Back on April 1st, I ordered a (warning: nerd content) serial to RJ-45 cable which I need to update the firmware on my new-to-me Belkin 8 port KVM.
Yesterday it still hadn’t come and the seller’s website was showing its status as “processing”, which would imply that it hadn’t shipped yet. Naturally I emailed them to ask what the deal was and, naturally, it arrived today. It just blows my mind how often that exact same scenario plays out.
Hard to unload a famous, one-of-a-kind, stolen bike that looks like this, apparently:
According to his Twitter, Lance will be riding the bike that was stolen Sunday and then recovered yesterday in tomorrow’s Tour of California TT. I’m sure the mechanics (and possibly Lance himself) went over it with a fine toothed comb, but still… somehow it just makes me uneasy.
This is another one of those “hopefully someone having the same problem comes across it and finds it useful” posts.
So my video card has taken to acting wonky, of late. Whenever I’d play a game (COD4 mainly) after a few minutes it would freeze up. My guess was that it was heat related, probably a bad fan on my SAPPHIRE Radeon X700PRO 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card. This was a great “bang for the buck” card when I bought it in August of 2005 and still fulfills my gaming needs just fine today, so I’d really rather not replace it, though I feared that would be necessary. Opening the case I find the fan barely turning at all and I know that I have my culprit.
The stock fan is a proprietary piece that I’m extremely unlikely to find a replacement for (and trust me, I looked), so I’m thinking I’m going to have to buy an third party cooling solution to replace the whole factory heatsink/fan assembly, which seems ridiculous, given the depreciated value of the card today. Before I start throwing money at this thing, I decide to see if it’s fixable. I pull the card out and find that the fan is secured to the heatsink by three very small Phillips-head screws. I get the screws out, remove the fan (which is very stiff and “draggy” and remove the sticker from the bottom covering its insides. Searching for suitable lube I decide upon Boeshield T-9. Developed by Boeing for Aerospace use, sold for cycling use, seems like just the ticket. A few drips later, the fan is spinning quite freely, so I put it all back together, reinstall it and BINGO! The temp never rises near the danger range the fan spins freely and all is (for now) well. And I can get back to the important business of “shooting melon fevers” in COD4.
The moral of this story: don’t give up on “bad” cooling fans. They can almost always be replaced, resurrected (cleaned and lubed) or “upgraded” to third party cooling solutions.
Last night I spent an inordinate amount of time equalizing the volume of the (1500+) mp3’s on my Sansa. If they all lived together in one directory, I could have knocked it out in no time and just let the software do its thing. However, being the obsessive/compulsive neurotic that I am, they all live in separate directories, sorted by artist, then by album. Anyway, I finally got it done and I’m thrilled with the results. No more wild fluctuations in volume level from song to song. The software I used to accomplish this is MP3Gain. It’s freeware and it:
does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear.
Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.
I’ve got a laptop that I’ve had for, I don’t know, maybe 7 years. Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking it’s probably time to upgrade the operating system from Windows 98 (I know! crazy, huh?). A while back I set it up to dual-boot with Kubuntu 8.04, and that really served to highlight just how dated Win98 is.
So, I’ve been seriously debating ditching 98 altogether and just running Linux, or possibly installing XP. Last week I was perusing eBay and came across a pretty sweet little IBM NetVista box for sale; 2Ghz P4, 512M of Ram, a $71 ‘Buy it now’ price (+$20 shipping) and best of all, it came with XP Pro installed. This set the wheels to turning;
I’ve got an XP Pro CD, I could use this computer’s activation key, install XP on the laptop, install Linux on the new ‘puter and add a new member to my computer minions, all for less than I would have paid to buy XP for the laptop (and with no “piracy” issues)!
Done, done, and done!
I just finished installing XP Pro on the laptop, activating it with Micro$oft, and updating it to SP3. The “new” NetVista is contentedly crunching numbers for BOINC, and I feel like a frugal demented genius… or something.
In case anyone was wondering, I didn’t get eaten by bears, or fall down a well, or anything like that. I’ve simply been neglecting the blog while other more pressing matters took precedence.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
This generally seems to indicate that it’s time for a flurry of new posts, so stay tuned, or something.
This is something I’ve mentioned doing in the past and at long last I’ve received a comment which I felt was worthy of this illustrious award. Here’s May’s award-winning comment from Sally:
Dear Greg,
Do you give advice on this website, too? This is one of the best sites I’ve ever seen, and you’re obviously a wise person with a great sense of humor, but I really could use advice with various problems in my life. You could call yourself, “Dear Greg,” like Dear Abby. Just an idea.
I hope I haven’t overlooked your advice column. Have I?
Sally
Sally Dr…, on 5-8-2008 @ 10:38 pm
Sally wrote this amazingly insightful comment in response to my post “Every Silver Lining Has a Touch of Gray“. For her contribution to the betterment of this blog, Sally will receive a valuable and much-coveted prize (seriously!)
Those of you who didn’t win; don’t despair. Study Sally’s comment and get to work crafting award-winning comments of your own. Also, bear in mind that this is actually more like a “Commenter of the indeterminate time period award”, it really depends on the quantity of quality comments.
Posted by Greg Evans in general, blogging Comments: Comments Off
The other day I wrote about my excitement vis-à-vis my Cameo Mention in the Wahoo Gazette. As luck would have it, I now seem to have angered the Wahoo Gazetteer through no real fault of my own. Here’s what he had to say in today’s Wahoo:
So I give this “Greg Evans” guy a cameo mention the other day. I often see his name in the alt.fan.letterman newsgroup commenting on the show so I decided to give him a mention. This usually results in a cheap Wahoo Gazette plug in the discussion group. Unfortunately, it barely got a blip.
And then I find out that Greg Evans has a website. I checked it out. He spouts how proud he is to have received a cameo mention in the Wahoo Gazette. I was happy to read the shout out. I peruse some more. Down along the right side is a list entitled “Blogs and Such Which I Frequent.” It is a list of 50 blogs and websites Greg Evans likes to read. The Wahoo Gazette is not one of them. Can you believe it? Greg Evans claims to be a fan of David Letterman since his daytime show back in 1980, so how can he not frequent the Wahoo Gazette? It makes no sense. He mentions Dave Yoder’s Letterman website. He does not mention the Wahoo Gazette. Misdirected energy, I say.
And what hurts even more . . . . . Greg Evans writes about his Cameo Mention in the Wahoo Gazette . . . and it receives no comments from his readers . . . if he HAS any readers!
http://www.gsevans.com/blog/
The Wahoo Cameo Committee is presently considering rescinding Mr. Evans’ Cameo Mention.
And here is a snippet of my response, as posted to AFL:
In all honesty, I tried quite some time ago to add a link to the Wahoo, but couldn’t figure out a way to link to it directly since the URL’s are dynamically generated. I did figure it out though.
I’ve added it to my links, I sure hope they don’t rescind
my Cameo Mention!
I can’t believe MikeMack went here:
Greg Evans writes about his Cameo Mention in the Wahoo Gazette . . . and it receives no comments from his readers . . . if he HAS any readers!
Sure I have readers! They’re called web-crawlers, bots and
spiders!
Why must you build me up, only to tear me down, MikeMack, why?
Speaking of Letterman, this week is ‘Magician Week’, which prompted me to renew my search for a comedy routine I remember from the late 80’s or early 90’s which I’ve been looking for (obviously not hard enough) for years. 5 minutes of Googling earlier tonight and I’d found it:
I hang out in the news group Alt.Fan.Letterman occasionally a lot. Over the years I think some of ‘the regulars’ over there have begun to begrudgingly accept me. Imagine my delight when I received a package (I’m considering it a birthday gift) in the mail from Kath, my favorite Australian.
Note the clever (and no doubt, intentional) misspelling of my name, lest I get too cocky.
A lovely card inside.
Signed by people I don’t know, at least one of whom seems unnaturally interested in seeing my pigeon-chest.
My Dingo! My Dingo!
The flip-side, showing Fraser Island, the dingo’s supposed home. I can’t imagine how they ever find a baby in all that sand! No wonder the poor thing looks so hungry!
