55dB

Oil Paper Towel

If you didn’t catch this yet (I just saw it on /.), this is awesome:
Nanowire mesh that works like a paper towel for oil

31.May.08 Uncategorized Read more Comments (0)

The Secret Lives of Politicians

I definitely don’t always agree with Andrew Coyne, but he had a fantastic quote on last night’s special Maxime Bernier edition of the National’s At-Issue panel. It went to the effect of:

I’ll believe in not looking into politicians’ personal lives when they stop putting their families on Christmas cards

28.May.08 Uncategorized Read more Comments (0)

The New Command Centre

ASUS P5N-D Mobo (the only real problem is only 4 SATA ports… apart from that, nice, inexpensive Mobo)
Intel E8400 3Ghz, 6MB L2 Cache, 1333 Mhz FSB
4 GB OCZ Dual-Channel DDR2 Memory, in 2GB sticks
8600GT 1GB Video Memory

… best I could do on a strict computer budget, since I intended to buy a new one next year instead of this year… I also took the old HDD and the new one, running data striping on them, and using the NAS for backups, so that should give me some performance on the HDD level.

24.May.08 Uncategorized Read more Comments (0)

Day 6

Day 6 without my computer. I’m held to using my wife’s, although I might be able to repair it today. The problem is, my OS is an SP1 version of XPPro, which doesn’t recognize my SATA Controller - so one must, upon trying to reinstall the OS, load the SATA Controller drivers - but the disc insists that those drivers must be given to it via a legacy drive - the dreaded ‘A’. So, upon finding an old floppy drive, I’ve enabled myself to at least *try* to load windows onto the HDD.

Of course, part of the reason I was unable to work on it was that we were in Winnipeg this weekend, attending Donny and Riki’s wedding. Carlos, Donny’s Best Man, and someone I’ve spent countless hours with in Azeroth, gave one of the best Best Man speeches I have ever seen in my life.

Many of the invitees were alumni of the infamous 110 Columbia, which now sits as a crater on Columbia St in Waterloo (one imagines the 52″ TV which sustained our undergraduate lives sitting within the crater like a monolith, with students dancing around it wielding crude tools made out of bones…). It was good to see old friends and discuss old times, and of course, the future. Robyn and I also tried to convince a few more to join the city with streets paved with gold…

Update: The computer boots. Once I gain access to all of my important files that were created since last backup, then I’ll format the thing and re-do. If the drive is salvageable, I may even buy one more and start a nice little RAID array…

Update #2: The computer randomly freezes. Seagate’s utility says the drive is fine, but chkdsk says it isn’t. I now have a brand new HDD to try out and see if it continues to randomly lock. If it does, my board’s probably fubarred since my CPU and Memory are fine, which means getting a new computer under duress (in which case I’ll use both drives), and if the new drive works, well, then the other is trash.

19.May.08 Uncategorized Read more Comments (2)