Well that was a short weekend, and it was followed by a crazy Monday. The weekend saw no reviews done. Instead I was working on the tracks for Tesla. Well, one track in particular, as it was a bit more complicated than the two others I’d done. I finished it on Sunday night though so now I can move on to the 4th track. I think I’m going to stick to keeping it relatively simple so as not to drag this out too long. I’m pretty pleased with the work I’ve done so far though. I’m really getting to explore musical territory I’ve never ventured into before — both thematically and compositionally. It’s fun, and it’s broadening my horizons, which is never bad. I’m still really just feeling my way through it though, but I think the end result will be good.
Not every waking hour was spent composing though. I did get some quality time in with Fallout 3, too. I finished it once because I inadvertently started following the main plot almost exclusively, so it ended rather suddenly with a dozen side quests unsolved, dozens more undiscovered, and a ton of unexplored territory. Now I’m going through it while following through on side quests and exploring everything I missed. It’s weird, because in Oblivion there were so many side quests that I felt like progress on the main quest was slow — but that was good. Although I got bored of closing Oblivion gates all over the place I enjoyed the loads of side quests. It seems like there are fewer of those in Fallout 3 — though again there’s lots I haven’t explored yet, so I’m probably missing loads of them.
I didn’t get much sleep last night though, and I’ve been dog tired all day, hence the lack of reviews today as well — though I’m still going to get one done this evening so I’m not too long between reviews. It’ll be an early night tonight, both because I need it, and because the work day was relatively nuts. It’s always tougher to head into a seasonally busy time of year suddenly when the last while had been comparatively quiet. Good for business, bad for stealing time away from work to blog. So it goes. But I’m positively beat. I’ve got other things to do this evening but if I can get one review in, great. If I get some quality sleep tonight then I should be able to polish off one or two tomorrow — work permitting. I’ve got a decent backlog I’m working through, so there’s plenty to keep me busy on that front.
Touch Podium seems to be dead. The last post was end of March. A month without a post. I feel bad; I mean, Jody and I started that up from scratch and built it into a pretty decent news site. But ever since Frapstr took off I’ve been busy with that, not to mention my various iPhone projects, beta testing a few apps, learning iPhone development, and so on. I hate to see TP languish like that, but I’m spread agonizingly thin as it is; I can barely scrape together the time to juggle what I’m already doing. *sigh* If only we had the money to hire a few pros to take some reigns. Maybe when I finally learn iPhone programming well enough to churn out some good stuff we’ll have some spare cash to spend on writers. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes. I know Jody’s working mad hours which explains his absence from the site. Life first and all that.
For now though it’s back to doing what I need to do this evening. Just wanted to post an update.
Tags: ambiscience, fallout 3, music, oblivion, tesla software, work
It wasn't me.
Honest, the downtime is our host’s fault this time. Seems that one of our host’s servers underwent “unexpected” file maintenance. I’m not sure how one is not able to anticipate file maintenance unless it’s some sort of automated thing that runs when certain conditions are met (like a defrag that runs when the drive(s) become more than X% fragmented) but the end result has been that Touch Podium, Frapstr, and Flog! (and whoever else ran their site of this particular server) were down for the better part of 4-1/2 hours between about 6:00AM and 10:30AM EST. It’s actually still down as I type this despite a panicky call into tech to ask what’s going on resulting in being told they’re trying to get the servers back up sooner than the estimated two hours they thought it would take. (Everything had been down for at least an hour by that point.)
Anyway, it looks like everything is kosher again. Let’s just hope there are no other “unexpected” tasks the server decides to take care of on its own.
As for me, the cold is progressing nicely toward epic proportions. Still no significant cough (yet) but the waterworks going on in my head are spectacular. Even taking extra doses of nighttime cold meds can’t seem to turn off the faucet in my nose. (Yes, I take nighttime meds during the day, too. Daytime cold meds don’t have antihistamines because that’s the stuff that makes you drowsy, but also the stuff that dries out your sinuses. I can easily deal with the drowsiness — I live with a perpetual sleep deficit — and I far prefer that than dealing with this damn mucous factory.)
Anyway, as you might have noticed I managed to get a good 5 reviews done during the day yesterday, which was good. Don’t know what I’ll get done today but I’ll shoot for at least a couple. As much as I was feeling better yesterday, that minor euphoria seems to have abated today, probably because the worsening cold made my sleep more fitful last night. I’m not feeling too badly though, apart from having to deal with my pouring proboscis every five minutes, so maybe I’ll be able to fire off a few reviews after all — presuming, as always, that my real day job doesn’t interfere too much.
Further to yesterday’s update regarding the top-secret game by the top-secret company, I spent a good couple of hours on GTalk chatting with him. (Text; my cold wasn’t condusive to a voice chat unfortunately.) He seems like a really nice guy and we chatted on a range of topics — mostly about his upcoming game and iPhone development in general. I managed to convince him to run a beta program before he releases it; the ideas he has regarding certain socal elements of the game are novel and have some serious potential, but they could seriously effect the balance of gameplay, so he really needs to get the balance right before it’s unleashed on the public, or the public might not adopt it, which will make his novel ideas fall apart from the beginning. His programmer apparently gave me the stinkeye the second I mentioned the words “ad-hoc build.” That’s okay, he’s forgiven; setting up ad-hoc for the first time is a huge pain in the ass.
Dunno how far along he is with the game but I imagine it’s at least a couple of weeks to a month or more if he’s going to run a beta at some point, so no point in really talking about it further until I get the go ahead to publish something, but he’ll be sending me a beta build somewhere along the line so I will at least be able to get a head start on whatever it is I’ll be writing about it.
Other than that, it’s Friday. As always I’m looking forward to the weekend and paying back some of that sleep deficit, though I’m not relishing the bitterly cold temps we’re expeding up here — which is completely at odds with the comparatively gorgeous 3°C (~37F) we’ll be hitting today. Canada: If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.
Alright. Enough rambling and back to the grind for me.
Tags: cold, downtime
Posted by Eric March on Jan 19, 2009 in
Frapstr News,
Personal Crap,
Touch Podium News We’ll start with the most obvious: Yesterday (Sunday), all of our sites went dark for about four hours. I posted about this in detail on Touch Podium so I’ll just recap by explaining that there were a bunch of queries left open in the SQL database and they were causing extremely slow responses as they ground our host’s CPU to a halt, so in order to put a stop to the madness the suspended the account. It took a good hour and a half on the phone with them to get everything sorted, but we finally managed, and now we’re all back on track, and all of our blogs are running the most up-to-date versions of WordPress, so that’s good.
But speaking of down time (warning, major geek talk ahead, next 5 mi.), I have been down pretty much the whole weekend, hence the lack of posts. I got a deal I couldn’t refuse on everything I needed to effect a complete system upgrade for my main computer at home, so I had to snag it. In the process I decided to get a new case, too — a Cooler Master HAF932, which is an enormous and wonderfully roomy beast with cooling of the sort that’s about as ridiculous as you can get without going liquid. Seriously, three massive 240mm fans in the top, front and side panel. 240mm! Three! Plus an additional 120mm intake in the rear, and a fifth 120mm intake I installed at the bottom. Give this thing a little juice and it won’t need wheels or feet, it could just hover.
As for the new components:
- AMD Phenom 9850 Black Edition
- 2×1gb PC2-800 memory (temporary; I’ll be upgrading that to 2×2gb PC2-1066 when I have the chance)
- An absolutely ridiculously huge Sunbeam Core Contact Freezer heat-sink/fan
- Asus M3A78-T motherboard with ExpressGate and 4x PCI-e 16x. (ExpressGate is cool. It’s a Splashtop Instant-On OS where you can access the web, play online games, view pics, access Skype and other such things in a Windows-like environment without having to load Windows. It’s not really instant-on, frankly; it still loads from hard drive, but it would be handy if your OS craps out on you and you still need to access the net.)
- Cooler Master HAF932, mentioned above.
The first problem I had building this thing was the discovery that there was while there were 6 SATA2 channels, there was only one IDE channel. I do have two 500GB SATA2 drives, but I also have two IDE hard drives plus two IDE optical drives. I was forced to solve this by going out and buying another 500GB SATA2 hard drive (I went Western Digital instead of Segate this time due to the serious problems Seagate have been having with their latest drives) and a SATA DVD-RAM drive. That let me ditch the two IDE opticals and move the stuff on the 250GB and 300GB IDE drives over to the new 500GB drive. (Yeah, I’m short changed 50GB, but it’s not like I’m hurting for space, nor that either of those drives were full anyway.)
I also ran into a problem installing the RAM. That massive Sunbeam HSF? Damn thing is so huge that the fan partially covers the A1 slot. That means I had to put the RAM in slots A2/B2, which means they’re running unganged. I may ditch the fan on the cooler; the damn thing has enough radiator fins and I have enough fans that there should still be plenty of cooling available without it. I don’t overclock, so it shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ll have to keep a close eye on the CPU temps.
The last problem was the one I thought wouldn’t be one at all: With every prior system upgrade I’ve been able to recover my Windows XP installation by running a repair install procedure. Not this time. This time it bluescreed every time it got about 2/3rds the way through the device install phase. It wasn’t AHCI, which I know can cause problems; AHCI wasn’t even enabled. I don’t know what was causing it, but what I do know is that try as I might I was not able to recover it.
So that has led me to flip over to the Windows 7 beta (64-bit) as my primary OS. Yes, I know it’s risky and foolish to run a beta OS as your primary OS, but I look at it like this: Having played with Win7 in a sandbox environment already, I’ve concluded that it’s pretty stable, and the glitches are relatively minor (for a beta OS, especially a first beta). More importantly, it is was Vista never could be, and while there are some small things I could do in XP that I can’t in 7 (set folder options on a per-folder basis, for example) on the whole it represents an improvement even over XP. Okay, it’s still a pig on memory, but I can live with that. Anyway, point is, I like Windows 7 and will almost certainly be buying it when it is released, so what’s the point of re-installing XP and going through the huge rigmarole of setting it up like I had it before if I’m just going to have to do it all over again when I buy 7? (I don’t do upgrade installs; too much crap gets left over from the old OS and performance is never as good as with a fresh install.)
So, my machine is now running Windows 7. Obviously, this has necessitated a great deal of setup time just to get my system running at what I would cosider a bare minimum. I’ve still got some issues; my Kodak ESP 9 all-in-one can’t print and Windows 7 throws a fit whenever I or anything else tries to access the print drivers for any reason whatsoever — though I can still scan; it also took a few tries to get it to recognize my iPhone. That might have been a reboot issue though — as in I had to perform one and have the iPhone docked before it picked it up; also, my ScribeFire plugin couldn’t be rescued from my old FireFox installation. I’m going to have to start over with a new profile, copy over my bookmarks and stuff, but reinstall all the plugins I used manually. I should be doing this anyway because I’ve been having issues with YouTube, and I know it’s because something went bad somewhere in FF’s plugins/extensions.
Other than that though, at least so far, everything’s worked out well. We’ll see if that trend continues.
Just for the hell of it I snapped some pics of the whole build process, just to add some icing to this incredibly geeky cake. I’ll leave you to browse those at your discretion while I shut the hell up and get some real blogging done.
Tags: frapstr, new pc, touch podium
