Links For Jerry Day

11.12.2003

I'm not sure if Jer has seen these, but here are things that make me think of Jerry:

• 1984 Macys Thnaksgiving Parade, for which our high school had the honor of being the lead band. Evidently, this is a big deal. I know we all acted like it was.
• Links to comic fonts, because Jerry is the keeper of the Big Ass Font List. Inside this group, I found a site with some fonts I had not seen before. I am not the font god that others are, of course.

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Big Boy Case Begone

11.10.2003

Saturday was my day to install new goodies on the home PC. I had just gotten a 2nd monitor through eBay (all the better to play around with 3D modeling and graphics programs), plus I had upgraded my sound card and speakers and wanted to get them set up. Seeing as how I've replaced almost everything in the current computer, installing this batch should be no problem.

Except life is never that easy.

The first thing I discovered was that my video card has a normal monitor adapter, plus a digital adapter. So when I pull up the configuration and it was showing 2 monitors, one of them was meant for a digital monitor (which I had none of). So, I had to go get a video card for the new monitor. No big deal. A trip to CompUSA later finds me with a new video card (PCI, since that's all that's available), and I'm good to go. The case cover comes off, I install the video and audio cards, press the power button....

... and the fan whirs for about a second before shutting down. I reapeated this about 3 times, and came to the conclusion that my power supply, with every plug taken with my 2 burners and 3 hard drives, had finally gotten over taxed. At least that's what I was hoping for, otherwise it meant the motherboard was probably fried and it was going to be more expensive to fix.

So another trip to CompUSA finds me with a 600 watt power supply, along with a 10 bay/5 fan tower to put it all in, just because I'm me. I hook up the new power supply and everything runs smoothly (I got lucky for once!). I start moving everything to the new case, and after a while almost everything is working (there's a problem with video driver conflicts on a driver that I don't think I need, and I can't get my internet connection quite working yet).

So, of the computer that I bought almost 2 years ago, the only parts that are still there are:

• Motherboard
• CPU (AMD 1700)
• 1 512MB RAM stick (I've added 2 more)
• Floppy Drive (salvaged from my old e-Machine)
• 80GB HDD
• Network Card

I've replaced the cd drive with a cd burner and a dvd burner. Added 2 120GB HDD. New video Card(s). New audio cards. Expanded the USB card to a 4-port card. Added an extra IDE controller card (to take care of all those drives). I've replaced so many things, I'm scared to check and see what I've ended up spending on this computer over the course of the past 2 years.

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Late Wrestler News

11.07.2003

No, not Dead Wrestler News, but more along the lines of Delayed Wrestler News. Jeesh, some people.....

I really am falling behind in keeping up with the goings on in the wrestling world. I just learned yesterday that Triple H and Stephanie McMahon got married last month. It's not a weird story angle (again), but a real live, actual marriage. The last I had heard they had broken their relationship off, but I guess things got better for them. There's also a couple of pictures from the wedding.

And finally, thanks to Jer for pointing the way to the church sign generator. I wish I knew how he manages to find all the cool stuff.

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Matrix Fallout

11.06.2003

[unrelated rant]

Usually my morning commute takes about 25 minutes (20 if traffic isn't too thick, 15 if the lights and traffic cooperates). I can usually tell which of those time frames I'm going to fall into by where the traffic starts backing up. This morning, the traffic started backing up way to early. I had already been waiting 15 minutes by the time I got to the earliest point where it usually starts to back up. Evidently the rain, wet streets, and morning fog hadn't agreed with somebody. Doing some quick calculations and seeing that at my current speed it would take.. lets see, carry the one, divide by zero.... forever to get to work, I tried an on the fly, alternate route.

And it was an alternate route that led me to the 2nd busiest intersection in Madison, which was now the home of a big old wreck. Definitely not a morning for me to be in a hurry.

But I finally got to work. 6 minutes shy of an hour after leaving home. More than double my usual time. If I wanted to live somewhere where it took forever to get from point A to pont B, I'd go to Atlanta (ugh, cold shiver down my spine). There's got to be a way for a wreck to not tie up traffic (like the "move damaged vehicles to shoulder" signs that nobody pays attention to) and just keep going and quit rubbernecking so you don't run into the person in front of you.

But this is one of those things that will never change.

[/end of unrelated rant]

After seeing Revolutions yesterday, I don't know how much I liked it and how much I was dissapointed by the ending. As expected, critics dislike it (watch out for spoilers here). Even the common folk seem a little let down by everything that was seemingly left out.

It was a good sci-fi movie. It had good sci-fi action. Yet for a Matrix movie, especially the finale of the series, it was lacking. And the thing it was lacking most was some good, quality Matrix time. It needed more bullet time slow motion shots firing spinning cartwheels of death. In fact, my favorite Matrix moment was a chase scene in the subway station, seeing how each character jumped the stall differently. Trinity had a great cartwheel/somersault past the gate that was perfect and fluid.

So, I want to like it. I do like it, just not as much as I want to, but I don't want to admit it. Yet I'll still go around spouting "Mister Anderson" and "It is an in-ev-it-a-bil-ity".

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Entering The Matrix Again

11.05.2003

If all goes well, we're taking a work break today and going to see the new Matrix movie. I'm sure we'll be thinking about how to incorporate what we see in the movie into things we're working on, that way it's still work related as opposed tosneaking off and watching a movie.

To get in the mood for the movie, and as part of setting up the new computer, I found that there is a cornucopia of Matrix Screensavers out there. My personal favorite is the 3-D Screensaver that has you zooming around glyphs as seen in the opening of Reloaded. It's quite mesmerizing.

And I remember back when aquarium screensavers were all the rage.

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