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Hope everyone had a nice weekend. Mine was alright. Slept too much, ate too much, but alright. Been trying to clean off the 100GB hard drive in my P3 so that I can transplant it into the new box I'm building and finally boot the damn thing, but it's slow going. We made some progress this weekend on the upcoming project I mentioned last week; things are looking pretty good on that front. Anyhow, I'm tired and can't think of much more to write. Later.
-apon
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| Sometime over the weekend, my favorite morning radio station (seemingly the only one in atlanta that plays music in the morning) changed to some kind of rock station with a damn call-in morning show...
--regolith
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| So it's the Revenge of the Marketing Plan! Been in a meeting most of the morning. Us techs have to put together a presentation (powerpoint!) to be given tomorrow, and we need to get more industry data and customer data. Life stinks :(
--regolith
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WREK plays music in the morning. So does 88.5. These are not new occurances.
-apon
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| True, I have used the services of WREK during the other stations' commercial breaks, but WREK plays classical until 9:00, and then they play jazz, and I don't appreciate jazz :(
88.5 I have not tried yet
--regolith
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| harumph... Presentation in 1.5 hours or so. Gotta go watch another group's presentation first, so hopefully they'll go crazy or spontaneously combust or something to let me out of mine. Actually, it's not so bad as that. I just have to sit there while the head IT guy gives the presentation. He might point at me to answer some stuff that I supposedly researched, though... *shrug* owel, it'll all be over soon.
Also, I procrastinated for awhile last night by ordering $1400 in parts for a new computer. Ordered a HD from one place, but then decided I liked this other HD better, so I ordered that one, too. Now I have to call the first place and have them remove the HD from my order (I also ordered 2x512MB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM from them), but the 1-800 number is busy at the moment.
--regolith
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Finally got my new box up and running last night. It took a good while to purge the 100GB drive I was using (I just went for one pass of pseudorandom data instead of the seven pass DOD level cleaning), and then to reformat the thing to NTFS, but by 10:00pm or so Win2k was up and running. Another couple of hours to insall drivers, SP2, and the 30+ security patches that have come since SP2, and I was up and running.
Kensuke was built on the cheap (~$200) mostly to provide me with a dedicated downloading box, and a place to play with stuff before installing it on Kaoru. It also has the nice benefit of allowing me to migrate Rei to Mandrake 9, so that I have a nice Linux workstation to play around with.
With the new box up and running, here's what my current menagerie looks like:
- Asuka - Pentium MMX 200Mhz / 64MB RAM / 90GB HD / Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 4MB / Redhat Linux 7.3
- Rei - Pentium 3 450Mhz / 384MB PC100 SDRAM / 12GB HD / nVidia TNT2 Ultra 32MB / Win98 SE (soon to be Mandrake Linux 9)
- Shinji - Pentium 4M 1.6Ghz / 512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM / 30GB HD + 80GB external firewire HD / nVidia GeForce 4GO 440 32MB / WinXP Pro (laptop)
- Kaoru - AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (Palomino) / 1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM / 160GB HD + 2x 80GB ATA/100 7200RPM 8MB drives in RAID 0 / nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB VIVO / Win2k Pro
- Toji - Pentium 120Mhz / 48MB RAM / 4GB HD / Hercules 2MB / Win98 SE (having memory problems)
- Kensuke - AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (Thoroughbred A) / 256MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM / 100GB HD / integrated nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32MB / Win2k Pro
I also have my family's old Pentium 90Mhz, but the HD controller is shot, so I've been slowly stealing parts from it for use in other machines. I doubt I'll ever bother to get it up and running again.
Justin is hereby required to list the specs of the computer parts he ordered. It took me two major upgrades to Kaoru before I had spent that much.
-apon
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Ok, obligatory new expensive computer stuff:
- ASUS nforce2 MB + Athlon 2600+ w/333 FSB
- 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 DDR SDRAM (maybe I'll run it at 400 or just 333. we'll see how it makes photoshop feel)
- Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 - 120GB HD w/liquid bearings (ooOOOOooo)
- This, uh, case... from Antec... with a 430W Antec Purepower PS
- Geforce 3 64MB! (heh, heh... gonna wait and see how nvidia's new whatever does. don't like ATI's drivers)
- Pretty HP scanner
- There is no number 7
Uh, I guess that's it. I haven't ordered a dvd-r, but I guess I'll go with whatever 4x one that Matt mentioned last night.
In comic news, my new tablet was delivered yesterday... Tried it some, but it's like drawing with a pencil or something. You have to move your hand/arm! :( I guess I was hoping more for a thimble mouse with pressure sensitivity, or a mouse with pressure-sensitive buttons... Something like that. It's a little easier if I take it off the desk and draw in my lap, but it's certainly something to get used to. Friday's comic will surely be Art-tastic! Photoshop's paintbrush has many pressure-sensitive options, like size and opacity, and you can also use pressure to blend between the foreground and background colors or to add noise to the brush, stuff like that. Maybe I should try drawing things in real life or "drawing every day" like Gabe says
The meeting last night went well, but I was mostly involved in standing in the background for an hour and a half, taking notes. Basically, we all talked about how we didn't like the product our partner company is providing us with to make our products, and they gave us more homework to find a different solution. So there's another meeting next Tuesday (at 9:00!?) to see what we've come up with. Today, I think I have to move myself from this cubicle to another cubicle where all the IT guys will be (not all in one cube, but in adjacent ones). Sooo, there's my half-hour of time wasted for our readers today. Cya later, or Friday ;)
--regolith
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The DVD-R drive that Matt mentioned was the Pioneer DVR-A05. Pioneer makes most the the DVD-R drives out these days, and the best ones, so I'm comfortable recommending it. I've been quite happy with my DVR-A04 that I picked up this summer. Newegg has the A05 in stock for $315 shipped.
The GeForce 3 is quite amusing. I upgraded mine to a GF4 Ti4200 last year after the UT2k3 demo came out and the GF3 couldn't cut it. The GeForceFX looks to be shaping up pretty well. Even with beta drivers, it's beating the Radeon 9700 on most benchmarks. The downsides are that it will cost more for a while ($400 for preorders vs. $300-$325 for a 9700 right now), and the fan is supposed to be kinda loud during 3D gaming. But I certainly support anyone who has the good sense not to touch ATI's drivers with a 10-foot pole. Digging through the news and articles over at the [H] will provide some useful info.
So, I'm getting an office-mate on Friday. I've got nothing against the guy personally (I don't know him that well), but this really, really sucks. I like my privacy, and I'm generally less productive if there's someone else around all the time. But oh well, what can you do?
Since Justin has promised you all an Art-tastic comic for Friday, I will be sure to give him a script with some ridiculously fanciful things to draw!. Let's hope Emi has told him how to draw by then!
-apon
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| I'm afraid of Emi and all female humans, so I didn't email her... I'll just extrapolate that she'd ignore me or tell me I should do something silly like try to draw things with pencil and paper and make them look realistic.
Anyway, the first part of my new computer to ship is the hard drive. googlegear.com worked pretty darn quickly and they sent it 2-day UPS for $0.50! It should be here Thursday. Now I have to figure out how to partition it...
--regolith
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More important than Justin's useless-without-the-other-parts hard drive, TRSI has shipped to me both Kodocha volume 5 and Marmalade Boy volume 5. Hooray!
Human females have the potential to be quite pleasant, you should not be so fearful!
-apon
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