blurby
had a splendid christmas eating and playing jak2 with keith...boxing day kicked off with a big pile of doomy earthquake/tsunami action...death toll is up to 85k as of tonight. sad as hell...but completely mesmerizing when you think of how much destruction nature can delve out when it gets really pissed off. if tsunami was an english word, it would be my favorite word in the english language. alas, it is a japanese word, and i love it so...natural disasters make me want to go back to university.
went to work the morning after the tsunami (dec 27) and was informed that all christmas hires, including myself are going to be without work as of january 16th. i haven't started panicking yet.
so much for post christmas computer upgrades...
computer talk makes the panic start, so i'm going back to watching the amazing flick the gods must be crazy....later


- posted by tart @ 1:26 a.m. (0) comments

geek girl on a mission....
after several weeks of deliberation, i've finally decided what i need to do to bring the pretty hate machine up to snuff...

job one: replace monitor. i love my phillips 107T, but its time to move up from 17" if i'm going to stay out of the lcd market for now. i've decided on the Viewsonic P95f+b. it's pretty.

job two: my current motherboard is an abit KR7A-133. it's lasted me a long time, but with a 266 mHz fsb, its definitely time to upgrade. i could stick with socket A and just change my mobo, but with AMD pulling all of its socket A processors off of the market, i'll be damned if i dump cash into dead hardware. thusly, i shall move to socket 939. while i may be diehard on ATI, when it comes to chipsets on AMD motherboards, i firmly believe nVidia is the way to go...which leaves me with scare options when sticking with AGP. the nforce4 chipset looks sexy as hell, but i'm not prepared to spend the cash on pci express when my radeon 9600 xt still kicks just fine, and by the time i do want to invest in pci express, hopefully ATI will have their 939 chipset all figured out. out of the 3 boards available, i choose the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum...sexy.

job three: Processor...my athlon XP 1800 (barf) won't work anymore with new mobo...c'est la vie...64 bit, here i come...

job four: Audio...oh my. i have audio problems and have for a few months. quite a big problem to be honest. the right hand channel on my soundblaster live just decided to crap out completely back in september. so when i use headphones, i get left channel only. with speaker, i get left channel only. its bad. i need new soundcard. the front panel on the audigy 2 zs platinum pro...overkill i know, but hey, it'll sound good...


that ought to do it for another 6 months or so....with various memory adds and tweaking....the hate machine cries in the night for upgrades....hear it? i knew you could.

- posted by tart @ 1:27 p.m. (0) comments

adding new links to my world...
okie its time to add some links...i see bunches of links everyday, but these two sure do pack a punch.

clusty - clustering/metasearch engine from the folks who brought us vivisimo...as stuck on google as i may be, i am fully aware that they will soon be bigger than time/warner....you can't fool me. options are good!

extremetech - whoa....ziff davis makes good yet again....especially good seeing patrick norton back in action

i found this article on extremetech about the ATI chipset for the AMD socket 939 mobo's....oh my. i can't wait. it always seemed weird for me to be so die hard ATI and then buy the nVidea chipset for me mobo's....thank you ATI...

- posted by tart @ 11:59 a.m. (0) comments

pretty
lookie
- posted by tart @ 5:45 p.m. (0) comments

i have issues. i admit it.
so i'm on the horn calling rogers tonight to make payment arrangements...and my call is answered by their 'new and improved speech recognition IVR'...it works like this...man, with slightly flip, sarcastic tones answers the phone and asks you what you want to do, and immediately says 'if you want to interrupt me at anytime, you just go ahead and do that'...wow...a man saying its okay for me to shut him up. sounds good so far...so he continues on asking me all sorts of intimate details like my phone number and postal code...he's a fast mover, that boy...so he gets me into the right spot, i do my bit and spend the rest of the night thinking about the smooth talking computer guy who answers the phone at rogers...not exactly what i was thinking when i said the perfect man would be a computer geek...he's a geeky computer...oh well, he'll do...

- posted by tart @ 9:18 p.m. (0) comments

it just keeps getting better!
a few years back, when i was living in edmonton I got hooked on ZDtv. Shaw Cable offered it for free in the high band of cable, up with CPAC and the channel where the guy reads the news for blind people. It was all technically joyous. Non stop geekdom...it was heaven. They renamed the channel TechTV and it got even better. When I moved to the tdot, it wasn't free anymore, so as part of my homesickness package (oilervision etc) I bought into Rogers Cable's digital cable package to get it all back. And it was all splendid (well oilervision is a different matter, but i'll go into that another day) until last may...

Comcast Cable down south ran a channel called G4....it was all gaming oriented. Clearly marketed towards younger kids with bottomless pockets of cash...not me. So back in May, Comcast bought TechTv and merged G4 with TechTv. The first thing they did was fire half the staff of TechTv and shut down the office, moving operations from San Fransisco to Los Angeles and axing Leo Laporte with his show Call for Help. Shortly after, Leo started the show back up with the Canadian affiliate of G4TechTv (Rogers with Bell having partial ownership). It was rough at first, but has slowly improved and allows me to keep up with Leo. But I digress....

Tuesday was the first show after another shakedown at G4TechTv. They've now fired Yoshi, Dan, Alex, Martin Sargent and Laura Swisher...the only ones left are Kevin Rose, Sarah Lane and the x-play crew, Morgan Webb and Adam Sessler. Granted, the remaining few are great, but still...yoshi is heaven. I gained all of my geeky casemodding knowledge from him...dan and alex, both awesome. I'm going to miss them. What a geek i am, missing tv hosts.

So, what i'm left with is this annoying nasty network that gives gaming reviews and vacant content meant for 16 year old rich kids...no more gadget reviews, no more hardware, no linux tips...ITS HELL!!!!

Leo has comments about it here, and i agree with him completely....its about 2 minutes into the clip. I believe the end of the network is near, and I now mourn the complete loss of Techtv...RIP

- posted by tart @ 3:34 a.m. (0) comments