Jared’s Blog

The NHL season opener is just around the corner (next Wednesday!), and I can’t wait. The Wild are looking better than ever with all their offseason pickups. I’ve been following their preseason (they’re 2-1 so far), and I’d be lying if I said I was excited. Nope, I can hardly fricken contain myself!

The Slovakian Super Friends, Gaborik and Demitra, look to be really connecting on the ice. I can’t help but think Doug Risebrough made a genius trade. O’Sullivan may have been a great player and he probably will be for LA in the near future, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the chemistry wasn’t there. My biggest gripe about having a player like Gaborik on the team was that he was the only quick offensive player. He could fly down the ice, but rarely had someone to dish that perfect pass to him. From what I’ve been reading, it’s like him and Demitra have a 6th sense about where each other is on the ice. Let’s hope one of those 2 streaking down the side and feathering a pass past the helpless goalie becomes a familiar sight.
Rick and I have been gearing up for the season by playing NHL 2K7 on the 360 almost daily. I have to say I’m a little dissapointed in the game. There’s only been minor improvements over NHL 2K6 on the 1st generation Xbox and I don’t think it was worth $60. I’ve heard good things about NHL 07, but I can’t bring myself to buy an EA game now that they’ve tried to gain a monopoly in their sports franchises.

It’s been one hell of a week at work. After the launch last week, we unveiled a truckload of problems with our backend admin area. The non-tech people didn’t quite understand the meaning of “test” until it was too late it seems. So this week has been full of me trying it put out various small fires; sometimes more than one at a time.

I promised the bosses wife (who is also an employee) that we’d have things fixed by the end of the week and by golly, I think we did it. There is, of course, still some tweaking to be done, but for the most part, we have a functional application that is head over heels above the previous version.

We got the go ahead on a public IP for our self-hosted staging server today, so if things work out by the end of the day, things will be back to order on the development side of things too.

I am really getting comfortable in this company and I can see myself sticking with these people for a long time. Just today, Neal, one of my bosses, walks in and announces he bought us all a massage this afternoon. I think the overall response from all of us was a collective “Whoohoo!” I guess they have a masseuse come in every couple of weeks for the travel agency and Neal decided since we’d all been working hard on the launch that we deserved a massage. I may have to start scheduling regular visits, because I really could benefit. I guess sitting at a comptuer all day (in a chair without armrests at work) is torture for your back. Go figure.

If you’d asked me a couple months ago, I would have said I’d never buy Intel chip. That was before Core 2 Duo benchmarks came out. Ironically, sitting on my desk right now is an E6300 and I couldn’t be happier.

After a week of abysmal computing on an old HP laptop that barely has enough oomph to run instant messaging and a web browser at the same time, I recieved my relief in the form of a package on Monday afternoon.

Day 1

Without much trouble, I went through the task of assembling all my new goodies. First I dropped the CPU in. Those Core 2 Duos are really tiny compared to my Athlon XP chip. I also like that they cover the actual silicon with a cover so that you can’t crack the core while installing the heatsink.

Next came the whopping heatsink. You can’t appreciate the size until you hold it in your hands. You know what they say about a man? Big heatsink means…ahh, I’ll let you finish it. The heatsink instructions could’ve been a bit more clear, but I managed.

The rest of the install was pretty tedious. I took my time getting the board in the case. I’ll admit I got a little antsy and finished the rest of the install out in a hurry. I didn’t bother to route cables very cleanly, I just wanted to make sure it’d turn on.

To my surprise, Windows actually booted fine even with the significant hardware changes. In my past experiences, it freaked out pretty bad and I had to reinstall. Ubuntu, however, refused to boot fully. Not a problem since I hadn’t had more than a day or two to do anything in it. I would later decide to move my OS partitions around anyway.

I did start messing around with the overclocking options on Monday, but I ran into some trouble and it actually worried me that I had gotten some bad components. For awhile, it wasn’t getting past memory detection and a lot of times I’d reboot itself a few times before posting. I researched it and found I just needed to disable some options in the BIOS. It turns out they have stuff in place to prevent you from frying your chip, go figure. It was getting late so I retired for the night.

Day 2

I knew that when I bought the motherboard it only had 1 IDE port and thus only supported 2 IDE devices. That meant I was going to have to lose some components as I had 2 IDE hard drives and 2 IDE DVD drives. What I ended up doing was getting rid of my old 40GB drive completely and putting the DVD-RW and 120GB on the IDE. I also had just gotten a USB to SATA/IDE adapater so I put my other DVD drive on that.I cleaned up my cables and I’m pretty happy with how it looks now. Finally, I’ve got SATA ports (6 of em actually), I am itching to get rid of those cumbersome IDE ribbon cables. The case would be so much cleaner without them.

The next item on my list was installing my OS’es on my SATA drive. First Windows, which installed impressively quickly. It was only about 20 minutes. During the install I was wandering back and forth between my roommate’s room and mine, so I wasn’t sitting at the desk waiting to move to the next step of the installation right away either.

With Windows up and running I could start messing with my overclock. After figuring out what to set in the BIOS, I was off. I tried a 300MHz FSB which it laughed at. It hit 320 without a hitch. I bumped it to 350 and it was fine. So right now I’ve got my 1.86GHz (1066MHz FSB) chip running at 2.45GHz (1400MHz FSB) and I’m pretty sure I’m not done yet. I did some initial testing by running Super Pi and playing some WoW. It didn’t even hiccup. Granted, I haven’t fully put it through it’s paces nor have I checked out my idle and load temperatures, but I’d be happy with a free ~600MHz and a 333MHz bump in FSB.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve read these chips hit over 3GHz on stock cooling. My goal is running the RAM at spec (400MHz) which would mean the chip would be at 2.8GHz. If I can get it stable and cool enough at that I’ll be happy, but I know I’m going to push it as far as I can go.
I hit another roadblock when it came to getting Ubuntu installed though. It turns out there’s a flaw in the Linux kernel so that it doesn’t recognize any IDE drives. That means when you boot the live CD, it just dies shortly after starting. I looked into it a bit and it seems there is a patch in one of the beta kernels around right now. Something about IDE actually using the SATA bus is what I read. Anyway, that means I’m going to have to find a different way to install Linux. I have been doing some reading this morning and found that I may be able to use my USB card reader to do the install, but I’ll have to wait until I’m off work to try anything.

On a side note, Rick and I saw Unearth and Bleeding Through on Sunday and they killed it. I even took home a few marks of battle. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll post photos.

Yesterday I woke up and something wasn’t right. It only took me a few seconds to realize my computer was off. First of all, the thing sounds like a jet when you turn it on; there’s no mistaking it. And second, my computer is never off. Ever. For me, that’d be like shutting off my hearing or vision.

I didn’t think much of it as I do have the thing overclocked (about 550MHz) and from time to time it will crash. Not to mention I’d left it running Ubuntu with the XGL/Compiz compositing window manager running which isn’t exactly stable I’ve found. By the way, XGL/Compiz is sweet as hell. It’s too bad I only had a day to play with it. Anyway, I walked over and hit the power expecting the thing to boot up. Instead, I got nothing.
At this point, my heart dropped into my stomach at the thought my machine had died. I quickly checked the connections, reset the power and tried it again to no avail. Was it the power supply or the motherboard? I didn’t have time to investigate as I had to get ready for work, so I unplugged it thinking maybe some rest would help it out.

After returning home after work, I began assessing the damage in more detail. I couldn’t find any burn marks and there wasn’t that telltale smell of burning PCB anywhere. No matter what I tried, it simply would not turn on. The best I got was a momentary flash of power, but it would only last for a split second before dying again.
I tried replacing the PSU thinking maybe the new one I’d gotten only a couple months ago had kicked the bucket already. That didn’t fix it. The next thing I tried was disconnecting all but my vital components like the RAM and graphics card. Although it seemed unlikely , sometimes components drawing too much power can cause problems (I’d been running with the same amount of stuff since I got the power supply which was 150W more than the previous one which held up fine). Even with the bare essentials, it still wouldn’t budge.

I knew I was in for a drawn out ordeal because I’d have to rip everything out and make sure I wasn’t shorting anywhere. I got to looking at the CPU fan/heatsink and the thing was looking pretty caked in dust. I grabbed some pictures, but I don’t have a computer to put them on at the moment, so they’ll have to wait. Trust me, I think something was living in there.

After a run out for some new thermal paste and some compressed air, I began the cleaning. Even after the thoughrough cleaning and rebuild, I still got nothing. As a last resort, I reset the CMOS to clear my overclock and go back to defaults. If that and running outside the case with the bare essentials didn’t cure it’s illness, nothing would. And it didn’t.

Defeated, I returned everything to my room and hauled out the old laptop I have. I was planning on ordering a CPU, motherboard, RAM, and video card soon anyway, but there were some things I wanted to pay off first like my trip to Jamaica. I did some research and price comparisons and in the end I settled on a Core 2 Duo system that I should be able to overclock like mad. See the specs below.

After reading this, I decided to go with the cheapest and slowest Core 2 Duo. Because this was sort of an impromptu purchase, I didn’t want to go all out and spend a bunch, but at the same time, I wanted some decent performance. According to the previously mentioned guide, they liked the Gigabyte board for overclocking, so I went with it. Of course for overclocking, you want a nice fat heatsink to cool your processor. The Typhoon wasn’t my first choice, but I think it’ll more than do the job. I was actually looking at this monster, but after measuring my case, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to put the side panel on. The graphics card I found for $120 after rebate so that was sort of a no-brainer. I don’t really game much these days anyway, except for WoW, and I don’t even know how much longer I’ll be playing that. With the RAM, I was really tempted to get 2GB, but I opted for 1GB instead because you can always add more later.

Update: As promised here are some pictures. If I did blow the CPU, this may be why.

Last night after watching, 40 Year Old Virgin (IMDB), Rick flipped the TV back over to cable and we were blindsided by ESPN2’s college football coverage of Florida vs. Florida State.

Instead of the normal football format, the screen was split into 8 screens, each of them showing a part of the game. Think BloombergTV.

There were dedicated cameras on each head coach, dedicated cameras on each quarterback, and 4 different angles of the field. Overkill? I say yes.

Why do I need to see what the coaches are doing during every moment of the game? Similarly, why does there need to be a camera on the quarterback whose defense is on the field? Do we really need to see him drinking his Gatorade?

After a few minutes they did go to a 6 camera format, but it was still way too much going on at once. I sure hope this type of coverage doesn’t start making it’s way to NFL games or I’m going to have a headache after watching the first quarter.

I made a quick representation of what it looked like for visual reference. See for yourself if this would make you go nuts too.

It’s Renaissance Festival time in Minnesota again. For a couple of months at the end of the summer every year, you can travel south of Minneapolis and end up going back in time.

I’d always heard about the yearly Renaissance Festival and how much fun it is, but I never had the chance to check it out until last Sunday. Uncle Dan and Auntie Maxine were in town for the wedding the day before and weren’t going anywhere until the next day so we decided to find out what all the buzz was about.

After driving for a good 25 - 30 min, I arrived at the permenant location of the festival. That was my first surprise. I’d always been under the impression that this was a travelling tour that only set up the few weeks they were in town.

The next pleasant surprise was free parking. I guess it’s really not all that surprising given that the place is pretty far out of the city and has a lot of open land around it. I’m just used to getting gouged at these types of things.
As I made my way towards the ticket counter, I noticed diversity of the crowd. Most wore plain clothes like me, but some had elaborate costumes that made them fit right in. I was expecting that, but not to the degree that I witnessed.

Inside, I found Dan and Maxine and we began wandering around. It turned out there was a jousting show starting shortly, so we hurried over to find a good place to watch. We settled for standing at the side of the fenced in area, which wasn’t ideal for pictures, but I made due. It was also partially shaded which was nice.

Having been to a Medieval Times in Chicago, I knew what I was in for, but again I was surprised with so much more. After some explanation of the rules and some playing to the crowd, the jousting began. Now these guys weren’t faking anything. About the only thing they could’ve done was score their lances in order to make them break. Otherwise, they were wearing real armor and using real weapons.

We watched as the jousters made several passes at eachother, each one becoming more and more spectacular. During the last few runs, the dismounted rider would grab a sword or mace and try to dismount his foe. It was then a realized, they were really hitting each other with these weapons. One slip and someone could really be hurt badly. They pulled it all off flawlessly and the good knight, my sides representitive, even won.

After jousting, Maxine was hellbent on getting an ear of corn she’d seen some others walking around with. She was quite impressed with the whole ear being cooked inside it’s leaves. Apparently, she’d never seen corn prepared and eaten like that. We found the corn and also some bratwursts for Dan and I (mine with sauerkraut of course) and began wandering around the shops.

In additon to the cheesy things like wooden swords and other souvenier-type shops there were a number of higher quality items. Handmade crafts that were created using traditional techniques. I could’ve really dorked out and started trying on armor or watching blacksmiths forge weapons, but I let the visitors go where they wanted. There’s always next year.

A second stage show we heard was a must see, was the firebreathers. Two guys, who basically blow fireballs out of their mouths. For the most part the show was just the two guys bantering back and forth and then showing a trick or two. The bantering actually was a bit raunchy for the young ones in the audience. Lots of sucking and blowing references. Anyway, I guess this is one of those things you just have to see for yourself.

The last part of the time we were there was spent watching a glass blowing demonstration. I could have honestly sat there all day. It reminded me of watching Bob Ross (R.I.P.) paint. His soothing voice, combined with the art of creation mezmorized me. You could tell he was very good at his job. He never once became distracted by his explainations of the process. Sadly, I was too preoccupied with the spectacle to snap and pictures.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll be making it back out again next year and if you’re ever in southern MN between August and September, check out the gem that is the Renaissance Festival.