trisweb.com

A Disturbance in the Force…
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Well, as I suspected it might, the DSL package came today; SBC Yahoo DSL. We got the promo for this month (it’s on till the 30th if you want to catch it) — $29.99 a month for 12 months, with free DSL modem and no activation fee. Pretty sweet deal I guess. So it came at about 3 today, and I had it set up by 3:30, and was already trying to get the HTTP port redirected to my laptop. It was a breeze, really. After about 9 hours of use (not constant use, time since I installed…) I am quite satisfied with the speed and reliability. The only thing I am not satisfied with is the crapload of crappy software that they install when you pop in the setup CD (which, coincidentally, you need to do in order to setup the account). But it wasn’t hard to get rid of. And now I am back to my flawless windows system, made complete with the addition of broadband. This just about says it all. Ooh, and the DSL modem is VERY cool. My dad went for the upgrade package for an extra $50 and got the Wireless version. So now I’ve got a wireless network for my laptop at home! Hehe.. and I’m running a web server on my laptop too. It’s probably the world’s first Wireless Laptop web server. Please visit (dynamic IP DNS courtesy of no-ip.net) triswebserver. Now remember, it’s only on when my laptop is on, and that’s only when I want it to be on. So good luck. If you do manage to catch it, comment this and let me know how the speed is.

And on a completely different note, it turns out that the sick puppy was contagious. She is completely fine now; in fact she’s more than fine — I had to play with her for hours to wear her out tonight just to get her to go to sleep and stop yapping. Must have been all that sleep she got yesterday…. lol. But yeah, we have another 5 puppies who will no doubt go through the same thing… three of them have already started. They’re all asleep now, at least, so I can get some sleep and prepare for tomorrow, when I’ll have to watch them all day. Someone please remind me why we have puppies…

Oh well. All in a day’s work. And they are cute when they’re not barfing. ::

Star Wars Galaxies comes out tomorrow… but my dad HAD to get the free 5-8 day shipping from Amazon and not next-day air… geez…

Well, no matter, because we don’t have DSL yet anyway. The modem and router package comes tomorrow (theoretically). That should be nice.

I bet you think my life is nothing but computers… not entirely true. Half my life right now is also these darn puppies we have. I have to take care of them when my parents are at work… which is most days. And yesterday we had this sick little girl… the total intestinal flu type thing. We thought it might be parvo, so we had to quarantine her and watch her and wash everything with clorox… but today she’s doing much better, and upon taking her to the vets, we found that it wasn’t parvo, but probably this poison plant she might have eaten, or just coxidia, which is bacterial and stress-induced. She’s fine now, though, thank God. And the pups are leaving next week! Woohoo! (yeah, they’re cute and all, but after 8 weeks, you want to see them leave and get your life back to normal (lol) again).

Okay, back to computers. I installed PowerStrip (really really cool video card overclocking, setting, optimizing, and tweaking utility) a while back with my old video card (ATi Rage Fury Pro 32MB), and I didn’t find much use for it. Probably because I could only overclock that card about 10 MHz before it started corrupting the display and such. Well, with this new game coming up, I was all over the video card and system tweaking thing, and I remembered PowerStrip and installed it again.

First, a little about my new video card. Well, not new exactly; I’ve had it for six months, and I bought it when it was old, so really, it’s old. It’s an ATi Radeon 8500LE 128MB DDR. I got it for 99 bucks; a really good deal at the time. It’s been a great card ever since, playing everything at smooth framerates, and it’s even got a nice score of ~ 8100 in 3DMark 2001 (as opposed to my old card, which got a measley 1252). One of the coolest things about this card is that it is identical to the regular (non-LE) Radeon 8500 except for the clock speed and memory speed. So, theoretically, if the card can be clocked at the non-LE clock speed, then you have yourself a regular Radeon 8500 128MB for just $99. But I had never tried it before…

So, I installed PowerStrip, and I went to overclocking this card. The card is defaultly clocked at 250MHz GPU/250MHz Memory (DDR => 500MHz). I read somewhere that the card uses 3.2ns DDR memory, which should really be capable of 333MHz speeds. So first thing I tried was 250/300. That failed miserably (resulted in a wonderful flattened-checkerboard patterned display corruption). So I started from the bottom as I should have in the first place, running a JediKnightII Botmatch to test each clock. 260/260 worked fine, then 270/270, and 275/275, which is the default clock speed of the Regular (Non-LE) Radeon 8500. So, if I had stopped there, I would have had the same thing as that card. But I kept going, because it was perfectly stable. I hit 280/280, and 285/285, and 290/290… I didn’t think it would go any farther, but I tried 295/295 just for kicks, and it worked beautifully. So I decided on a happy medium of 285/285 to keep as the default. A full 35MHz overclock… not bad for a graphics card.

So that was fun. I’ve already OC’d my CPU (AthlonXP [palomino] 1700+) from it’s default 1.47 GHz to 1.67 GHz stably… but I don’t really have the cooling to keep it that way. So I’ve been running it at default. Besides, I hope to get an AthlonXP 2400+ sometime in the future (they’re down to about $80 now). The extra 512MB of RAM I got was definately the best computer investment I’ve ever made; I’m still amazed at how much faster everything runs. Well, that and I keep my Windows squeaky clean
Okay, that’s enough. I think I’ll go try to hit 300/300 Who knows? It might just work when the clocks are synchronous… ::

Yes indeed, RAM is a good thing. I just got an extra 512MB of Crucial PC2700 DDR, and man can I feel the difference. I added it to my 256MB, so now I have a full 3/4ths of a gigabyte of RAM (I like saying it that way ;-). Everything is snappy. And I just now opened a 8.5×11″ 600 DPI (= 5100×6600 pixels) image in Photoshop, and I could work with it like it was 40×40 pixels or something. It just had enough RAM to store the entire thing. So then I opened up IE, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Outlook, Explorer, Windows Media Player 9, w.bloggar, and Solitare… while I still had that 600 DPI image up for editing. Photoshop still ran like it was the only thing running, and like the image was an icon. Then I opened up a web page, a word doc, an excel doc, a publisher doc, a powerpoint presentation, a 300 DPI 8.5×11 fireworks image, a flash movie, a Dreamweaver site, checked my email, browsed my music files, played some mp3’s, played a few seconds of solitare and am currently writing this. And it’s fast. Real fast. Everything is still open. Amazing.

I did have some trouble when I first installed the RAM. It turns out that I had my old stick of 256 in slot number 3 of my motherboard’s RAM slots…. I’m suprised it worked, because (naturally) when I tried to install the stick of 512 in slot #2 next to it, I couldn’t boot windows there were so many memory corruption errors. So I switched their order, and Windows booted, but around every corner, I got a blue screen or a program error complaining about corruption of some file. It took me a while to figure out that the files were just corrupted in memory and not on the disk, so I tool a look inside the case. I looked at the type on the motherboard and read “DIMM1, DIMM2, DIMM3″ next to each RAM slot. Stuck the 512 in #1, the 256 in #2, and everything is rock solid stable. Motherboards are just picky I guess.

On a side-note, the developers of Star Wars Galaxies have finally announced their release date. It’s just as I had predicted: the 26th of June. Hooray.

I’ve been lazy and vegetable-like lately. The only exercise I got today was riding my bike to the bank and to the computer shop down the street to get RAM. How geeky is that? But that was worth it Definately. I’ll get off my ass soon enough. Tomorrow, even. I’m going to work on my mom’s web site like mad; put this RAM to good use. (But I guess that’s not really getting off my ass… just figuratively in the sense that it won’t be lazy… yeah)… Laters. ::

Star Wars Galaxies looks to be just one of those games…

I already warned my dad that my brother and I would be stuck on it for at least 3 days straight after we got it. After that, we’ll probably back off and play it more realistically. And man, I hope it comes out at the end of this month like they originally said it would (that is, after they delayed it until December 2002 and then to April 15th 2003). But who really knows…? It’ll come out when it comes out.

I’m really looking forward to this game; more than any other game I’ve ever played. Maybe I’m watching too many E3 video footage clips. But damn, they just make me want want want even more. I’ve already preordered from Amazon, but unfortunately, it’s with super-saver free shipping (5-8 days…) and it’s shipping to my dad’s office (more reliable?). Whatev. It’ll come when it comes.

Want want want. I want this game, but before that, I want to finish my mom’s web site, because I want DSL and I think my dad would be more willing to compromise if I show him I’ve actually done something. Before I get DSL I want another 512MB of RAM, and an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ in a box. And before any of that, I want to sleep.

Let’s just say I’m not quite Buddhist. Goodnight, and may the force be with you. ::

Check out some of the beta testers’ accounts of the game. Right now this is all that’s passing through the Non-Disclosure Agreement, but man it looks like an absolutely awesome game. I’m gonna need some upgrades for this one too… DSL, a stick of 512MB of RAM (=768MB total), and a new AthlonXP 2400+ will help. ::

Well, life is generally boring now. I can post something interesting every single day in Berkeley, but not here.

So here’s a week’s worth of material.

• Star Wars Galaxies - This game could very well be the best game ever to hit the market. Hopefully it’s coming out on the 25th of this month, but it’s been delayed several times before. It’s one of those Massively Multiplayer Online Games… like Everquest, only better, and set in the Star Wars universe. Think about it — you can do anything — fight ewoks, build droids, join the rebellion, become a Jedi (albeit with much difficulty)… it’s everything a gamer and a Star Wars geek could ever want — to live in the Star Wars universe. Don’t worry, it’ll only take over my life for the first couple days.
• Driving is going well. I’ve only almost crashed twice. Not even that really, I’ve just cut someone off once and made one or two risky moves. I’m learning
• LAN Party?* - I’m planning a LAN party for sometime this summer. I’m envisioning 8-12 people, all 1337, no n00bs. (hahaha. just kidding. everyone’s invited. hmm, better not say that on the internet… “you’re not invited unless I tell you you’re invited.” there. that works). Games include: CS, Starcraft, AoEII, Q3A, JKII, STV:EF, and more. It’ll be at my house, and sometime in July. Tell me if you’re interested.
• A Job? Me? - I might get a job. I don’t know when, I don’t know where, and I don’t know how. I just want to make some money doing something related to computers. Ojai PC Pros? Ojai.net? Lynda.com? I’ve got some options. I’ll look around and keep you posted.
• DSL Is finally in Ojai and has been for months, but my dad won’t get it. He says we don’t need it at all, that dial-up is just fine, and that it’s expensive. I plan to convince him that he does need it (a lot), Dial-up is insanely slow and can cause mental instability, and DSL is the same price as Dial-up plus the extra phone line that we need because we use it so frickin much. I will win this one. :-]

That’s about it. More next week. Hehe. ::

Yeah, I am bored. But there are a few interesting things going on:

• We have 6 little five-week-old puppies here! When I got home, their eyes were already open, and they were playing and wagging their tails… they’re cute.
• I got my driver’s permit! for the second time. I’m learning how to drive this summer. There is talk of a car… my thoughts: “I don’t want one if I have to pay for it. Furthermore, I assume no financial resposibility if a car happens to show up in my driveway.” Just remember: I didn’t ask for it
• Most of my time this past week was spent programming in PHP. I’m very comfortable with the language now. I made a very (very) cool web file manager program, designed to facilitate the editing/viewing/copying/moving/deleting/uploading of files on any web site. I’ll show you if you email me, but it currently has no user system, so I’m not just postin a link. Most of the testing is done using my laptop as an intranet web server, actually… IIS 5 is cool like that, and if it comes with the machine, why not? ;-).
• I want to do something fun. I don’t know what. Gimme ideas.

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