For the second time I've been pulled over for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign...when I'm actually about the only person on the campus that DOES come to a complete stop.  He SAID he was watching, but I have to wonder, if he was watching, why didn't he go after that guy that was there 30 seconds before me...that went thru the intersection faster than the (absurdly low) speed limit?  "Thankfully" I got off with a warning like the first time, but I shouldn't have been stopped at all.  If it's because of some criminal activity in the area and they just want to stop me, I'd be FINE with them saying they just needed to stop people.  What crazy ass amount of time am I supposed to stop at these stop signs to not be pulled?  It's not like I ONLY wait until my car rebounds from breaking.  I wait several seconds (yes, I actually count since that last one) and this time I ironically stopped for another moment to ponder how annoying it would be if I got pulled again after that other guy flew through the intersection without stopping.  Sadly, I've now experienced how annoying it is.  Do I need to get one of those stupid little things to track my car's movements constantly???

I've had that song from grease "You're the one that I want" stuck in my head the past few days and the lyrics have morphed in my head into a song about a pyro needing a medic (in the game Team Fortress 2).  I should probably ask someone about making a video on that (what?  I'm lazy).  I guess it wouldn't be TOO difficult though, at least you don't need to be able to sing.  You only ever hear pyros mumble because of their face mask, so it'd have to use subtitles and mumbling.

I got kills...they're multiplyin' and I'm takin' control...but then I'm hit and I start dying...it's mortifying!I need someone... who can heal me fast, who can heal me on the run.  I need someone, I need das ubermensch... heal me with your medigun... give me your uber when it's done.

Uber me up...or we'll never last.  We'll take the sentry down this time.  Uber me up and we'll cap the point.  Or we'll kill their whole team tryin'...then we'll cap if we survive.

The 200 meter breast stroke event in the olympics...all I have to say is that it's WAY LESS INTERESTING than the name implies

Nvidia questions...apparently there are rumblings about MASSIVE FAILURE RATES of nvidia's 8000/9000 series product lines.  I should probably update the computer parts suggestions to reflect that ...ie, just not recommend nvidia until this is settled.  On the other hand, nvidia just enabled physics acceleration on most (all?) of their 8000/9000 series cards...so there's a lot of potential there.  On a third hand, once someone fully ports nvidia's CUDA to ATI (and I hear individuals are close to having it done), PhysX acceleration will be available for them as well.  Oh well, in the mean time I'm thinking I should pick up a super-cheap (but workable) card to do a cascading downgrade (my older card back to my machine, that card to my wife's machine, etc) just in case my 9600GT fails.

Well, I put a LOT of work into the computers over a 3 day vacation.  Nothing like a relaxing day of pulling your hair out. 

 
FreeNAS was the one easy thing to install.  It actually takes longer plugging in a card than it does to install FreeNAS and it's just a couple minutes to make the drives accessible to windows.  As I've mentioned in the past, FreeNAS is nice enough to take over as the master server if you tell it, so if the network connection is up, any computer on your home network can see it...none of that bullshit windows networking often does.  I've modified a crappy case I got for free so instead of holding three 5.25 drives, a floppy and a single 3.5inch drive...it holds up to SEVEN 3.5inch drives.  Should make for a nice RAID box (one for boot and up to two, 3 drive RAID arrays).  I'm not entirely satisfied with the 120 megabit throughput of the system, I might need to try another motherboard since it seems the VIA chipset (no surprise) kinda holds back the hard drive transfers.  No biggie, again...it's quick and easy to install.  I'm hoping to get it up to about 200-250 megabits (about enough to burn 12X DVDs straight off the network drive)

Recommendations as of August 26th, 2008

I figured I should get off my ass (since I've actually been keeping up lately) and offer some computer recommendations.  If the date on this is over a month old, take it with a grain of salt.  After 3+ months it'll be largely invalid (although may still be better than a lot of people's recommendations)

IMPORTANT NOTES! 

I tend to recommend toward the cheap side.  Cut corners where you can.  There is NO WAY to buy a faster computer now to get an extra year or two added onto the computer's life.  In a couple years a CPU that costs $1000 now will be a complete piece of crap.  In a year a similarly performing CPU will sell for next to nothing.  Cut corners where you can, spend where you have to.  Most people screw up and pay for crazy fast CPUs and then get a cheaper graphics card.  If you're going to play PC games on the system an extra $50 on the graphics card will get you WAY MORE PERFORMANCE than hundreds more on a better CPU

I should have put this up earlier but...I've been playing games a lot (like Team Fortress 2...see below) and going back to test various things.  Anyway, for a slightly early birthday present I picked up a Chaintech 9600GT OC. WOW, I thought it would be nearly twice as fast as my ATI X1950 Pro by some benchmarks that I saw but, it doesn't QUITE work like that.  I mean sure, if you don't have on any anti-aliasing and such, it's twice as fast.  But this card seems to handle anti-aliasing a HELL of a lot better.  Like it went from...Oblivion being playable at 1024x768 and 4xAA with everything on to the same except...at 1600x1200.  In Crysis (thing of beauty that it is) it went from being tolerable at 1024x768 at medium settings with maybe 2xAA to playable at the same resolution, high settings and 8X...or 1600x1200 high settings and 2xAA.  WOW!  I don't know, maybe something's not set right or something but it seems to scale oddly, like the more you throw at it the more efficient it gets.

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 a bit lately and thought it would be amusing to do a couple of announcements.  These are just "Thank you for calling Team Fortress support" sound clips...as if it was from some help line for the soldiers in the field.

All our operators

Press or scream one now

Newbie engineer 

About the heavy and bullets 

Well, I got most of my back pay.  Retirement and tax took a little more than I'd expected but it's still enough to REALLY help get our finances stabilized.  Hopefully this will be a good year.  Before taxes and retirement it was $1111.80.  This next (regular) paycheck is going to be about $100 higher as well...and I think I've still got a minor issue worth another $50.

Due to unrelated factors I might actually splurge a little early and get a new video card now instead of waiting until next month.  The card's not TOO expensive at $150ish although most people for some reason think video cards...these days the part with the most powerful processor in a computer...should be cheaper.  Should be able to play Crysis with some antialiasing and basically any game at reasonable speeds for the next year :D

I probably should have mentioned this earlier...although what the heck, I don't owe you guys anything and hey, I'm lazy!  But seriously, I've been waiting with anticipation to find out exactly how much in my favor a little mistake in my pay will be.  Well, to be honest it's not "in my favor" that I've been short by a little bit of money for the last TWO YEARS, but it'll sure as heck be in my favor to get it all back in a lump sum.

I noticed because there was a little mistake on my vacation, which...ironically...probably hasn't been resolved.  Anyway, when I was looking over THAT check, I checked out my night shift pay (a 10% bonus) and found that I was probably short by a fair amount.  I dropped by payroll and...well it turns out that there's ANOTHER problem.  Since early 2006 the formula used to calculate my pay has been screwed up.  It's an odd problem that only happens because of the odd way it dealt with paying people that worked for two departments.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, I'm not entirely sure how much it's off by but I think it probably averages AT LEAST $20/month, possibly as high as $60/month...for the past two years.  *fingers crossed* hopefully the latter.   They're supposed to let me know before (or on) my next paycheck at the end of the month.

A friend of mine got some people together and did a cloverfield spoof

He also did this very funny antipiracy ad... *ahem* that I did a little voice work in ;)