Goofus Maximus

I'm just recovering from a nasty bug I caught over the weekend. I was pretty much out of it till today. Fatty can tell you I wasn't quite all there, on the server yesterday. Frequent draining of excess nose juice and lung horkage-uppage can make one miss quite a bit of what's going on... This is the second time in a row I've caught a bug after the temperature's dropped from 50 to 20 in one day... It's worse when a family has it, because they seem to pass it back and forth amongst each other. I remember times when we had to eat only using paper plates and plastic-ware for eating...

Why yes I did. The drill was so small there was barely any shards left. And bunneh, the heatsink was so hot that if I put it on a wooden surface it would have taken off the lacker. So yes, I did it on the carpet. If it's hot enough to take off the laquer, isn't it hot enough to melt carpet fibers?

I've found that lint/dead skin is the bane of an optical mouse. I have to use eyebrow tweezers to nab the little waving fibers of lint and cat hair from the optical cavity of the nouse, and sometimes, when just blowing into the mousewheel isn't enough, I have to take the mouse apart and clean out the spokes of the mousewheel. So far, whenever my mouse (a logitech wheelmouse Optical just like yours, but blue instead of red) starts acting flaky, these two procedures have snapped the mouse right back into tiptop shape.

If I ever needed to know that Source is CPU bound on my computer, I now know it is. The difference in FPS in Half Life 2 at 1280x1024 and at 800x600 is... 5 fps. With 2X AA and 4X AF. I have a greater difference in CS:S, of about 10 fps, and AF causes the most difference from trilinear to 4X AF. I need a new computer to go with this monitor now. I'm taking donations!

I got a card. We can't afford Christmas anymore! Waaah!

They would've put out more PS3s, if they could, but problems manufacturing the laser for the Blueray just slowed things down too much for that to happen.

Interesting. Of course, partitions are useful for other things than speed. I've had bitter experience from reinstalling XP without reformatting first, so I'm not trusting his statement at all on that bit of advice. I like that I can reformat/reinstall Windows without having to back up gigabytes of data first, not to mention having all the drivers and programs I want to install there and ready to go right after the reinstall. Also the defrag and chkdsk times are much reduced with smaller partitions, for those of us who defrag occasionally. Prime95 is a better stress test for memory than Memtest86; it finds problems with memory that memtest never does. I think in Vista, indexing is going to be mandatory, and will replace the current folder/path system entirely, if MS has it's way...

We got freezing rain, sleet, and snow here. The power lines took another hit, but we got power back after a day (sort of) It's been flickering on and off a lot today, though. Some of the 520,000 homes in the St. Louis area won't be getting power back for 5 days from the time of the storm. Fun is having no heat in the house, with temps dipping into the low teens outside. I spent the day wearing a housecoat over a sweat-coat (with hood up, and muffler around my neck) over a sweater over my thickest long-sleeved shirt, over thermal long-underwear. I was surprisingly comfortable like this. I wonder if I've been wasting money by running the furnace....

They eat 177 watts at max, though. Be sure to buy that Kilowatt PSU first!

If you're using Windows XP, then you won't be hurting too much by just using the built in Windows firewall. For Linux, there are many front-ends that give you a nice graphical "firewall" to configure, while doing all the IPTables rulemaking so you don't have to.

Just think of how grand that would be, if they were using O guage trains! It would take up an acre of land! Even HO guage is something. I still have a fondness for the nice portable N guage trains though...

Sorry Sairs but remote does not equal gaming controller and is << keyboard and mouse. I wish Nintendo would focus on it's hardcore gaming crowd instead of trying to find a way to get everyone to get it Alas, the hardcore gaming market has been drifting to Sony, and this is the only way that Nintendo sees to expand it's market once again. From reports from a Gamespy editor who spent 9 solid hours playing it, the new Zelda game with the Wii controllers will be a blast, once you spend the half-hour getting used to the setup. That said, I'm not likely to get any of the new consoles, since not even the TVs in this house are less than a decade old!

Update: I've switched to µtorrent as well. It works better than Bitpump with some trackers, and works with more clients than Bitpump, so my downloads go faster.

I use BitPump from AnalogX, since all I need is a simple utility for keeping up with AnimeSuki torrents. I like the AnalogX utilities because they're light-footprint, fast-loading, and do the job they're designed for without being buggy like other utilities. Also, they're all FREE! As in "Free Beer"!

So now you can double the chance that Source will crash while you play! Yay!

Do they make one of those that also picks up HD Radio broadcasts?

I was sick to the finish, 'cause I ate me spinache! I was Popeye the Sailor Man! Now people will start to realize why humans went AWAY from Organic in the first place. They've been going nuts over percieved risks that are so miniscule as to be non-existant, and now they're finding out what the not-so-miniscule risks of doing without modern technology is all about! Scared of "mercury in vaccines? Don't give your kids shots against measles or polio. Both are now making a comeback, and measles can be deadly, rather than just a case of little red spots and sensitive eyes. People are stupid. That's what I think now.

Tom Slick, George of the Jungle, The time-traveling kid and his dog, that Mounty guy, and the end of the show always ended with that guy sweeping up the trash...

My cartoon memories are all somewhat older than that, with Bugs Bunny, Bullwinkle, Mr. McGoo, Flintstones, Jetsons, Johnny Quest, and the like. All of which have made comebacks, now that I think of it.

I always knew this would happen with the steam "It's not really your game, even though you paid for it", "we control the horizontal. we control the vertical" protection scheme. I wonder if it's a server problem or a client problem? The steam forums are getting hammered too, so I guess this is a really widespread problem. Oh well, it's back to youtubing episodes of "Ouran High School Host Club" for me. I wonder when they'll get episode 19 of "The Third" subtitled? "Ah My Goddess" subtitling is two episodes behind as well... Naruto is all caught up though, even though episode 202 isn't worth clicking the mouse for...

"Scrapped Princess" and "The Third" are two other series you might like, if you liked FMA. Take it from a Youtube Anime Addict; they're both intelligently written, though "The Third" has a touch too many narration sequences about charactors feelings of the moment.

Scrapped Princess is one of the better anime series I've seen so far on youtube. There is some (rare) strong language, so it's a pg or pg13-ish rating, but it is really well written. About a Princess whom prophecy said will destroy the world on her 16th birthday, so most everybody wants her dead, and even those who don't are conflicted.

With Charter.net, it used to be that I could call up, and tell them my problem, and where it originated according to Hypertrace, but nowadays, phone support goes mostly to Bangalore, India, where people with incomprehensible accents don't understand what you're saying, and won't deviate from their "It's your modem" scripts. I had to have a service tech out here, just so I could talk to someone... Problem (far from here) got fixed in two days. Any company that uses phone tech support from India is brain-dead, since it's a good way to drive away customers.

. . . That made my brain hurt . . .