Posts from April 2006

  • Update - I Still Hate Building Computers

    So, in an amusing twist of fate, after going to Best Buy (yes, again… piss off!) and buying myself another video card for a whopping $129, I discovered (during a household search for other components, but I’ll get into that later) that I did, in fact, have a spare video card that will suffice… an old PCI Mach64, which will certainly do the job for the short term (and will eventually find itself in my server, in a swap for the GeForce card it currently possesses). Thus, now I find myself needing to go back to Best Buy (yes, for a third time) to return the card I just purchased.

    Oh well, on the bright side, I’m saving myself $129, and I found that old card I was sure I had!

    Updated Update:

    Bah, so I plugged in the Mach64 card, and the board wouldn’t power up. Odd, I thought. I pulled the card, and when I hit the power switch, at least the fan started spinning. So I plugged in the GeForce and… spinny fan, but no POST (Power On Self Test, for those not in the know… the part of the boot sequence where the RAM is counted, etc). Not even a beep from the speaker. And the HD led stays on, which doesn’t seem like a good thing.

    So, I think I’m gonna abort this whole process. I’ll try taking the board back to BEST, and the card back to Best Buy (I’ll keep the RAM and just load up Frodo for now). Now, on to trying to compile a new kernel for Frodo, since the current kernel apparently doesn’t recognize more than 896 megs of RAM (as oppose to the 1.5 gigs that’s in there). I hate computers.

    Further Updated Update:

    Got the new memory in and the new kernel compiled. After futzing with my video drivers, I even have X working again! Now comes the wait to see if anything broke… good thing I kept the old kernel around.

  • I'm So Disappointed In Me

    Wow. So Lenore returned from Regina yesterday morning at around 5:00 am and opted to go straight into work, and so I decided to go in early, so we could bail out from work around 2:00 pm. That evening we then proceeded to rent a few movies, two of which were 1-day’s, so we had to watch them right away.

    Well, the first movie was “Dreamer”. Think Seabiscuit, but with a little girl instead. Or, put another way, a chick flick with a horse. But, hey, it wasn’t “She’s the Man”, so I can’t really complain. And it had Kris Kristofferson … and, really, how can you go wrong with Kris Kristofferson?

    The second movie was “Domino”. Now, I don’t know if it was because it was late and I was tired (we started the movie at 10:00, and I’d been up for 16 hours by that point), but “Domino” must be one of the worst attempts at a stylized action movie I’ve seen in quite some time. Plot? Atrocious… so confusing, I don’t think the writers knew what was going on. The “style”? Horribly distracting. In retrospect, the reason I found the movie so confusing may have been from the epileptic seizures the visuals were triggering. Frankly, I think the only purpose of this movie was to show how awesomely badass Keira Knightley could be. The problem is, she was really not that awesome at all… in fact, she was pretty terrible.

    But, in the end, I think the real question is this: why didn’t I just stop watching this movie?!? I just kept watching and watching, even though the movie went from scene to scene delving deeper and deeper into realms of suck rarely visited, let alone depicted in film. I could have made it all stop, but I didn’t. I let myself down. And for that, I apologize to me.