas is up and running again, which should be soon if I can get around the graphics card issue. There are a couple of other projects in the pipeline right now, but those haven’t really kicked into high gear yet. I’ll probably really get working at the beginning of the coming week.
I finally started up running again on Thursday. My legs were pretty unhappy yesterday and not a whole lot better today. Despite still being a little sore, I think I’m going to go out again before it gets dark. Before I ran on Thursday, I knew I was pretty out of shape, but I didn’t quite expect to have as much trouble as I did. With luck, today’s run will go better. I’d love to get myself back up to where I was at the end of the first semester of sophomore year at Columbia when I was running at least 6-7 miles four days per week. I was hoping to get some other exercising in after a while, but I don’t know if I’ll have that much time for working out.
I decided I was going to use swaret to upgrade atlas (which ran Slackware 10.0). However, the upgrade was less than successful. At first, I only thought that, for some strange and unknown reason, that most of the upgrades failed. Well, a couple days later, Sharon couldn’t log into atlas because of an error in glibc. Well, sure enough, it appeared that swaret had upgraded bash without upgrading the dependency! In trying to fix the problem, I only made it worse and completely hosed bash. So, what’s a good little admin to do but reinstall the OS. Fortunately, I burned the newest version of Slack (10.2) for Sharon recently, so I installed that and went to work. All was well until we rebooted the computer.
