From the category of places that you never thought to look for cool stuff:
- Internet Archive – Public Domain Videos – A huge repository of old movies, video game speed runs, all kinds of public domain video (and in large sizes and quantities) that you may have never seen before.
- One of my more favored places online, LifeHacker, has had some really interesting posts as of late. This is the kind of blog that I could go back three months in and still find good stuff to read.
- This falls in the category of “stuff that only a geek like me would enjoy” … someone took the original RBI Baseball and re-created completely the 1986 World Series inning where the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs! This level of accuracy, in a word, is both interesting and sich all at the same time. Here’s the link.
About two weeks ago, I found a deal that I couldn’t refuse (cue the music!). I bought a clearanced iPod Video 30GB for $209. Someone returned it to Micro Center and they were getting rid of it.
Best purchase I’ve made in a long time!! Even though I’ve used it for maybe 3-4 hours so far, and I’ve only been catching up on the GJ Podcasts (yes, I still haven’t listened to the podcast I helped create, I admit it!), it’s definitely a quality piece of hardware. I also bought a silicon jacket for the system that came with a screen protector, which unlike the DS and PSP varieties, I actually got onto the system without bubbles, so I have some confort now of keeping my iPod in a shirt pocket and knowing it will come out of it in one piece.
Came with space for an armband too. I’ll test that tonight as I’m going to the health club (yeah, I’m gonna try and start working out regularly. More on that soon!)
Those of you who know me well also know that I am a very lost person without having the Internet. Some would view this as an addiction, and I’m not here to disagree, but it is what it is, so to have the fun I’ve had with my first two weeks here and computers was definitely more then most people should have to endure in a lifetime!
Computer Problem #1
My P4 machine is so old, that the choice of socket (Socket 423) made it one revision. Even scarier, I found a board that took this chipset and adds to the mix VERY craptastic SDRAM memory! The thing is built with such junk inside that it should topple over or burn itself up any day, yet, it was still reliable and had plenty of hard drives inside.
Until the 100 gig boot drive decided to give in. Just a few months out of warranty too!! I got most everything off of it, but it was toast, and it needed a new case, which it got. That computer is just now getting back on its feet.
Computer Problem #2
My main computer’s hard drive decided to stop detecting. Now this is a problem, cause this 160 gig drive had things I really did need. Come to find out after about a day and a half of messing with it that it was a busted power splitter causing it and the DVD Burner on the same wire to short and not get enough juice. Nonetheless, it gave me the excuse to replace the boot drives (a 40 gig and 30 gig) with something decent (60 gig and 80 gig) and re-do the spanned disk setup I had … NEVER DO SPANNED DISKS! Too much trouble.
It also is finally getting back on its feet today, but I think I will need to replace the Radeon 8500 card in it, which is starting to show weird signs of sketchiness, and it may be worth getting a Athlon XP 3000 Barton chip in it and some more memory. The network card seems sketchy, definitely doesn’t do a true 100 megabit, so I could stand to get a new one of those too. But, it does function now, thank god.
So, that’s two computers down and now back up. Did I mention I’m gonna upgrade Danielle’s machine with new hard drives and her parents’ PC with remnants of ANOTHER dead PC? 
The WOW – Time Warner Debacle
I was sharing a 3 megabit line downstream with 2 others in Cincinnati. I could leech sometimes, but certain things never could be done with maintaining shared bandwidth like torrents. Danielle only had 768kbit downstream, so I knew I was gonna upgrade it when I moved up here.
Twice, including the weekend before I moved up there, I tried to get TIme Warner to come in and switch. Both times, they had rewiring issues, one time the guy said they would make an appointment (and didn’t), the other time I warned TW that rewiring needed to be done, but they did not listen. Both times, they got kicked out of my place, no business. I called WOW and instantly went to 6 megabit downstream, needless to say, this worked just fine for me!
(Note that the wiring was always a bit weird, but hey, it worked, so I never thought much about it)
So last Saturday, I wake up to find that I have no cable or internet. I call WOW, and the quickest they can get someone out is Monday, and I’m the only person who has called, it’s not an outage. Didn’t like it, but I was headed to Cincinnati anyways, so it was alright.
Sunday morning, I wake up to cable TV, but no Internet, and my Scientific Atlanta cable modem has five lights blinking in unison, basically screaming “WTF?!”. Come to find out later in the day as I was hunting for the Regional Final NCAA games, that it wasn’t WOW anymore, it was Time Warner! I talked to Patrick Mize, my neighbor, anyone I could to try and make sense of the issue, and it didn’t make sense … until later.
WOW came out the next day and switched the line back to WOW. They said Time Warner had been screwing with the lines. Time Warner called me later that day about a wiring appointment, unwarranted too. I railed on them pretty hard, and didn’t mind a bit, their Columbus team is now 0-for-3 in my book.
So Wednesday comes around, and the neighbor directly above me, Kaylee, knocks on our door. Come to find out, the cable wire is run straight down through three condo units (which can’t be legal or good), so when she was calling Time Warner to get service (never mind that she had free basic WOW cable!), they cut off three people, not one. She said that TW was supposed to come out on Friday and wire her up, and that we’d all see how it went.
Friday came and gone and I still had cable, so thus ended the saga for now. The speeds have been insane (700 kilobytes a second from newsgroups), and the service has been good, so WOW has me as a permanent customer for the time being.
Seeing as I have been horrible about posting the last two weeks, I thought I would go back in time a little and replay from moving day on to sum up my first two weeks here in the new city.
Moving you ask? It actually went amazingly well! I met my friends Ian and Erick in Kentucky in the morning, got a table from my mom (which she will hate to know is housing my laptop currently!), and then headed up to Ohio. Before the apportioned time of noon for everyone to come out and help, Ian, Erick and myself had the job about 70% done, so we were able to stay on schedule.
Quite a few people made it down for the trip and I’m appreciative of everyone who did. Matt Adams, Tim Russo, Kyrie Culp and friends (whose names I do not remember, they can come on and give me massive amounts of hell later!), and of course my wonderful girlfriend and a friend of hers, Lawrence from up here in Columbus, and my dad for being the driver. He had one heck of a long day, I’m glad he was able to help.
My dad, Erick, Lawrence, and Danielle were the crew who made the roadie to Columbus. We got everything undone and somewhat in place, got to the storage bin where we loaded it up and finished filling it to capacity (cause it’s COMPLETELY full now), and then I went back to Kentucky to help my dad home and run Erick home as well.
All in all, it was about 14 hours of work, but still that seems amazingly efficient for moving from one city to another. I could not have done it without a lot of friends, and now I’ll have to handle the job of hooking ‘em all up! (Except Lawrence, his Everclear has been delivered!)
Scooter’s 2006 NCAA Wrap-Up
Yes, let the record show … I SUCK AT THE BRACKET!
Most sports fans will tell you this, or at least I will. The more you know about the game, the less it helps you when you do these NCAA brackets on a yearly basis. You think about games, you analyze, you know there’s going to be upsets so you make stupid selections. All of these things rang true this year, and the unpredictability of a 11-seed like George Mason making the Final Four didn’t help.
All in all, I finished in the bottom third of the AST Sales bracket (I didn’t get to Columbus in time to do the Karlsberger one). Brian in the office won as he successfully picked UCLA to go to the finals, which they have done. I don’t even remember where I finished in the Game Junkie pool, but it was ugly! (I just checked, 21st out of 28)
Heck, my picks were almost gone after the first weekend. (OSU, North Carolina, Duke, Kansas)
There is always next year, and I’ll have to figure out if I’m gonna do any Fantasy Baseball. I didn’t last year, didn’t have time. I might bow out and just do the video games.