Brobst Town » Uncategorized

The Wilderness Downtown

paul — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:49:31 +0000

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Stand By Me

paul — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:11:57 +0000

Stand By Me from David Johnson on Vimeo.

Branching Out

paul — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:59:47 +0000

So I’ve been trying to branch out a bit.

Last weekend I went to a techno dance club. Never done that before.

Yesterday at dinner I left the pickles on my burger. I still don’t like pickles that much, but I have to say it does change the taste of the burger a whole lot. It wasn’t unpleasant.

I am a new man.

Fifteen Seconds of Saturday

paul — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:15:16 +0000

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GTA4 Killed My 360

paul — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:21:06 +0000

I played it for a grand total of three hours.

New Tron In 2011, It Is About Time

paul — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:47:25 +0000

Kotaku reports that Disney has slated a new Tron movie for 2011, and it will be in Disney Digital 3D.

I have watched Tron at least one hundred times in my life. When I was a kid I would beg my mom to rent it every time we went to Video Station. It is probably safe to say it is one of the reasons that I grew up to like computers so much.

Melting Bunny

paul — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:04:19 +0000

This is one of the more surreal videos I have seen in awhile. The bunny seems so innocent, which makes the melting feel gruesome. Add in the extremely peaceful music and there is a lot of cognitive dissonance.

Goodwill, not a warm feeling

paul — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:33:07 +0000

So I just got back from dropping off some of my old computer stuff at Goodwill.

It was not the experience I expected. I thought maybe I would get a thank you.

What I did not expect was to be berated after hesitating when I was told to just throw my 80 pound CRT monitor into the bin.

“They pull them all apart and just recycle them”, they said.

“But it still works fine”, I said.

“So? No one uses those old dinosaurs anymore, and I’m not going to be the one pulling that heavy thing out of the bin either.”

Next time I’ll just give my stuff away on Craigslist. Hopefully then it will actually get some more use, which I thought was the whole point of Goodwill in the first place.

Typing Test

paul — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:20:17 +0000

Ed forced me to do this typing test. The way they do scrolling is infuriating though. During the last 10 seconds it scrolled the line I was typing off the top of the page.

Here’s my results:

Number of words typed: 245
Test duration: 3 min
Speed: 81.6 words/min. (408 keystrokes/min.)
Error penalty: 0
Accuracy: 100.0%

Take that Ed!

My New Computer

paul — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:05:18 +0000

My faithful computer of five years died a horrible death last week. I’ve tried all I can and it still won’t even post bios. A dead motherboard or CPU on a five year old computer means only one thing.

Time for an upgrade!

Luckily, my friends and I had been pricing out systems and watching for deals since I was already planning on getting a new system.

The fruits of our labor was the fact that, as usual, if you catch Dell on a good deal it will beat out building your own by a large margin. In my case the difference between the Dell I got and the DIY I would have built was around $350.

I’ve added a few new components (some which caused issues) already, so here are my final specs on a stable system.

Dell Dimension 9200 – $649
- Intel Core 2 Quad 6600
- 2 gigs 667MHz ram
XFX 8800 GTS 320MB – $250
Western Digital Raptor 150gig boot drive

The WD Raptor drive caused some issues, unfortunately. My system would sometimes stall in mid boot for over a minute. Frequently it would halt and sit there for over a minute after I clicked on something. Clearly something was wrong.

I checked the events log and saw a bunch of these iaStorV errors with Event ID 9.

A quick Google search brought me to The Flying Nerd. He offers a lot of background reading and a description of the exact problem I was having.

The Intel site he linked to offered more information. Essentially, some power management registry keys have been set in the Vista Intel Matrix drivers that can cause issues if your hard drive does not support those features. The result is hanging during install and these iaStorV timeouts.

The Flying Nerd offers several potential solutions. For my case, installing version 7.6.0.1011 of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager has cleared up my timeouts completely.

The pertinent benchmark:

3DMark06 – 9085

For some reason PCMark05 aborts on the HDD XP Startp test. I haven’t been able to find out anything about that.

Now to see how some real games run.