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| Whew, that took long enough... Glad I recently bought more clothes for work, cuz I forgot to do laundry tonight, and that would have meant wearing dirty clothes again, monday... Anyway, the Zaurus came this weekend, and I've been putting crap on it and screwing it up. I put on NetHack, and it's this pretty, graphical version! It is impure, but I likes it anyway! Unfortunately, I accidentally dropped the stylus on the one small patch of hardwood flooring around my computer area and the tip snapped off, so now I have to go to Office* and get a new one or two.
Anyway, more details later, I guess. I unfortunately pushed the sleep sharks back a couple hours this weekend, and now I have to drag them forward again somehow. Someone bring me some D.S.T.! ;)
--regolith
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My doctor wanted some lab tests done, and so I had to have blood drawn today. I'm not particularly fond of needles or bleeding, so I rarely consider this to be a good experience. Today, however, was extra bad. "He just won't bleed!" That's an actual quote. I was stuck a total of six times this morning before they finally managed to get the blood sample they were after. It took two technicians to accomplish this. While a needle in the arm is generally unpleasant, one in the hand just plain hurts. And I got two of them in the hand. On the plus side, at least no arm-sized bruises seem to be developing this time around. On the minus side, the fasting I had to do before the tests has left me rather loopy and out of it today.
As for the sleep sharks, they've been kicking my ass lately. I haven't managed to drag myself out of bed after less than 8 hours of sleep in quite some time, and I'm to the point where I shut off my alarm without ever really becoming conscious. I think I'm going to have to switch to using a password-protected computer in the other room as my alarm clock soon. Perhaps the classic Lobster Magnet will be able to rouse me from my slumber in a timely fashion.
-apon
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| Memory AND case came monday, so I put my new computer together that night, but it seems I forgot to get that dvd-r drive, so I can't actually install any operating system yet... I will try a network installation tonight, maybe. Also, nothing about the motherboard's packaging indicated it, but its serial-ata controller supports raid, so whenever those SATA disks come down in price a little (or in a month, whenever), I'll be ready for two :) The front of the case has a set of USB ports and a firewire port, so I was thinking there'd be some nice connector to snap onto my MB and that'd be that, but no... EACH WIRE from the USB and Firewire connectors (14 total) had its own single-pin connector and I had to look up the pinout on the MB and insert each one individually ;;_;; The 3.5" drive bays have a latch that holds them onto the case, so you you can detach the bays, screw the drives onto the bays outside the case, then put the bays back in the case. The 5.25" bays come with these plastic sliders that you attach to the drives. You install the drives by just sliding them in the front, and you can squeeze the clips to pull the drive out again. Installing the cpu was stressful, because it was my first time using the ZIF-style socket, and I didn't think I'd have to apply as much pressure to the lever as I did... Guess I just had to break it in or something. Installing the cpu fansink was a pain; there is a bank of capacitors standing next to the cpu, so I couldn't get my finger in there to make the one tab lock onto the left-side of the cpu socket, and I had to take it off and bend the tension bar (my term) a little so there wasn't quite so much pressure needed to get the other end down to the right side of the cpu socket. Hopefully I didn't screw up the thermal grease too badly, but I have plenty left, so I can always redo it.
My UPS has started complaining that it needs a new battery :(
I've been forgetting to order kiki's delivery service from amazon since Matt shared the love for it. Amazon says I have 7 hours left to purchase it, I think, but it also says I can buy just $4.76 more and get Free Shipping, so I'm looking into a flash card or something for my zaurus (hey, maybe a stylus!). Perfect use of work time...
Gotta have a meeting with a manager tomorrowish or so and go over the stuff I've been doing for her. Only problem is, there's not much. I finally decided on the database schema (well, mostly), so I should be able to get something significant done by March 1 (when she wants something significant done). Start hackin', Justin...
--regolith
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| You can get a 512-meg CF card for $106 after $50 MIR... only problem is, the rebate fulfillment company is TCA Fulfillment Services, and I seem to recall reading some icky things about them. Maybe I'll just get a SD/MMC card after all.
--regolith
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Instead of fighting off the sleep sharks, I could instead fall asleep around 7:00pm and not wake up for over 12 hours. And I seemed to be able to implement that plan without even trying!
Anyway, fun optometrist visit this morning. My eyes are stable (yay!) and I don't have glaucoma or anything (yay!), so I call the visit a success. Only downside is that my eyes had to be dialated, so now it's hard to look at the computer screen for long periods of time. That should fade in the next couple of hours or so, though.
It's kind of amusing reading about Justin's fascination with all the spiffy features of the Antec cases; I thought everybody already knew about them. :-) As for installing the HSF, you're not supposed to use your finger! The retention bar is designed the way it is so that you can easily slip a flat head screwdriver in there and secure it. I'd be more worried about having screwed up the HSF's retention mechanism (thereby lessening the HSF's contact with the CPU and possibly increasing the likelyhood that it will fail and the HSF will come loose) than I would be about the TIM.
My BackUPS 650 was complaining about the battery one day. So I turned the damn thing off and then back on after a couple of minutes, and it hasn't complained since.
On the topic of rebates, I've had no problems with TCA. As a matter of fact, I bought a Viking 128MB Smart Media card for my Fuji Finepix 2600Z from Amazon with a rebate through TCA and received my check in less than a month.
-apon
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| I knew about the features before I ordered the case, but I thought nobody else did, so I figured they'd marvel at it and how really, really heavy it is... It also has these 4 feet on the bottom that swivel out to make a wide stand. (for use on tilted floors?)
It still required plenty of force to get the heatsink bar locked into place after I bent (unbent?) it. I was worried about it ripping up the socket or crushing the cpu. Maybe I put it on backwards, though, because the part with the screwdriver nest was on the side where it was easy to use my finger (actually, I used a screwdriver to get it down at that point, but I don't think my screwdriver would have fit between the capacitors and the 'sink the other way. it is a silly screwdriver :). No matter, if it gets too hot, I'll just open it up and bend it and flip it and re-seat it and try again.
I guess I'll do the thing with the rebates and the buying, since I am fairly sure I can follow the directions on the rebate form.
Lunch.
--regolith
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Someone else from Rockville with a Comcast cable modem was looking at the page yesterday. Most interesting, especially since as far as I know this isn't someone I already know...
-apon
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I must say, Gearhost really endears itself to me when our site stops
responding while I'm in the middle of typing up a rant. Thanks guys!
I use the feet on my case simply to stabalize it. It's fairly tall, so
they're good if the case (or the desk it sits on) should be bumped fairly
hard. As for weight, my brother's 630 series case is pretty darn light,
and my 840 isn't too bad, even packed full of stuff as it is. Did you go
for the 1040 series? (I passed on that model because I didn't like the door
over the drive bays.)
As for putting the HSF on backwards, there's an indentation on the one
side of the heat sink that corresponds to the plastic part at the top of
the socket. I would hope that you noticed this and aligned it properly...
Didn't your HSF come with instructions? (Even the $4 HSF I bought for Kensuke
had a crummy little diagram packed in with it...) Oh well, like you said,
high temperatures should give it away pretty quickly.
I've gotten a headache due to these dialated pupils that is making actually
accomplishing anything work-related very difficult. Oh well.
-apon
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| 1040: Yeah, I figured I'd just tear the drive bay door off if it got to be inconvenient... Though now I find I don't use my current drives much at all, so I probably won't have to damage it.
Sinker of heat: Ah, there was such an indentation, I recall... It was so shallow and the cpu with its little rubber pads on top seemed to be pretty level with the socket top, so I didn't make much of it. The thing came with a diagram of how to hook up the temperature sensor and the little fan speed dial but no instructions on how to attach the thing to the MB. I'm pretty sure I got it on the right way though, because this way the cpu core touches the center of the copper disc and the other way was off-center. (I'm pretty sure that's the way I have it ^^;;)
So I've now ordered my dvr-105 (or a05, whichever is oem) and dvd-r discs (Ritek, woo!) with 2-day fedex, so I should be installing stuff any day now... I've ordered from these guys before, so I don't think it'll take 3 weeks.
I feel as if I stand at a precipice with an ocean teeming with sleep sharks far below me. Every minute I don't jump off, they get more frenzied. *sob*
--regolith
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I wish somebody else I knew was watching The Shield this season, I would so love to talk about that. That was so totally the best moment of this entire season of television, bar none. Man!
-apon
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Just so everyone knows, Google makes a poor substitute for a magic eight ball. Furthermore, magic eight balls really suck at answering questions that need a freeform response.
Please make it stop snowing. Please?
-apon
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| Very Tired. We (not me) put a norton antivirus proxy email server in a week ago, and today we got listed as an open relay on some black hole site (cuz it was an open relay), so we had to fix it. The manual wasn't really lucid about what should go in all the boxes and what a normal server setup should look like, but I managed to save the day. Then there were 3000+ emails in the queue that were still trying to send, so we moved the server's clock ahead a month or two to expire all those emails.
Anyway, that ate up my morning, so I'm behind on my thing that I have to show my boss/client tomorrow afternoon, so I'm hoping nothing else goes wrong before then. Whenever I try to work on it, I get so tired, but I don't know if that's because I'm bored with it or I'm really tired or it's too damn hot in here to stay awake. It's usually better in the morning, so I guess I should put off my usual checking of comic and news sites until after I'm done tomorrow.
Just gotta work on it 40 more minutes, then I'll go home... maybe i'll go to sleep early right after star trek, yeah...
--regolith
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