Friday, August 28, 2009

Hear it

Last night, the Hot For Zombies group was kicking around tracks to play at the upcoming formal.

I have added my two suggestions to my playlist (over there to the left):

"Tear You Apart" by She Wants Revenge: It takes on a new identity when you imagine it being sung by a zombie.

"Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo: A favorite of mine from the 80's. Obvious, really.

"She's So Cold" by The Rolling Stones: Again, listen to it from an undead perspective.

And I also included a cover of "Mexican Radio" because I heard Wall of Voodoo getting increased airplay last week...

Share and enjoy

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

National Topless Day

Yeah, I didn't know about it until I happened across the link on CNN.

/me hopes for more coverage (ahem) on the issue.

Hooray for Boobies

Thursday, August 20, 2009

We know how this will end.

Yes, I stalkerize Skat on her blogs. To recap:

She's now in World of Warcraft. According to her, Leose persuaded her to start. She is now a 6th, 10th, 11th, fourteen-point-seven level Drainei killing arachnids. From a distance.

I am familiar with these sorts of MMORPGs...my son and I are questing through Wizard101 as I type. But, I have presented my evidence to both Skat and Leo regarding WoW: The addiction stories, the youtube videos, the lack-of-zombie-strippahs...

Skat, being Skat, sends me a "FREE World of Warcraft Trial!" offer.

/me facepalms

I am a sweetheart by nature. Rarely will I say "no" to someone. I enjoy life's little challenges.

...so....do you think this plate-armor will make me look fat?

Monday, August 17, 2009

Carma

A few months ago, my precious-snowflake-of-a-daughter scribbled some swirly patterns..
...using a rock
...on the side of my car.

I'm a car-guy. I enjoy how compact-an-environment it represents. I especially enjoy making it run well and look clean. I also realize what they represent psychologically-speaking...what can I say? I'm a guy.

Anyway, for those two months, looking at the scratches each day - gave me perspective on parenting...and a mild ulcer.

Yesterday, I set out on washing and waxing my car/artist-canvas. It was a hot, sweaty, stifling day and it seemed like the washing, rinsing, vacuuming, claybarring, polishing, waxing, and buffing would never end. But after all was said and done, the scratches were gone.

Megan is only 3. Soon, before I know it, she'll be helping me buff-out the excess wax, turning the towel frequently.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Wishing Calie a Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday, Calie Warden!

If any of you psychopathic stalkerazzi see her in-world, do wish her a glorious birfday today - in person. She's twenty-something.

/me feels decrepit.

/me goes back to making keyboardcat/taquito/cookiejar/zombie/wolfshirt/british/oreo/nightstick/stilettoheel/blingwatch cake. With extra-bandwidth frosting.

Breaking Mirrors

Bad luck, you say? Sometimes, there's no other alternative.

Not the silvered looking-glass devices you non-geeks are accustomed to. I'm referring to drive arrays. The 800-pound gorilla that is my terabyte data store needs to be re-done...that means backing up all the information to another drive (or 4), killing the existing RAID, making the new mirror (because all of this is destructive to data), and restoring the 900+ gigs of 1's and 0's. So much fun for so much pr0n.

While I'm on this thread, I should say that RAID arrays *ARE* effective as a full-time backup solution. Hard drives keep getting larger AND cheaper and one terabyte SATA at $70 or less is plenty of storage, even for me. If your platters are spinning 24/7 (as mine are), the chances of a disk going bad increase - so save your precious bits with redundant technology.

Wanna know my partitioning scheme? Check this out:

Drive 0: 80 GB SATA
40 GB C:\ this is for the Operating System only. Do not save your personal data here. When it dies (and it will), your data will not go with it. Keep this small, uncluttered, and defragmented for performance and management reasons.

40 GB D:\ this is for applications. Install all your software here. When you run setup.exe for whatever software you're loading, it'll give you the choice of where to install: Instead of c:\program files\blahblahblah, switch it to d:\blahblahblah. Located on the same spindle as the OS for performance

Drive 1: 1000 GB RAID-1 set
1000 GB X:\ This is where your personal data goes: music, videos, pictures, everything I don't want lost. I also keep copies of my installation media for all my applications here. When drive 0 goes bad, replace with a new drive 0 and a fresh install of windows and applications.

..and yes, you can mirror your OS, but I just don't see the value of having redundant OS files. The space is better used for my pr0nz.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Mirror

..so this new motherboard I purchased...

(waits for Megz to stop laughing)

** begin rant **

Murphy's Law is definitely at work when trying to set up a RAID 1 on this board. In addition to the motherboard, here's an undocumented list of extra hardware and software you may need:

1. USB floppy drive - In order to load the driver in XP, you need to have the driver on a floppy disk. (link provided for those of you who do not remember floppy diskettes). The motherboard manufacturer and Microsoft both advise this method of RAID driver setup. That being said, this particular motherboard does not have a floppy disk interface - so conventional floppy drives will not work.

2. PS/2 keyboard - After I managed to get windows setup to recognize my RAID drives, it proceeded to read from the usb floppy disk - and lock-out my usb keyboard. I could not tell Windows to start installing on C:. So...one more reboot later with a PS/2 keyboard and I was loading my Windows files.

3. nLite - ...or so I thought. Even with the floppy disk successfully reading, the install asks for "Windows setup disk 1"...quite odd. To get around this (and the issues stemming from points 1 and 2), you can slipstream the driver into the Windows XP setup CD using a (FREE!) program called nLite. I know, it's alien voodoo-magic...but at this point, I was considering eBay'ing for a sacrificial goat. I re-burned my XP setup CD, armed with the AMD AHCI RAID driver for 32-bit XP and booted Windows setup once more...

4. Microsoft Vista* - ...and after windows setup formatted my C:\ partition, XP bluescreens with "please remove any recently added drive interfaces or hard drives". It never even gets to complete the Windows XP setup.

* - I have not attempted Vista installation for this motherboard just yet...that is an entirely different hive of scum and villany.

The system does run fine with XP and no mirrored-drives. (I even overvolted my RAM to 1033 speed) Also, in their defense, many of the motherboard companies have extremely poor RAID documentation, this one is no exception. But I am not going to compromise - I'm going to have a terabyte mirror.

That is what kept me from Hard Alley last night - and that's the part that hurts the most.

** end rant **