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.