So I finally got a “real” job, not that working at Wal-Mart and FedEx wasn’t real, it’s just that I’m educated as an electrical engineer and I’m not exactly doing that there.

So, my computer is still craptastic (crap + fantastic). It’s full of wonderful shiny parts of tasty hardware that would make most geeks drool. However, I’m regularly greeted with the locking up of my machine when I decide that I’d like to play a (graphically intensive) game, i.e., NOT World of Warcrack or any other wonderful terribleness that’s designed to run on an Osborne 1 (really, really old “laptop”). Originally, I couldn’t really figure out whether my problem was the result of not enough juice or overheating. After removing 8 HDDs and the RAID controller I settled on the latter since I was still having problems and a similar box was made by MaximumPC that uses a PCPower 750W PSU compared to my PCPower 1kW PSU. I’ve complained about my issues on a forum or two and I’ve been told that my case just doesn’t have enough airflow. That’s probably true considering the compartmentalization of the case, there’s essentially no airflow over the mobo area. Lately, I’ve been looking at some custom water cooling setups, I could get by with ~$600; but that’s just not good enough for me…I’m spoiled…I’ve been reading about nVidia’s ESA open “standard” that starting to be adopted by many companies including power supply and case manufacturers…ME WANTS! Yet, all that wonderful terribleness would run up the cost approximately an additional $2400. But since I’m not one to borrow money to get what I want, though that would be soooo easy, the ultimate price just isn’t worth it. Blast you Dave Ramsey and your popularification of common sense! So…I’d need a new job to take care of that ’cause workin’ ~75hrs/wk at ~$x.xx/hr just ain’t cuttin’ it for splurges like that. Well, I should probably monopolize on the time I could be sleepin’ instead of gabbin’.

Well, I’ve made a list of the languages I’d like to learn. The list encompasses approximately 40% of the world’s spoken languages (based on population), it’d be higher, but I am all ready quite fluent, though my wife would likely argue a counterpoint, in the world’s third largest spoken language: English. The list in order of population who speak it:

Chinese (Mandarin)
Spanish (Spain)
Bengali (Bangladesh)
Hindi (India)
Portugese
Russian
Arabic (Egypt, you’d be surprised how many dialects there are.)
Japanese
German
French

Those 10 languages account for approximately 2.74B of the world’s 6.66B people, so, if I’m able to successfully butcher the languages much like our international friends butcher English, I’ll be well on my way to being

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been responding back and forth with NCSoft’s customer support for a game called Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa. Under the advise of my wife, I’ve decided to let it go, since, even though I am in the right, the customer support team just continues to parrot the “research” someone supposedly did, but in the interest of time, actually did not do. It’s quite aggravating but I am quite familiar with how customer support works. After the first couple times of submitting responses, I was probably *flagged* as a “problem customer” since I’m not dumb enough to actually believe any of the crap they spew at me. Their last response it what really cracks me up. “No record of a character named ‘Kridler’ for any…account.” REALLY? NO KIDDING! All of the beta characters were deleted from the accounts after the end of the beta prior to the game’s live release; of course there’s no “Kridler” for an active account, it was deleted! I’m starting to think that they’re only looking on the servers that I have an active character, and not the beta logs. I’m really looking forward to getting screwed out of the 10 black armor dyes I’m supposed to get for playing on the public test server for two consecutive hours, especially since I played one character for about 12-13 hours in multiple hour segments. Anyhoo, here’s the “support”:

Yay! Finally after about a month of procuring all of the components I managed to manhandle my new computer into existence.

Har be de specificationesessesseses:

Processor: Intel Quad Core 3.00 GHz

RAM: 4GB Corsair DDR2 (only 2.25 of which are actually usable but that’s an operating system thing)

Hard Drives: 12 one-terabyte  hdds in a RAID 6 array controlled by a 3ware 12-port RAID SATA controller

Video Cards: 2 XFX 8800 Ultra XXX (in SLI, of course)

Sound Card: Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Pro

Motherboard: eVGA 775 SLI

Case: Lian-Li PC-2000BPlusII

Power supply: PCPower 1kW custom psu (15 sata drive connectors instead of ide connectors)

DVD drives: 2 Samsung S203B SATA drives

I’m sure there’s something that I forgot to document here, but that’s pretty much it.  Unfortunately, I lose a bit of the ram as a result of Windows XP’s 32-bit goodness but, I’ve got it if I ever decide to go 64-bit. But, I’m not exactly one to be an early adopter so I’ll probably end up waiting until 64-bit OS’s go mainstream. Of course, this machine was not without its hiccups, and I’m still trying to determine if I’ve snuffed them all out yet; but that’s another story.

The other day, my mother called me with a message that my grandmother wants to “secure the future of her great-grandchildren” with an “investment” in gold. I called my mom back and told her that was a terrible investment. Here’s why: since 1833, gold has had the incredible interest rate of 1.97% per year while the consumer price index, aka, “inflation” increased at a rate of 3.29% per year, since 1913. But that’s not such fair comparison, so how about comparing gold and CPI since 1975. That comes out to be 4.35% and 4.35% for inflation and gold, respectively. Good investment? I think not! Gold’s barely kept up with inflation. Something that I consider an investment performs better than inflation *after* taxes.

I listen to this fellow named Dan Miller. He’s a pretty smart guy and has some great insight in helping me to find the work I love. As such, I registered a new domain name: http://www.48dayspodcast.com. I’m a pretty picky person when it comes to audio quality so I “remastered” Dan Miller’s podcasts for my own personal use. Yet, I really want to share them with others, so I asked Mr. Miller if he would permit me to do so; if not, I’ll just create a site that basically links back to 48 Days.

TECHNICAL GIBBERISH
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A few days ago I downloaded iTunes to listen to a few radio broadcasts that I like to catch. Well, I can’t really say that I liked it. Sure, it’s pretty nifty, but it’s got a lot of stuff that I neither use nor care for. So while I was at Davis-Kidd with Amelia, I decided to pick up a book to kill a bit of time since browsing bookstores is not my idea of fun, they only have books that I don’t want, or if they do, books that I can’t afford. It was about podcasting. After reading for a bit, it mentioned a program called iPodder. I tried out this program a few years ago when podcasting was a relatively new idea but was fairly unimpressed. Now, it’s impressive, just like Linux, this little puppy is developed by its users. iPodder is now known as Juice. Check it out, it’s free.

It seems that the more reading, gaming, etc. that I do, the dumber people seem. The most recent offense comes from PC Gamer Magazine’s July 2007 issue on page 16. “And if you’re performance at either degrades as a result of too much…” (sic) Since when is a person “performance”? What the crap! Another comes from a television ad that’s been running for the past few days “In less then 30 days…” (sic) First of all, then denotes time, e.g., one then two; secondly, than denotes a comparison, e.g., one is more than two. How hard is that? Apparently it’s a lot harder than I’d expect. Another common terribleness is that of the incorrect usage of the possessive apostrophe when applied to a name that ends in an S. According to Purdue’s Online Writing Laboratory “add ’s to the singular form of the word (even if it ends in -s), e.g. James’s hat”. This is a fairly common screw-up by professional companies, *cough* Blizzard’s World of Warcraft *cough*, where the ’s is left off in favor of only the apostrophe. This is just wrong, the only known exception being that of religious origin, e.g., Jesus’ apostles and Moses’ stone tablet. Anyhoo, I’m done ranting. I don’t claim perfection, I just think that professional companies should be, umm, I dunno, professional…

This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system, had this been an actual emergency you would be S.O.L.