Are you sure its not my birthday yet?

Most of you know of my gadget reliance. I have been using a PDA for about5 years and have frequently complained about the amount of space it occupies in my pockets. This was almost remedied by the PDA I bought off of Tom because it was thin enough that it wouldn't be a hindrance to movement in my pocket if I left the protective nylon case at home. Unfortunately, the thing occupied the whole pocket meaning my phone and keys had to go in the other pants pocket (which may explain why my phone is so scratched up).
Speaking of my phone I am pretty sure it is dying. It will randomly drop calls even with 4 bars, I get very spotty service sitting in my cube (as in 3 bars one second, no bars the next, drops a call while it is ringing, or won't even get the call but will get the voicemail notification). Generally it is becoming a pain in the ass.

I am currently on the second battery cover for my PDA, and the battery itself is getting a dangerous bulge, and just like my last PDA I have managed to wear out the "down" button and am getting dangerously close to wearing out the "right" button. I think I may have gotten my moneys worth out of this one.

On the subject of phones and PDAs you all probably know by now they my wife recently upgraded her 4 year old Samsung i500 to a Treo 755p ... for free. Its amazing what good timing, full phone replacement plans, and a too much cuteness for you own good will get you these days. This of course has caused me no small amount of gadget envy since over half of my friends are now operating PDA phones, and the one person out of all of them who has been reliant on a PDA for the longest still fills his pockets with 2 devices.

You may wonder why a post titled "Are you sure its not my birthday yet?" talks so much about the sad state of my gadget empire. Well, those of you who are very astute will probably figure it out.
On Tuesday my battery cover popped loose again (ok, I was replacing the tape that holds it on) and the little piece of paper I had wedged into the battery cover switch came out. This little switch tells the PDA that the cover is open or off and switches it over to the backup battery so that you don't lose all your data. In my attempt to re-seat the little piece of paper I managed to trick the PDA into going back to main battery mode without a main battery attached. This means the device lost total power and reset to the factory default. In other words I lost everything on the device.
(sarcasm =>) Lucky for me this has happened before.
This is actually an almost bi-monthly occurance. As such i set my PDA up to do a weekly backup to it's memory card. I restored from my backup, which recovered every file except the ones I had added on Monday (lots of first day of school stuff) and the executables. I have since determined that those are only included in manual backups, not the automatic ones.
Not a huge loss here, I would just have to wait until I got home to reinstall some of the extra applications I use, but none of them are vital. I can get through my day without my ebook reader or my xvid video player. Oh, and all those notes from school? I am sure I can remember what room my second class was moved to, or what my teacher's completely cryptic web address was.

After cleaning up this little mess I decide I shouldn't quite get back to work (since I am at work) and instead reply to one of my wife's emails adding to it the woes of my morning.
The day goes by quickly because I am pretty swamped at work. I take my lunch at 12:30 at my desk (so I can keep working) when I get a call on my work phone. Its my wife. She says my phone sucks. I say "I know, I told you I don't get reception in my cube". She says "Well why don't you come out to the parking lot so we can fix that."

At this point I my mind kicks into high gear, but I fail to come to the conclusion that I am sure all of you faithful readers have. It takes me a good 5 seconds to realize what is going on and this is mostly because we [my wife and I] have been discussing it for the last few weeks.
When we were at the sprint store getting her new phone I finally had the chance to play with the Sprint Mogul. I decided that the world had finally produced a PDA/phone that met all of my desires. Full screen touchpad, compact size, Windows Mobile (NOT smartphone), and as a bonus the device has twice the memory of my current PDA and a slide out full QWERTY keyboard. Oh the joy. The thing was small, light, and retained all the functionality I have grown accustomed to. Unfortunately it was pretty expensive. I couldn't justify spending half this semesters book fees on the device when my current PDA and phone still work.
Luckily for me my beautiful, smart, charismatic, beautiful, loving, beautiful wife does not share the same reservations.

Kristina took a long lunch, went the Sprint store, bought me the Mogul, activated it, then drove to my work to surprise me with it. I guess that explains why she didn't try to call me on my cell phone.
Happy early birthday to me.
Thank you Kristina, you know me entirely too well.

Its that time of (2) years(s) again.

Well, its come time in my computer life to upgrade. My last major upgrade was 2 years ago, almost to the month. This time I will be getting a new CPU, GPU, and some more ram.
I started looking for socket 939 dual core processors about 3 weeks ago. It was alot harder than I was expecting. You see they stopped manufacturing the 939s in favor of a new socket type that allowed for faster ram (*not technically accurate but good enough for the point I am getting across). The remaining stock of the higher end chips has apparently been sold almost completely. After waiting for one of my many "auto-notify" emails to come in from an online retailer to tell they had the part in stock again I started calling around to the local stores.
Luckily this week Fry's Electronics got a socket 939 AMD X2 4600+ in stock. It was a return but, hey, its all ANYONE had.
I bought it and Tom came over last night to watch me install it. Well, about 5 minutes into the install I found out the probable reason for the return. A few of the pins where "tweaked. Thats not to say they where bent, but it looks like the pins may have brushes something at some point in the handling of the CPU. This caused to pins to be off center just enough so they wouldn't fit, but not enough to be easily noticeable by the naked eye. Luckily I am a trained professional (no, seriously) and was able to spot the trouble makers. About an hour of gentle persuasion, some fine tweezers, and some outstanding light holding by Tom and I was able to get the offending pins back into proper alignment.
For those interested, Windows had absolutely no problem with the upgrade. First boot detected the new CPU and loaded the appropriate APIs. Once the new drivers where loaded I rebooted and "presto magico" I was rocking dual cores.
I have notice increased responsiveness in my system, especially when I am doing things like watching streaming video on one monitor, browsing the web or doing email or reviewing homework on the other monitor. (Did you like that run on sentence?)
More importantly there is a large gain in performance when playing Supreme Commander. This game is freaking awesome and probably the reason I haven't posted in a while. It a HUGE RTS and it can get very CPU intensive. I would say it is probably the most CPU intensive game on the market (its surprisingly easy on the video card and still looks great with low settings).
I will be upgrading my video card to the Geforce 8600 when they hit the market in April (17th). When I order the card I will probably get another gig of ram. This will bring my new system specs to:
MSI K8N Neo4-F Motherboard
AMD X2 4600+
2 GB DDR 400
Nvidia Geforce 8600 (ultra/GTS)
2x250 GB Western Digital SATA hard drives (raid 0)
19" LCD
19" CRT

Its dead Jim

So last week my computer died. By my computer I mean the control board on my main hard drive. Kristina went to K-town to visit her parents and all but 1 of my friends where out of town. I took this rare opportunity to play Company of Heroes online with some friends until about midnight. I went to bed with dreams of gaming all day Saturday dancing in my head. I got up the next morning about 8 am and crawled into my office. My computer was not sleeping as I expected nor was it quietly and patiently waiting for me to start some delicious games. No my friends, instead it was sitting at the BIOS screen waiting for me to insert a bootable disk or drive.

This next bit is for you more techno savvy among us:
My immediate action is to hit the power button, pull the plug and go take a piss. As I contemplate making a pot of coffee I plug my computer back in and hit the power button. The computer POSTs, runs through the RAM check and then hangs on the IDE autodetect. After about 30 seconds of watching the little blinking cursor blink in the same spot I start to panic.
I am going to fast foward through a few hours of frantic phone calls, hard drive swapping, and much much much swearing and bring you up to about 1:00 in the afternoon.
At this point I have determined that some little tiny piece of silicon on the control board on the bottom of my hard drive decided 3 years and 2 months was a long enough life and it didn't need to do whatever it is that the little piece of silicon is supposed to do. The drive powers up just fine, I can feel the platters spin. There where no warning signs of mechanical damage like the click of death but I tried the freezer trick anyway. The drive is not recognized as being attached at all, I tried it on 3 motherboards. Some boards hang on trying to detect the drive and some just don't bother and skip over it no matter how adamantly or precisely I tell the BIOS exactly what kind of drive is attached. Conclusion: bad control board, perfectly good platters and heads. If I can't get a computer to see the drive how the hell am I supposed to use all my sweet recovery software? The drive is exactly 2 months out of warranty and it has also been discontinued so no one has an identical unit in stock. There go all my hopes of getting a free replacement or a good drive to cannabalize parts off of in an attempt to recover my data.


Regular readers pick up here:
This dead hard drive had all of my personal stuff on it, you know, pictures, this semesters' homework, emails,and inexplicably all my backups. I swear I had my backups going to another hard drive. I guess I was wrong, lazy, or careless. I finally resign myself to the fact that I have lost everything with no chance whatsoever of recovery. The next logical step is to begin to rebuild. I head out to Fry's Electronics to pick up a new drive. They don't have any of the drives I want in stock. I head over to CompUSA and Best Buy. They have the drives I am looking for but for exactly twice as much as my favorite online merchant. While I am desperate to get my computer back up and running quickly I am not "pay twice as much for the same thing" desperate.
I head home dejected and lonely. When I get home I go online to www.newegg.com and order 2 hard drives

Tech alert: I am running a Raid 1 array of 2 -250GB SATA Western Digital drives. 100% data redundancy FTW!!!!11!!1! I find it slightly humorous that Fry's had no Western Digital drives in stock except for some high priced Raptors.

I now sit and wait patiently for 3 days for my order to process and ship. As usual newegg is disturbingly fast and efficient with my order. It is processed by Sunday night and the drives ship Monday morning. UPS 3 day ground gets them here in... drum roll please.... 3 DAYS!
So Wednesday night I begin the system rebuild and that pretty much brings us up to today. The system is back up to my personal standards and I have begun to install all those unnecessary additions.. like games.

I know it was probably a pretty boring read but thanks for sticking with it. This was a pretty big deal in my book and I will be saying things like "I had a copy of that but it died in the crash of '06" for years to come. Just like I still say "I had that album/song until the drive crash of '02". Case in point: Don called me yesterday asking for an updated resume.
One of these days I will learn to stay diligent with my computer back-ups.