Inside joke

Frabjous is now 0.9875 standard Bovia.
*This is not a comprehensive number, it is merely a superficial measurement.*
It has been years since Frabjous has had an opportunity to be greater than one standard Bovia. He could potentially reach 1.0625 Bovia within a few weeks!

Time for everything.

Ask and you shall receive right? - I've been wanting some time to finish various house projects, and to really start turning this house into a home. Well guess what I've been laid off.

My employer has some work on the horizon; but right now - zilch. So most everyone got laid off for a month or two. Getting laid off isn't something I wanted, but I'm going to make the best of it.

So I get to update the ol' brag sheet, and look around a bit. Ideally I'd like to find some temporary electrician work. In addition to looking for work though, I'm going to spend some time painting, welding, cleaning, etc... and it will be wonderful.

OS's

So i finished installing WOW on Ubuntu. And it plays just fine; but with the new Cataclysm update, wow can now use some of the more advanced features of my video card. Unfortunately either OpenGl or the gnu/linux version of the video card drivers aren't up to the task yet.

So I'm installing winBLOWS again.

Maybe I should do a small Gentoo installation and virtualize my computer so I could run, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and 'the operating system that is only useful for games' all at the same time.

Bleeding Edge

So some time ago when, what I consider to be, the second generation of SSD drives first hit the market. I went and bought one. It's a Gskill Falcon 128GB (230 MB/sec read 190 MB/sec write). It was bleeding edge at the time, and is still quite a fast boot drive.
Unfortunately like most bleeding edge hardware, the software support is usually quite primitive, as in just barely usable. Well time has passed and several new firmware revisions for this drive have been released, including a trim program. I've been reluctant to update the firmware because the drive manufacturers in there wisdom made it so that a firmware update destroys all data on the drive.

Brilliant!!!

But the SSD delays have gotten a bit too long for me to ignore, it needed trimming. So after three hours of burning boot disks, rebooting, changing things in the bios, swapping around SATA plugs, and general hair pulling I'm happy to announce my success! Firmware version 2030 is now installed, and I'm off and running reinstalling my operating systems.

For good measure I updated my motherboard BIOS, and increased the overclock on the processor as well. Fun times!

E-reader

In the past few days I've been thinking about getting an e-reader. I've been trying to read in bed, and I was thinking that an e-reader might be much easier to hold. With a paperback, I spend a bit of effort holding the spine open and twisting back and forth to comfortably see the page. Then again; maybe I've just gotten soft. I remember a time when I used to hold a book over my head for what seemed like hours every night before falling asleep.

Then again I also really like the idea of carrying around thousands of books in a tiny little gadget. We'll see.

Household projects update

The bedrooms that I've been working on are coming along just fine. Unfortunately there have been other setbacks...

The cat situation exploded! A cat we had been caring for started fighting in earnest with our cats; and one of them started peeing! A cat that pees once is forever a pisser. It had to go; but the reason it was in my house was that it had no where else to go! So I'm building a cat house for the garage. It's heated, and should be quite comfy; especially when the thermostat I ordered from Amazon arrives.

Another set back lies in our new furniture. We bought a new bed and nightstands from IKEA. My visiting father and his sig-o slept on them fine, and on new years Gretchen and I crashed on it; no problems. Later that afternoon I leaned on the bed and, the frame broke; the box-spring and mattress went crashing to the floor in one corner. So now I have another opportunity to use my new welder. I'll have to go buy some steel and weld up a bed frame; or at least a structure to reinforce the new broken one.

Flashlight project and other thoughts

I have a pair of DeWalt DC527's (battery powered hand-held florescent lights). The reason I have two, is that one doesn't work! I'm too lazy to go through, what I assume would be, a difficult returns process; so I'm fixing it myself.

The not so functional light does sort of work; the bulb glows; but does not fully light. I may have narrowed down the problem: the not so functional light is running at twice the frequency of the good light. I'm working on a circuit diagram (for diagnostic purposes), hopefully I can determine which components create the AC switching frequency, and test them next.

I may have given up trying to tape and skim coat my walls upstairs, I'm just not very good at it. I found someone to hire to help me with the work. I hope he calls tomorrow.

- Sy