An end to an era? Nah, just making room for more era.

YOU: So Curtis.. what did you do on your last day of 30?

ME: Well, I was cleaning my office and trimming down the library of computer games. I threw out a spindle of 150 disks and an ungodly amount of jewel cases. I would say I just trimmed out something like 50 games from my collection.

YOU: What?!!?! That's a lot! Why did you just throw them away? Couldn't you donate them or something?

ME: Well.. trust me.. no one would have wanted those and a lot of them had missing disks or CD keys or were just plain illegalz. I kept all the good ones, don't worry.

It was amazing how much wasted space there was even in the "new" packaging introduced about 10 years ago using smaller boxes. I also realized that a few years ago the gaming industry made a second switch. Instead of small cardboard boxes about the size of a hardcover book with CD jewel cases and manuals inside they switched to small plastic boxes that were the actual jewel cases. No taking out the essentials and throwing away the packaging there. With some of them you can remove the CD and manual and put the CD in a paper sleeve or something but most of them have the CD key to the game printed an the giant plastic case. LAME.
In the end my video game library has been reduced from its previous volume of 1 medium sized box, 1 stuffed cd booklet that has traveled to way too many LAN parties, and a GIANT spindle that used to house 150 or so blank CDs (no, they didn't all get burned into games). The collection is now compressed to 1 small box.
I also found a few audio books I thought I had lost. Looking back I wish I had taken a picture of it, but its probably best not to have photo evidence of the nerdery.

I am part of the machine.

I guild mate posted this in our forum and I thought it was good enough to share with all of you.



I hope you all found it as entertaining as I did, especially those anthropologically inclined readers.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I know I have been leaning towards getting a Macbook Pro. Not because "its a mac" but because it is a very small package that packs a pretty mean punch as far as notebooks are concerned. This may cause some of you to believe I have reversed my stance on all things Apple, especially with my recent iPod acquisition.
Well, it hasn't. To help support this claim I want you to read this article and know that it is a near perfect representation on my own feelings.

This guy really hates macs. I just seriously loath them, its not quite a full fledge hatred anymore. How can it now that they run intel processors and can boot Windows XP and (reportedly) Vista.

18 hours

I finally converted my 15.2 GB itunes library of .m4a to MP3. It is now only 14.1 GB but there was about 6 hours of files that didn't convert because they are DRMed (an audio book). It took 18 hours. I used my laptop so my main rig wouldn't get bogged down or slow the conversion process. Hell, my laptop has a full desktop P4 3.2GHz HT processor so I would say it was definitely up to the challenge. I did notice a slow down after 9 hours of that I attribute to processor throttling due to thermal protection so I gave it an hour break in the middle.

You may be asking yourself "why"? Well, I don't like itunes very much. I don't really know why, I just never quite got the hang of it. I'm not one of those "let my computer tell me what to listen to" kind of guys and I didn't like making a bunch of play lists. I am kind of old school like that.
I go through my mp3 directory where everything is organized nicely and just queue it up in winamp or WMP through the right click menu. All media players have some sort of library management and I don't really like any of them, although the itunes one is the best overall in my opinion and I feel that winamp has a stronger search function.

The real problem is that when all the CDs where ripped into itunes they where given a serialized file name and stuffed in a random serialized folder. This means an album can have 3 songs in 1 folder and 6 in another but you would never know it because the folders are called f00 and f27 and the file names are ZQLFS.m4a or IGPAK.m4a
For someone who likes to browse his music collection by wandering through his folder hierarchy this doesn't help. By converting all the songs to MP3 itunes renames the files by the same hierarchy I've been using for almost 10 years now (started way back when I would record my CDs into .WAVbecause there wasn't anything else). That structure is a folder for the artist->folder for album->song files.
Compilation albums are clumped under various artist or don't get an artist folder.
Itunes follows this close enough for it's mp3s and I can now find and listen to all those songs on my IPAQ. With a 1 gb SD card I can fit enough music to get me through the week but all those .m4a files where off limits. Not anymore. It feels good to have my library consolidated and standardized. No I need to go through and weed out all the duplicates and I know there is a lot of them.

Special thanks to C1 for donating large portions of my itunes library ;)

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.