I love my Civic again

So I am finally recovering from the whole new parent thing and starting to get some things done again. One of those things was to get new tires on the car. While I was at it I figured I might as well get the rest of the maintenance I have been putting off done too. My poor Civic was new in 2002 and has over 100k miles on it. I have not done any major maintenance on it. Just oil changes, filters, brakes, and tires. The Honda Civic is an amazing bit of engineering though, even with all the neglect I was still getting 30 mpg and it ran fine. It used to get 36 mpg and there was a lot of maintenance that I have passed on, so I figured it was about time.

I had the front tires replaced and aligned, the belts replaced, the spark plugs replaced, a new battery, an oil change and a general tune up. It ended up costing about $900 with the lifetime rotation and balance package at Firestone. It took about 4 hours that Liz, Aurora and I spent wandering around Santa Ana getting errands done and having lunch. It was a pleasant day.

The belts were cracked and I new they needed to be replaced, the battery was basically dead for months (You could probably start a Civic with a AA), and the spark plugs were way over due. It cost a lot, but considering that I have not had a payment in over 3 years and it has needed very little maintenance. I can not complain.

What really makes it worth it through was driving it home. It was like a new car. I had not realized how much the performance had decreased over time. I know what you are thinking performance and Honda Civic should not be in the same post, but you can get a lot out of the manual transmission version of the Civic EX. I have driven the automatic version of the Civic and I feel bad for anyone who has one. I had to have them ship a manual from another dealer when I bought mine and they thought I was crazy, but I will never buy an automatic as long as you can still get manual transmissions. Besides far better performance in general they get way better gas mileage and its much harder to power slide in an automatic (It comes in handy sometimes).

I will probably had to replace the transmission or clutch eventually though, I have taught several people how to drive stick on it and I am not gentle on it. Maybe at 200k. Here is to the next 100k miles!

Baby Aurora has Arrived

In case anyone missed the emails, texts and facebook updates my daughter Aurora Elizabeth Sanford was born on September 23rd, 2009 at 08:21. She was 8 pounds 12 ounces and 20.5 inches long. She also looked kind of like an alien, but I won't hold that against her. She was much cuter once the slime was removed. Anyway as promised here are two photo albums of her. If other people have good pictures please send them to me so I can add them to the gallery. Thanks.

Click the galleries to get higher resolution photo's directly at Picasa Web. Oh, and since this is my geek blog, I highly recommend the Picasa photo organizer. It does not mess with where the photo's are on disk and it has really cool facial recognition built in to automatically group people into albums. Working with it made me realize a couple things. First, I know a lot of people named Chris. Second, I have a lot of pictures of people I do not remember.

The Birthing (PG-13)


Aurora and friend's at less than 1 week old

Aurora's castle

Normal people just paint the nursery pink or something for a girl, well we are not normal. We are doing the room as a castle balcony. There are mountains, forests, trees, and the ocean. We will be adding a village and pirate ship soon. As she gets older we will add the volcano and rampaging dragon.

Since this is going to be a babies room the base coat is all Olympic Zero VOC Low odor acrylic paint with an eggshell finish. The details are done in non-toxic acrylic paint form Micheal's.

Anyway instead of trying to explain it in any more detail, I will just include the Picasa slide show of the painting so far.

Baby projects: The Closet

The first baby project is done. I have remodeled the closet in the nursery. It was just your standard boring closet, but now it is a closet for the ages. Okay, it's not that great, but it is more useful than the standard layout and should last Aurora until we move or throw her out of the house.

I love building things, be it computers or anything else, but the first step of any construction project is always my favorite, demolition!

 

We were careful to save the shelf that went across the top, since I am a cheap bastard and we used it to make selves for the end of the closet.

While my dad and I worked on the demolition and the shelves, Liz and Barb worked on the shelf/drawer tower thing from Lowes.

After a little trouble and a lot of jerry rigging we got everything in. As per my usual specification you could store an elephant on the shelves and the center piece is bolted to the wall with 9 inch molly bolts, so it's not going anywhere. The clothes bars it came with are a little flimsy so I may have to replace them with galvenized pipe in case Aurora wants to do pull ups on them, but that can wait a bit.

 

Next project: Crib assembly.

Labor Class

We went and took the condensed one day labor class at Hoag today. On one hand, it is nice to know that we will be at a really great hospital with private rooms and ocean views. They have great doctors and they keep your baby with you the whole time. No running off with the baby right after she is born like they used too. They do all the tests in your room. They also keep women after the birth for two days for simple births and four days for cesarean births, which is longer than most hospitals.

On the other hand, it was scary as hell. They cover all the things that can go wrong that you have no control over: prolapsed cord, breach position, the head being too big, the placenta separating, etc.

Even if everything goes right it can be anything from a few hours of discomfort to days of agonizing pain and suffering for Liz. To be completely honest I am glad I am not the one who has to go through it, but that does not mean I want her to suffer. It kills me to see Liz suffer.

However it goes down, at the end of the process we will have a baby! That is scary in and of itself. I am sure Liz and I will be good parents, but it is still a bit freaky. We will be responsible for another human life. I will have to resist my natural urge to experiment on her.

Upgrade the Final Chapter

As mentioned in my previous blog, I was having issues with my motherboard not recognizing all of the memory I had installed. I was to busy to be without the computer though as I has a ton of editing work to do for a 7k music video and continuing work on Improv Shmimprov videos. Oh, I also had to build the 7k website. So I have been busy.

But I finally got back to testing with the surprisingly good support staff at XFX Force and we basically eliminated any other possible problem. It was definitely a defective motherboard. So I had to RMA it, but I still could not be without and editing system for a week or more while shipping the old one back and waiting for the new one. Again the XFX support staff were awesome and told me to just come into there return center not that far from my house and they would just exchange it there.

To minimize the time the computer was down I removed the motherboard, always fun, on Thursday night. Liz took the motherboard up to the return center on Friday and the staff were again very nice to her. I really appreciate that, most return centers are horrible at the best of times, let alone when you send someone who is not a techie. Anyway I had a fully functional computer that night. Everything works perfectly now.

I have been building computers since the 286 was the hot new chip and XFX had the most helpful and intelligent support staff I have ever dealt with. All computer parts have a relatively high failure rate, so I do not hold getting a defective motherboard against them. They actually worked with me and around my schedule to fix the problem without treating me like an idiot or blaming someone or something else. That is so rare in a computer hardware company that I will definitely prefer their hardware in the future and recommend them to anyone who asks me about motherboards or video cards.

Anyway I now have the monster system fully operational. It is a beautiful thing to behold: Intel i7, 12GB of triple channel 1333 RAM, 1.5TB RAID 1, 500GB RAID 0, external BlacX with another 1.5TB for backup, Dual layer DVD burner, NVIDIA GTX 280 with 1GB, and dual 22" wide screen monitors. I can render HD video, burn a DVD and play a video game all at the same time with out any noticeable slow down.

Coyote domestic

A really random event occurred this morning while riding my bicycle to work. I was stared down by a coyote. It was just chilling on the sidewalk on Irvine Center Drive, which is a major 6 lane road. He was not really doing anything and seemed quite at ease. Which is odd, since I am pretty sure their natural habitat is not major roadways.

I see people walking their dogs in the morning all the time, so as I was coming down the street I just assumed it was a dog, but it most obviously was not. Once I got close enough he just stared at me as I rode past him. I literally passed within 5 feet of him. I wanted to stop and get a picture, but figured I would either scare him away or get mauled. Neither of which would have been the outcome I was looking for.

After getting to work I looked up coyotes on National Geographic and saw they can run up to 40 miles per hour. So I guess if he was in a mauling mood he could have taken me down anyway. In any case he was gorgeous and it was kind of a surreal experience. Ya wildlife!

Animated movies

I went and saw Up last weekend and I was really impressed with how well done it was. It was cute, touching and funny. While leaving I realized that most of the movies I am actually going to see at the theater lately are animated. It seems most of the really clever writing and plots are being done as animated kids movies. I do not know if it is the added flexibility of animation, the extra planing that has to go into an animated movie or what, but they are just much better quality than the live action movies. Maybe its just the prospect of being a father soon.

Its a girl!

We had the ultrasound last night and found out we are having a daughter. The most important thing for me though is everything seems to be developing normally. The brain, spine, kidneys, and stomach all look good. They could not get all of the images of the heart they wanted because she would not turn over, but the four chambers look good. They also could not get a look at the palette for the same reason.

The picture is to torment Liz. I am totally buying my daughter a pink 22 as her first gun. Isn't it cute. Every girl should have a pink gun, probably not for the baby shower though. I don't remember exactly when my dad bought me my 22 rifle, but I still have it and take it out whenever I go shooting. If I have a son they get that one as their first gun.

Anyway what do you think the proper age is to get your own gun?

Pandora and Swine Flu

I was to quick to say nice things about the Pandora blackberry app. It crashed with an unhandled exception on my way to work. It was not too bad though, a soft boot of the phone fixed it. Kind of a challenge to reboot and unlock while riding a bicycle in traffic, but I gotta have my music. The regular media player on the Blackberry Storm crashes pretty regularly too. So I still give a thumbs up to the Pandora application.

Up next Swine Flu, I am not impressed. As of April 26th there were less than 100 cases, how is this an emergency? Even the New York Times says the cases have been mild. Were are the really ambitious diseases like the black plague any more? That wiped out 30%-60% of the population of Europe, now that is impressive. The Swine Flu is cured by Nyquil, so what the hell is the panic about. I say it is just the media trying to distract us from the fact that the economy sucks. The best thing Swine Flu has done is inspire this song.

Pandora on the Blackberry

I love Pandora. I usually listen to it when working at home and have dozens of stations to fit my mood. They recently released a client for the Blackberry and I downloaded it immediately for my Storm. It is a little weird as it tends to keep playing behind everything else you do. Which in a way is cool, but can be kind of annoying as you have to remember to turn it off instead of just hitting the red button. On the other hand I am normally listening on my way to or from work, so it does not really matter that much. It does not seem to consume much more battery than a phone call and the quality is good at least in my area. So if you have a Blackberry I suggest you at least download it and try it. They also have a client for several other phones if you are not part of the blackberry cult.

Earth day

The day the earth gets vengeance for our stealing her precious resources! Unfortunately no, it is just a day to be a little more conscious of our impact and try to be a little more green. So be nice to the environment today, or it will have its vengeance upon you! For ideas check out the Earth Day Network and the Nature Conservancy.

And it my quest to find something on earth week I found an interesting site dedicated to the major ecological events of the last week. It documents earth's struggle to defeat the vermin that crawl upon it and other ecological events. Earthquakes, volcanoes and cyclones, oh my.

Perfect woman for me

I really have found the perfect woman for me in Liz. It is hard to find someone who is loyal, sweet, loving, supportive and heartless. We were out Friday night at a Shmimprov show and someone was ranting on the train platform next to the theater when we went in. Apparently they, or someone else, decided to jump in front of a freight train. At the time everyone else was all sad, but Liz and I both just thought it was terribly inconsiderate to inconvenience so many other people when you kill yourself. We both pretty much agreed that you are an idiot to get hit by a train, read her opinion for yourself.

Oh and she cooks too.

You got your zombie in my fertility festival

If you are easily offended just scroll down to comment and leave a message about how I am going to hell. It will save you time and your life will be a little brighter for not having read this. Oh and what are you doing reading my blog anyway?

For those of you still with me. Today celebrates zombie Jesus and fertility. Kind of an odd combination, but really amusing when you think about it. If nothing else it lead me to a fun christian site declaring Easter the work of Satan, then again so is Christmas, so I am not going to worry to much about it. The pagans already had all the good holidays by the time the christians showed up, so you can't really blame the christians for hijacking them.

Anyway back to zombie Jesus, having the extremely vivid imagination I do, I picture zombie Jesus leading an army of egg laying bunnies to destroy humanity. Not exactly the zombie apocalypses I normally picture, but you need to be prepared for any contingency. My neighborhood has a lot of bunnies, so the bunny zombie apocalypse is going to get ugly, but that is what the shotgun is for. Unfortunately I was kind of counting on them as food, but I am not eating zombie bunny.

Here is one to really horrify everyone. So what is the proper way to celebrate fertility? Humping of course. The other thing being celebrated is a zombie and zombies are dead. So combine the two and what do you get? That's right. You know what it is I will not type it here. And for you real sickos you can add in animals. I will just let you ponder that thoughts on this lovely holiday.

On a more non-offensive note it leads to chocolate bunnies and the most delicious substance on earth, Reese's peanut butter eggs. After long discussion I have come to the conclusion the peanut butter eggs are better than the cups do to the higher peanut butter to chocolate ratio. I am having Liz raid the grocery stores tomorrow for half price peanut butter eggs.

So happy "Resurrection Sunday" to the fundamentalist christians, happy Easter to the moderate cristians and pagans (apparently Easter is one of the pagan names for the mother goddess), and happy zombie Jesus day to all the lolzians out there. I am listing lolzian as my religion next time it asks on a form. So enjoy your rituals, female oppression, cannibalism and fertility, but if you come after my flesh or brains you are getting some lead.

Educational Internet Videos

While the internet is great for meaningless entertainment there really is some great stuff on it. My friend Dean sent me a link to Academic Earth, which is a very cool site that has videos of lecture's from some of the top U.S. universities. They have a relatively limited selection at the moment, but some really interesting ones. I am currently watching the philosophy series on death. I also started listening to one on the old testament on the train home yesterday. Both are fascinating. They also have lectures on just about every other topic available, science, history, politics, law, medicine, business, etc. The philosophy and religion ones lend themselves to being listened to at work as I don't need to actually watch the video. I think that would be more difficult with the science and math ones. I hope they keep adding courses. Its the best part of college without all the homework.

There are some also some very interesting videos on the economy out there. Money as Debt is one of my favorites. It really explains why our economy is doomed and we can not borrow our way out of debt. Although, that should be obvious to anyone with the ability to reason, most people have never been told how the system really works, so its understandable that people do not see it.

Another friend, David, joined the Zeitgeist group on facebook which reminded me of that movie. You can find the movie on the Zeitgeist movie site. I do not agree with all of its conclusions, especially in the addendum, but I think it is very interesting and makes you think.

So next time you have an hour to kill, instead of watching people getting hit in the nuts on youtube, watch something educational and entertaining. Save the nut shots for when you only have a few minutes.

Slap a politician

Ugh, I really hate politicians. Republicans are all of a sudden for small government again. Now I am all for small government, but where were these guys for the last 8 years? Oh, that's right, they were busy expanding government and running massive deficits. The Democrats are no better. They at least admit they want to take your money and give it to someone else on a massive scale. Both sides are just in a constant grab for money and power. Neither party cares about the public except as a tool. A rather innocuous article on NPR drove me to this rant, but it also lead to a great idea.

Here is my plan for raising money for the government and providing feedback to politicians. We need to have all the Representatives, Senators, president and heads of major departments all line up outside the capital every morning. Then you let anyone pay a fee to slap a politician. You would have to make it a percentage of income so anyone could do it. I would plan a trip to DC tomorrow if I could slap a few politicians while I was there. We may have to limit it to only the first half of the day, so they have some time to hopefully correct their poor behavior. If not there is always tomorrow. It would give them immediate feedback on how many people disliked the job they were doing. Maybe have it so you could pay to shake their hand too. It would be good to have some positive feedback for them. I just think it would be a lot more meaningful than satisfaction surveys. It would also limit the amount of damage they could do since half the day would be spent being slapped.

For more realistic, but far less fun, solutions to some of the excesses of our government take a look at Downsize DC. It is an organization dedicated to shrinking the government or at least limiting its growth. If you are a Republican, this will appeal to your desire for limited government if you still have one. If you are a Democrat, this will appeal to your desire to reduce human rights abuses by the government and increase personal freedom. If you are Libertarian you will just love everything about the site. So everyone should be able to appreciate some of the initiatives they are proposing, well except for fascists, but nobody likes them anyway.

Best woot podcast ever

For the uninitiated Woot! is one of my favorite websites. They sell one item a day most of the time. Sometimes the item is $1 sometimes it is $2000, it is usually a really good deal for whatever it is. Shipping is always $5. About once a month they have a Woot! off where they sell all the crap they did not get rid of on the daily sales. Each item stays up until it sells out, then they put up the next one.

Now this does not sound all that exciting, but the writing is what makes it the best site ever. The descriptions are always at least lols and some are roflmao, which I am sure confuses my coworkers. So if you are not checking them on a daily basis your world is a colder, darker place than mine and I pity your sad existance. They also do a podcast during the week which is usually amusing, occasionally mediocre, and then there is today's. It has to be the funniest one I have heard yet. It is part of one of the funniest series they do, million dollar ideas. So go listen to Million Dollar Idea #16 and make your world a better place. I have listened to it six times today and have not been able to supress my laughter. All I have to say is, "Don't give tours."

The shirt.woot, sellout.woot and wine.woot sites are also amusing, but nothing beats the original.

Upgrade Part IV

I got the parts Friday as expected, so now I have Vista 64 Ultimate, 12GB of RAM, and Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12. I also found out how to turn on the RAID on the motherboard, so I have the drive configuration I wanted, a 1.5TB RAID 1 array for the main drive and 500GB RAID 0 array for scratch disk. For the most part everything works much better. Pinnacle Studio is fantastic, so far it has done everything we have needed in real time. It can preview and scrub full 1080i video with cuts, transitions, effects and audio normalization without a hiccup. Still playing with the DVD menu features and titling , but they seem quite competent so far.

The biggest issue I am having is that Windows only recognizes 8GB of RAM. I can run CPU-Z and it sees all of the memory, but windows can not. I searched the internet and while there were lots of memory problems most of them were with the 32 bit version or just basic setting issues. I doubled checked them all just to make sure I was not doing anything stupid, but they are all correct. So I will have to file a ticket with Microsoft, that should be fun.

On a more fun note, I updated the blog layout and colors to better match my main site, which I am still working on. Also starting work on the Wazza site, that one should be fun.

Upgrade Part III

I am seriously frustrated by the fact that Vista is so damn slow. Once a program starts its fine. It just takes forever to load. It looks like the couple programs I actually need to run will actually execute in Vista 64 bit and there should be drivers for all of my hardware, so I am going to give it a try. I ordered a copy from TigerDirect, my favorite online store. I ordered the Ultimate edition so I can actually set up the RAID the way I want to. I am hoping that will help some too. If I am going 64 bit, I figured I might as well get 6 more gigs of RAM since it is so cheap. I also ordered Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12, it has decent reviews for basic video editing and it allegedly runs in Vista 64 and edits AVCHD native. I will let you know how it works out. I just want something that will do basic editing as quickly as possible. It should all be here Friday, so I will put up part IV on Sunday or Monday.

Upgrade Part II

The hardware arrived on Friday as promised, so I got nothing done this weekend. As with most upgrades, not everything was compatible. The biggest problem was that the power supply I had was not powerful enough and the case was actually to small to fit the video card into. The BFG GeForce GTX 280 is a monster, the picture does not do it justice. That was just the beginning of my woes though.

I stopped by Fry's on my way to my tax appointment, conveniently located within a block of Fry's, and picked up a new case and power supply. I got a huge case, the Thermaltake V9 that is very open, with enough cooling to take care of anything. I can safely say this is the best case I have worked on and it looks cool too. In any case I highly recommend getting a case with the bottom mounted power supply and the 230mm fans. Even though the case has four fans in it in addition to the one on the video card, processor and power supply, it runs much more quite than my last one with only 2 fans. The bottom mounted power supply simplifies working on the case and gets it away from the processor. I also picked up a Corsair TX850W power supply, they make good memory, so I hoped they could produce a decent power supply too. It is well reviewed for being stable and quite. I recommend spending the money on a decent power supply if you are building your own system. Power fluctuations can lead to all kinds of intermittent problems that are a pain to trace down.

Being overly optimistic, since I had all premium parts, I hooked everything up. Even with the bigger case the video card literally extended into the area a floppy drive would go and I had to remove a few pieces of the case to get the thing in and then put them back. I really hope I do not have to reset the BIOS as it is under the video card. The video cards are getting a little ridiculous. Anyway, I got everything plugged in and connected, turned on the power, and nothing. The motherboard actually has a power button on board, so I tried that. Still nothing. I unplugged every device one by one and still nothing. So out comes the motherboard. I remove the processor even and plug it into the old power supply. That gets it to at least light up, and go through the error codes on the board. Unfortunately this probably means the power supply, motherboard, or processor are bad. I reconnect the processor. Still works on the old power supply. I plug in the memory (bad memory can lead to some weird problems too. Still works. One more try on the new power supply, and it works fine. I go through plugging in one item at a time. Everything works.
I think it was just mocking me. I have concluded that computers require a certain amount of sacrifice before they will work. It is usually a blood sacrifice on one of the random sharpened bits of metal they hide in the cases. Usually somewhere you have to reach in to plug something in that you can not actually see. This case was exquisitely design though and actually had little rubber covers on the sharp pointy bits. So it got no blood. It did get about 4 hours of debugging though.

So I had a working system with two 1.5TB and two 250GB hard drives in it and no OS. This is when I find out that the motherboard does not have an actual RAID controller on it. Its software RAID, boo. I wanted to use the two 1.5TB drives as a RAID 1 array and the two 250GB drives as a RAID 0 scratch space. Fine I can do it in software. I actually bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium to try it out. I got the 32 bit version because I remember what a mess 64 bit XP was and have heard they did about as good a job on Vista 64. It installed relatively painlessly. It installed wrong, but at least it was relatively quick. It just stuck everything on the first drive it found. Fine, I could still RAID it in software I thought, but I thought wrong. The software that actually goes with the hardware would not boot in Vista. The native configuration options are there in Home Premium, but when you go to apply them it gives you a lovely message that spanning is not supported in this version of windows. I have been running RAID at home for the last 15 years. How is this Premium? Now I know why it cost less than XP, it has less functionality. Windows XP handles RAID just fine. I will accept this for now and move on. I will try out Windows 7 I guess when it comes out. It will probably just charge you every time you boot up.

After installing updates, drivers and basic software, which took several hours and many reboots, I installed a couple games. GTA IV for me and Sims 2 for Liz. It seems besides annoying you with pop ups it is also reading a novel while booting up each program. Even the Sims 2, which is old, took a good couple minutes to start up. I had thought the computer had crashed and I went to get something to eat. To my supprise it actually was loading when I got back. GTA IV is actually a little faster to load. And the graphics are amazing for about an hour, then it crashes with an out of memory error. Apparently that is a known issue with GTA IV. Rockstar has really gone down hill. The story is still good, and I can run everything maxed out smoothly, so it is beautiful, but seriously, dying after an hour due to a memory leak. After looking online I guess I am lucky, some people it only lasts 30 minutes.
I really upgraded for Video editing though and I will start that this week. If I have as many issues as I do with that I am just going to find my XP disc. The hardware is willing; we will see if the OS is.

Any Motorcycle > Any Car

When I first met my wife I was riding a Suzuki Bandit which was a spectacular sport bike. It was big enough to comfortably seat us both and small enough to be nimble definitely not a Sport Utility Motorcycle or a crotch rocket that barely fits one. You know what I am talking about. The SUM is the motorcycles you see that are as wide as a car with a giant trunk thing that is up to the riders head, usually still trying to split lanes. The crotch rockets are the bikes that are better suited to the track than the street. The Suzuki was a great little bike that would get me comfortable to work, fit Liz on the back comfortably and could still do over 130 if I wanted to. The goal was not to get all nostalgic, but there you have it. Liz liked riding so much she took the MSF course, which I recommend to anyone who rides, and I bought her a Honda Rebel to learn on. Eventually I had to sell my bike just because the insurance was to expensive (Getting caught doing 130 will do that) and I moved within 5 miles of work, so I could not justify the expense. We also sold Liz's car, so we just have a Honda Civic and the Honda Rebel, which works out great as I ride my bicycle to work most days now.

Today I was exhausted and slept in a little so I rode the Rebel into work. That is an actual picture of it. Its only a little 250, you can't let the choke out completely and it does not go into neutral while it is running, but it is still a hell of a lot of fun to ride. I feel a little bit like a Shriner on it, but it does not matter. I would rather be riding almost any motorcycle than any car. I don't care if its between a 125 dirt bike and a porch, the motorcycle is more fun. Now the Rebel is not going to beat a real sports car off the line, but it still takes off faster than most cars on the road without even trying. Hell the thing tops out at 75, but when the freeway is not moving and you are your max speed is not the important part of the equation. The ride home just relieved a whole day worth of stress and I thought I should write something about it.

So for anyone out there who has ever considered getting a motorcycle or trying it out I highly recommend it. Be responsible, be safe, but have fun in life. They make a great second vehicle, get great gas milage, and the insurance on the cruisers is dirt cheap. I think the Rebel insurance for both of us is about $300 a year. Not to mention we have a lot more garage space. You can get a motorcycle used and sell it if you don't like it for almost the same price. I actually made a little money on the Bandit. I paid about $3000 for each of the bikes, so its not a horrible expensive trial considering how much is wasted on a second vehicle that normally only holds one person anyway.

Time to Upgrade

I mentioned in my wedding blog that we recorded the wedding in AVCHD 1080/60i on our new panasonic AG-HMC150 AVCHD camcorder. The video is awesome. Unfortunately my computer is barely capable of playing it. After the first couple minutes it could not keep the frame rate up. A few minutes after that the temp alarm went off. Apparently it was not made to be decoded by a normal computer in real time.

Its not like I have a crappy computer either. Its a AMD X2 with dual NVIDIA 7900 cards, so not the latest and greatest, but decent. At least I thought so until now. To insult my sensibilities Liz and I both got a video game with a gift card from the wedding. She got the Sims II apartment life bonus pack something or other and I got GTA IV. Her game ran fine. Not so much on the GTA IV.

I bought GTA IV because the previous Grand Theft Auto's had really good PC versions. This time they have sold out to Microsoft and it shows. The game requires you to sign up with two different online accounts and log into both just to load the game. To add insult to injury they still require the stupid disk. It also failed miserably at downloading any of the updates automatically and just gave me the classic random numbered error. So after finally signing up for all of the online accounts and manually downloading and installing all the updates I loaded the game. It froze a couple times, but I did get it to load only to find out it does not support SLI in a most painful way. It basically loaded one image into one card and then only updated the other. It was an epileptics worst nightmare. So I had to turn off SLI to avoid developing a twitch. Even at a graphics level well below any other game I play it still was jerky, had tons of artifacts and froze often. So it looks like Rockstar has joined the companies trying to destroy PC gaming.

I need a new system to edit the video from the new camera anyway, so this just pushed me over the edge. Yes I realize it is just buying into the whole upgrade to support bad programming vicious circle, but so be it. So I went on tigerdirect.com and got me some new hardware. TigerDirect is one of my favorite online computer stores, good prices and more importantly great service, and no I do not get any kick backs from them.

I decided to go the Intel i7 route, since you might as well get the top of the line at the moment. Although I got the bottom one so it was not a complete rip off, the Intel Core i7-920 2.66Ghz 8M LGA1366 CPU. I ordered a XFX X58i LGA1366 motherboard, which I am a little nervous about; I usually stick to Abit or Asus. I went with OCZ Gold Tri Channel 6144MB PC10666 DDR3 1333MHz for memory. I am not sure if I am going to run 64 bit Vista on it or not, but it was cheaper to get the 6 gigs than it was to get the 3. I still remember 64-bit XP, so I will wait until Microsoft has a couple more tries. It is kind of silly that they are so incompetent when it comes to 64 bit. All of my other computers have been running 64 bit versions of Linux since AMD starting making 64 bit chips without a problem. Anyway, I already have 2 500GB hard drives that I am going to use from the existing system as a RAID 1 main drive, but I needed some RAID 0 scratch space for the video editing so I ordered two Seagate 1.5TB Serial ATA HD 7200/32MB/SATA-3G hard drives. I saved the best for last though. I went with the BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC 1GB PCIe w/Dual Link DVI for the video card. I have done the SLI twice now and it just does not pan out as well as it should. Between poor support and heat issues its just not worth it. Since I only use my Windows box for games and a few other tasks like the video editing I am still using XP, so I am taking this opportunity to also finally jump on the Vista hate wagon. I ordered an OEM copy of Home Premium SP1. I have not liked it when I have had to use it, but I will now actually try to configure it to be at least usable. If not I can always go back to XP.

All of these toys should arrive on Friday, so I will post how the upgrade goes. I also have to figure out how to distribute the old hardware to my other computers.

watchmen

It turns out I watch the Watchmen. It was very good. The sound track was spectacular. I do love a super hero story where the hero are not all that good and the villains
are not completely evil. I am a bit of a comic geek, but it has been a while since I have kept up with them. I am loving all the comic book movies that have been coming out lately and this one does not disappoint. I think DC has thrown down the gauntlet for Marvel to do even better in their next movie. I am looking forward to wolverine.

Liz's Health Update

Liz is doing much better after the IV fluids. She has Hyperemesis gravidarum, which is basically super extreme morning sickness. They think it is caused by an over reaction to estrogen and progesterone in Liz's case. As far as the baby is concerned it is actually a good sign. All of her hormone levels are good and even the nurse that came out to change the IV found the heart beat with no problem.

The IV fluids were to get her back up to the level where drugs could actually work to fight the nausea. The doctors finally found a combination of drugs that seem to keep the nausea down to a manageable level. She is on subcutaneous Reglan and oral Zofran. The Reglan is delivered continuously through a pump into her thigh. Reglan works on speeding up digestion while the Zofran works on the nausea center of the brain. She was taken off of the IV fluids when the nurse saw her on Sunday as she was keeping liquids down. She was able to get at least 48 ounces of liquid with tea, chicken broth, popsicles, and the like.

She has since worked back to some solid foods, mostly crackers and pretzels. She has had some chicken noodle soup and mash potatoes too. As long as she does not let her stomach get empty she has been doing pretty well. If we can keep her from getting to dehydrated she will not need the IV again. The doctors and nurses tell us that it normally clears up by the 16th week even in sever cases like hers. So she has about 5 more weeks to go. Once she is stable for a week or so they will start reducing the medication to see how she does.

The wedding was a success

Amazingly Liz was up for the wedding. She got to walk down the aisle without the IV pole although she did have the very fashionable IV mesh cover over her arm. She looked gorgeous and I will put up pictures as soon as I have some. She made it through most of the reception. We did not get to do the flower or garter toss, but that was not that big a deal. The most disappointing part was not getting to do the first dance. We meet swing dancing, so it really sucks that we did not get to dance at our own wedding.

On a somewhat related note, we got a great video of the wedding in AVCHD 1080/60i on our new panasonic AG-HMC-150 AVCHD camcorder. I got the camera a couple days before the wedding, so it was a good test run for it. My computer is not fast enough to actually play it back or edit it though. It was doing decent until the CPU over heated. Time to upgrade to a quad-core and liquid cooling. I have been looking for an excuse to upgrade for a while now. Might as well be so I can edit high def video. I am testing editing software at the moment, so far none of them measure up to Adobe Premiere. I may just have to break down and pay the price for Premiere.

Let the blogging begin

I have been resisting the blog, but have finally given in. So I will now write my generic rants here. I actually have a ton of stuff going on right now, so I have things to write about. I am relaunching Fear the Geek web design, starting a youtube channel with my friends at Wiggy VonSchtick (not my design), starting a financial video blog, planning a wedding and having a baby.

Well the baby one is mostly my wife, but I am trying to take care of her. She has not been doing so well. She was dangerously dehydrated and is now getting regular IV fluids. Constant vomiting will do that to you. The great medical care she has been getting makes my over priced PPO worth every penny though.

We were legally married a year ago, but are just now getting around to having the "party" wedding. It's not going to be much of a party if she is feeling awful though. She was doing almost all of the planning until the morning (afternoon, evening, night) sickness struck. So I have taken some of that over too. Luckily, I thrive on having way to much to do.