1. a random, steady, unvarying, electronically produced sound
2. nerdy notes from suburbia
I’m not going to go off on the current fascination with twitter. I’m not going to claim it doesn’t bring anything to social networking that can’t already be done 100 different ways. I’m not going to suggest it’s dragging down the signal to noise ratio of our infotainment sphere.
No, instead I’m just going to watch this for hours:
Filed under General News
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 General News
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.
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
D and I traveled to Nashville, Indiana this past weekend to catch a talk by Coach Bob Knight. The venue was a low key place, a 2000 seat auditorium, which usually hosts touring country acts. We had great seats – sixth row, center.
Before Bob came out, a projector replayed footage from the ceremony celebrating his 880th win back in 2007 (which made him the men’s div 1 college basketball wins leader). Then, after the seats filled up, Bob came out to a standing ovation – the Hoosier force is still strong in this one. After the applause quieted, Bob started, in typical point blank fashion, with some ribbing of the event organizers (long time friends of his) about the modest on-stage setup.
Bob went on to talk for over two hours. He retold stories dating back to his coaching start at West Point through to his recent work for ESPN. His first story was a 15 minute monologue about how upon arriving at Texas Tech he quickly learned of the expression, Son’bitch. One of my favorite lines was in this story in which he said “I don’t know much about computers. All I know is they weigh a hell of a lot when my wife puts one in our carry on.”
He spoke a lot about fellow coaches and past players. Although his tales twisted and turned with lots of tangents, his recall of names and scores was uncanny. Bob talked about coaching Mike Krzyzewski at West Point and how he instructed him to never shoot the ball (“if you shoot, you will die”), an order which the young Coach K followed. He talked about the satisfaction of beating Digger Phelps (94-29) who was in his first year coaching at Notre Dame while Bob was in his first year at Indiana. A lot of stories centered around the IU team who won his first National Championship in ’76, including one player he called his all-time MVP: Bobby Wilkerson. Although Wilkerson wasn’t as popular as Kent Benson, Scott May, or Quinn Buckner, Knight told of his dedication and versatility on the court.
At one point in the middle of the talk Bob’s cell phone began to ring. Bob stopped and answered it right on stage. He went on to talk to an unknown person at the other end for several minutes about the merits of hiring Dan Hipsher. After the call, Bob said we might’ve just seen a preview to a big announcement in the coming days.
Bob took a few passing digs at the IU administration that ended his tenure (nothing too pointed and names weren’t mentioned) including this one during his closing remarks:
After the main portion of the talk, Knight introduced long time friend and biographer Bob Hammel. Hammel, mic in hand, went into the audience and relayed questions from the crowd to Knight for a good 15 minutes. At one point, Knight invited his wife Karen on stage and she tearfully spoke about how she misses living in the area.
After all that, there was a short break and a Meet and Greet started up a few minutes later. D and I decided to pony up a few extra bucks for a couple signed souvies and a brief 1 on 1 (meeting, not game). During our handshake and photo op, Knight took the time to sign D’s plank from Assembly Hall and it’s since become even more cherished.
Filed under Sports
My computer has been out of commission for seven days. The power supply died in very unceremonious fashion. Luckily it was only 2 years and 2 months into a 3 year warranty so I was able to send it back for a replacement. Unluckily it will be another week before I can expect that replacement to show up.
In the meantime I’ve been able to catch up on some things around the house (and help Slick with a project of his own). Being gameless for a while sucks, but I’m so happy that it didn’t happen during this Summer’s MillionManLan!
Filed under Comp hardware / mods
Random stuff…just cuz it’s Friday:
We had an earthquake in the midwest this morning. Although it was centered in southern Illinois it still woke me – and that’s saying something because I’m pretty dead to the world at 5:30am. I think it was actually the bedroom door that woke me and not the earth rumble itself. Our door was moving ever so slightly back and forth making a little creak and that did it. I recall it lasted about a full 10-15 seconds. Long enough for me to consider all the possibilities of what it might be. My first thought was earthquake (I recognized the feel from a very similar one years ago), but then you remember you’re in Ohio and start eliminating more likely scenarios. Some gigantic loud truck outside – nope, it’s not loud, some major wind storm – nope, again too quiet and it’s a constant shake, and so on. Until eventually you think, damn it is an earthquake.
With all due respect to Al and everyone else in Cali, they really need a different word for earthquakes here. Here, the news revels in it and people look at it with unintimidated awe as a rare, harmless feat of nature – like a solar eclipse or a double rainbow. Our earthquakes are your dust devels to our tornadoes.
And now for a reminder of how weird people are, Slick forwarded me this link. Me thinks this makes for a great caption contest…GO COMMENT!
Filed under General News
This weekend brought the inaugural lawn mowing of 2008. We had postponed it as long as possible, but with the grass quickly reaching foresty heights I had no choice but get out there and clear-cut it. Saturday was a cold, windy day and the mower didn’t feel a bit like starting. I decided since getting the thing going would be a struggle, I might as well give it the good maintenance once-over. I polished the spark plug, took off the blade (which was rusted on) and sharpened it with a hand file, replaced the air filter, and drained the gas and refilled it with some fresh stuff. After all that it fired up without too much trouble.
As I was sharpening the blade I got wondering about how many people even bother. When I went to Home Depot to grab an air filter I saw people buying new blades for $30-40. Sure enough, after 15 minutes of sharpening, my old blade was super sharp and as good as ever. Sure, I can see buying one if your blade gets warped or has a big chunk broken off by some stealthy lawn boulder, but those babies are pretty serious pieces of steel, so that can’t be very common. I’m thinking that fixing things at home is becoming a lost art.
Filed under General News
The memories linger…
Filed under Vacations
Holy Crap! With tonight’s 92-85 win in the NIT Championship game, perhaps the OSU men’s basketball team has finally broken the collective curse of Maurice Clarett, Jim O’Brien, Bo Schembechler, Willis McGahee’s knee, Ted Ginn’s ankle, NBA draft rules, or whatever else it was that put our teams in Karma’s outhouse. I’m not about to start bragging about it, but at least now maybe I can watch a Buckeye sporting event without feeling like I’m waiting for a swift punch to the junk.
Nicely done Scarlet and Gray sirs!
Filed under Sports
