Archive for February, 2009
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28 Feb 2009"That URL has an @ in it and it's misspelled. I don't think it'll bring me to the website." ¶
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27 Feb 2009Workstation
Now that I have the laptop stand on the right, it's far easier to use both screens fully.
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27 Feb 2009
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27 Feb 2009
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26 Feb 2009"The Quake Live line is way short. I got in after waiting for only about 30 seconds. http://www.quakelive.com/" ¶
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26 Feb 2009This is a great idea. Due to the wackiness of Times Square, they even think it'll reduce congestion. I need to plan a trip to NYC this spring sometime.
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26 Feb 2009
The first five news events I actually remember (and my corresponding ages) were:
- 1986-01-28: Challenger explosion (6 years, 1 month)
- 1986-02-09: Halley's Comet passes Earth (6 years, 2 months)
- 1986-10-27: Mets win the World Series (6 years, 10 months)
- 1987-10-19: Stock market crash on Black Monday (7 years, 10 months)
- 1988-11-08: Bush defeats Dukakis (8 years, 10 months)
One of the most interesting things I learned while looking up these events is how close together the Challenger disaster and the Halley's Comet perihelion were. In fact, the Shuttle mission (STS-51-L) and the following scheduled mission (STS-61-E) had apparently been scheduled to observe the comet up close. In my mind, those two events were far apart. Along the same lines, the Mets won the World Series just a couple of months after my family moved to Connecticut, but somehow I suddenly became a Mets fan.
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24 Feb 2009Quake III Arena, in your browser. Q3A is ten years old.
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24 Feb 2009Ooh, data.
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24 Feb 2009
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24 Feb 2009
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24 Feb 2009"I'm 16.5% addicted to books: http://plutor.org/bookaddict/?f=zlj9hdgs" ¶
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23 Feb 2009
I've got my new desktop birthday gift essentially planned at this point. I've been doing a lot of reading on Tom's Hardware and Ars Technica, and both of them are pointing at Intel for solid mid-range desktops nowadays. There's some disagreement over whether the Core i7 (Quad-core on one die! Triple-channel DDR3!) is worth the price premium over the Core 2 Duo. I've decided that, for me, it's not. I don't do enough video gaming anymore for four cores to be effectively utilized. Even two cores feels like a bit of a waste.
We're still deciding on a case (although I really like everything Lian Li, like the PC-7B plus II) since the case is a part that I feel that M should have a say in. But the guts are going to be as follows:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (Dual core, 3.16GHz)
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P (Intel P45 Northbridge. X48 was tempting, but I don't need that much PCIe, and I probably never will.)
- Video card: Radeon HD 4850 512MB (This was a hard decision. The HD 4870 1GB would be so much faster, but in the end I don't game as much as I used to, and another $100 for the performance is too much.)
- Memory: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) (DDR2 800, Dual Channel, CAS 5. The Motherboard has four slots, so
ifwhen I need more memory, it'll be simple.) - Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar 640GB (7200 RPM, SATA 3.0Gb. I'm a hard drive miser. I could splurge for a 1TB drive, but I've never even filled my current 160GB disk.)
- Optical drive: I'll move the NEC ND-3550A DVD-RW from my current desktop. It's still solid.
Update, Mar 3: I just ordered the parts, but not before a whole bunch of stuff changed.
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22 Feb 2009"All of a sudden, Flickr's mobile site is great." ¶
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21 Feb 2009Meeting up
Biggest Boston meetup I've ever been to (obviously besides the ginormous Mathowie/Jessamyn/pb-enhanced one).