Last weekend we saw British comedian Eddie Izzard perform downtown. This was just the 4th stop on his 34 city tour of the US – the largest tour of his career. Eddie’s mostly known now for his role on the FX series The Riches, but he was first and foremost a touring comedian before landing television and film roles. D and I first were introduced to him with HBO’s showing of his 1998 tour “Dressed to Kill”. He no longer performs in drag (at least not this tour – he wore jeans and a tux coat with tails), but his comedy is as spot on as ever.
Eddie started the show by telling us he’d be talking about everything that’s ever happened…ever. Turns out, he wasn’t far off. Eddie started out with bits about his #1 source of information…wikipedia (“which is all written by three guys on toilets”), how we’re all a bunch of lairs for checking “yes” to having read software terms and conditions, and how Bill Gates gives away billions…but he keeps Billions. From there, he went way back to the creation of the Earth, God’s shitty track record, the 150 million years of monsters, paleontologists vs. geologists, playing Scrabble before language, hunting Bison and the beginning of the stone age, hunters vs. the gatherers, the weather report in Ancient Egypt (“let’s see tomorrow…eye, eye, feet, mostly and over here, wolf’s head, eye, man pointing sideways, eye, feet, eye…”), Noah’s challenges with loading the arc, Moses and toad-blindness, then quickly through the Greeks and Romans, and on up to landing on the moon. Yeah, Eddie covered A LOT of ground. He picked on Christianity throughout (“Why would our Creator choose to live in the cold, damp clouds?”) and the crowd didn’t seem to mind a bit. The highlight for me was his routine about monsters going to church (I won’t ruin it for those that will see it eventually).
This show will keep me laughing for months. Can’t wait till he makes a DVD of it.
Filed under Uncategorized
Another little mod to the gaming system this week. I picked up a nice Zalman video cooler on sale for about 25 bucks. I haven’t installed a GPU cooler before so I thought it’d be interesting to see what kind of impact it’d make. Here’s a look at my aging, but able, BFG 7900GT with the stock fan/heat sink.
Installation was simple. Just took the stock cooler off, cleaned off the old thermal compound, attached the new heat sinks to the ram chips and then mounted the new cooler. With everything back up and running I was first surprised at how much quieter the new one is. I have it running on 5V “quiet mode” (which is still ~2500 rpm) and it’s barely audible over the other fans in the case. Temperature-wise it’s equally impressive. Between idle and load the GPU temp ranged between the low 40’s to the mid 50’s, which is consistently 10 degrees cooler than with the stock cooler. Even though I’ve got the GPU overclocked by about 24%, I never saw it break 58C while gaming. Ready for this summer’s four day frag-fest!
Filed under Comp hardware / mods
I got home last night excited to find my replacement power supply had arrived.
- It’s the same model – yay! all my modular power cords will still work with this unit.
- It’s reconditioned – ok, fair enough, these are out of production and mine was over 2 years old.
- It’s blue.
WTF? While I’m super glad to have a fully functional PSU again, and it only set me back about $15 in shipping, I wasn’t expecting this aesthetic twist. I had this whole silver / red theme going and boom, they send me a blue replacement for my chrome original. Since only the unit was replaced and not all the modular cables, I’m now stuck with red braided cables coming from the blue PSU. The icing on this monstrosity is it has fans with blue LEDs which can’t be turned off.
Oh well, it looks like I’m perfectly prepared now for MillionManLan which falls over July 4th!
Filed under Comp hardware / mods
