Archive for March, 2008

I decided late last year that I was going to take the year off from the computer upgrade process. That doesn’t mean that I planned on absolutely zero upgrades, but that I would defer the “big stuff”. This came after a tremendous amount of hassle and fuss trying to get Vista and my 2006 PC upgrade working to my satisfaction, and after the satisfying experience I had with my MacBook Pro.

But things change… and the upgrade that wasn’t going to happen, did…

Read the rest of this entry »

I am in the midst of another office cleanup. Unlike last year, I don’t think I’ll bore / shock you with too many pictures. But as I shuffle things around, I have to occasionally shut down the network- including the server that provides this website. I expect the outages to be fairly brief: so far, there have been three outages of under thirty minutes each. But you have been warned.

One thing that is different this year is that I am attempting to dispose of a vast quantity of outdated/no longer used computer bits. I have four chassis, three of which have partial or nearly complete PCs ranging from a pentium III to a dual processor Athlon. There are also three CRT monitors, a stack of hard drives, another stack of network hubs and cards, and several boxes of “miscellaneous parts” (including RAM, sound cards, and other odds and ends). Most of the stuff is over five years old, and I can’t honestly tell you why I’ve held on to it other than it is hard to dispose of.

I plan on renting a truck later this week to cart it all to the Goodwill electronics recycling depot: they reuse what they can, and break down/dispose of what they can’t use. The scary thing is that I need a truck… I’ll probably post a picture or two of the loaded truck once it is all done. And probably a picture of the finished re-org: the “in progress” pictures would be truly frightening.

Back in December of 2005 I added Google Adsense features to my site. As I said back then, I have no illusions of actually making money off of Adsense. Starting year three, my “a buck or two a month” estimate is holding remarkably true. I’m up to about $45 sitting in the Google coffers, waiting to reach $100 so I can claim my riches.

More interesting to me is the ebb and flow of statistics and traffic relating to my site. Back when I started with Adsense, a good day on my site was about 50 page impressions: now a good day is about 500 page impressions, and a “slow” day is about 150. So traffic is up, but arguably the number and variety of people exploring the web is also up.

But why do people come to my web site? I don’t do anything to “advertise” it, and I break one of the cardinal rules of building an audience for your blog: my topics are all over the map. A good blog is one that picks a specific topic and sticks to it: I, on the other hand, blog about whatever interests me at the moment. Yes, that means much of what you see here is related to technology (computers), computer games, and science. But there are personal rants here as well, and boring stuff about things that have happened around the house.

I have no desire to “restrict” my posting to specific topics, but I think I should do some work to better structure the site by category. I imagine it would be nice for folks interested in my, say, computer hardware, to have a well defined button to push to see that content. That stuff is actually pretty easy to corral here on this site with my current categories, but I don’t think everyone knows how to use those- expect me to make some changes there in the next year to make this easier. I’ll probably be using those buttons at the top of this page for this purpose: my challenge right now is figuring out what categories make the most sense for my visitors.

Why is this a problem? Well, if I look at my Google stats and my own local statistics software, the top handful of “hits” to my site based on keyword searches are:

• Mary Carey
• Teresa Noreen
• Asus M2R23 motherboard problems
• Battlefield 2142 vista
• exploding biceps

Well… I’m not partial to setting up categories based around “sexy women” or “exploding biceps”. And the really odd thing is: I have literally dozens of posts on computer hardware and games, and only a couple of posts regarding models / sexy women, yet somehow those posts drive more traffic than everything else combined. So I’ll have to give this some thought… maybe I need a “Girls Geeks Lust after” page?

The exploding biceps thing, though…that really freaks me out.

P.S.: your challenge for the day is to find the exploding biceps post on this site…

P.P.S: your other challenge is to post a comment on this thread telling me how you found this site, and what might make it easier to find what you want. My guess is, I’ll get zero comments on this topic, since everyone is here looking for partially-clothed women and exploding biceps…

It started innocently enough… ah, crap, that’s how I began that other post.

Okay… here’s the deal. I’m weak. My weakness is gadgets, particularly computers. You know this if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time. It is rare that I make it through a given six month period without doing *something* that involves partly or completely gutting one or more computers.

Of course I’m leading up to the fact that I’m ripping the innards from my PCs once again. This time I can hardly make a cogent excuse for my behavior. My main gaming PC is the subject of my latest reconstruction and, as I noted in that post you’ll find at the link above, it started with a new video card. The ATI 3870 x2 is a great card, by all accounts, but it isn’t working out so well with my AMD 64 x2 processor and Asus M2R32 motherboard.

The first and most “urgent” cause for this uncalled for reconstruction: the new video card didn’t make EverQuest 2 faster. I really think this is an EverQuest 2 problem: everything I’ve read tells me this. Yet I’m upgrading even more of my computer. I told you I didn’t have a good excuse for this… but that doesn’t stop me from proceeding. My theory of the moment is that getting off the AMD platform and onto Intel will remove one potential source of difficulty. Plus moving from a dual core to a quad core configuration can’t hurt, right?

The second reason… my current PC build, which I assembled in October of 2006, has given me difficulty pretty much right from the start. I still can’t put the system into standby mode without a 50/50 chance of utterly and completely corrupting the hard drive. I’ve had strange problems with the system failing periodically to boot. Then yesterday I went to install new Catalyst drivers for my video card, and it crashed on start up forcing me to revert to a previous config.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the configuration . But Asus more or less stopped updating the drivers for the M2R32 in January of 2007: several of their “latest” drivers for Vista are still dated prior to the official release of Vista. This makes me suspicious that some or even all of the problems I am experiencing are a result of this motherboard being a bit of a “Vista orphan”.

All of this is an excuse to burn up more money and buy more shiny things that go “beep!” I bought a giant heat sink! And a motherboard designed for over-clocking! Wheee!

And yes, I’ll write a more complete article regarding the build I’m assembling once I get the pieces put together…

I clearly remember how I first got into Dungeons and Dragons. I was 15 years old at the time. My friend Tim was a member of Mensa, and told me that they had this thing called Dungeons and Dragons that they played. Since I was a big fan of Tolkein’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tim’s description of D&D sounded perfect. I wrote an IQ test and discovered I missed the grade by a couple of points: the fact that I wrote the test on the day I found out my Dad had died might have had an impact, but I also never really claimed to be a genius. But the desire to play D&D remained.

I bought my own Players Handbook (Advanced D&D 1st edition) and started a D&D group shortly thereafter. That’s how I met my life long best friend Chris, and role playing was the foundation for a ton of other improvements for me. I’d always been “bookish”, but had never really fit in with any particular group- D&D gave me a ready-made introduction to any number of like minded people. It also focused my creative interests, helped me become more social (I had to form that D&D group after all, and continue to find new members as the years passed by). Years later when I was still playing the game in my 30’s, I once joked that my original Players Handbook was older than some of the players in our group. Although I haven’t actively played for a few years, D&D was truly a life changing activity for me for at least 25 years of my life.

Gary Gygax, or “E. Gary Gygax” as his byline used to be on all the source materials, was sort of like the iconic “father” of the game. Yes, there were others arguably who contributed more to the mechanics, but Gary was the “face” of the game during it’s early years. He was also a bit… odd, and seemed like a magnet for equally odd people. His one-time-wife, for example, who ultimately stripped him of his place within TSR and removed his name from the game. In later years he was re-recognized by the new owners of the game, Wizards of the Coast (and later Hasbro), and was granted the chance to have his name associated with the game once again at conferences and in the occasional article that he wrote.

I never met Mr. Gygax. I don’t doubt that we would have had some things to talk about, but I’m also pretty sure that we wouldn’t have gotten along terribly well. That is beside the point, however: I owe a debt of gratitude to the man for his contributions to Dungeons and Dragons. A man who was responsible for a major part of my adolescent growth has died, and I shall miss him.