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FrankensteinOctober 7, 2006 2:54 PM
It's been YEARS since I've had to do any desktop computer support, and as such, it's been a long time since I've had my face shoved in the side of a PC with a screwdriver and a flashlight. Apparently, building enterprise software to support large companies and thousands of people got easy, while figuring out how to take the side panel of a Gateway PC off got REALLY hard.
Well, two of my friends on the same week decided to do some PC "house cleaning" as I whined about the performance I've been getting out of my now 5-year old computer.
Well, neither of them could actually give me one fully-functional PC. In all, I receive FOUR machines in addition to the two I use here at home.
I've now stripped three of them down bare, taking a motherboard here, RAM there, network card here, sound card there, and have built one fully-functional machine in the case of the fourth. The best part? Even with every video setting cranked up high, it still runs TWICE as fast as my good ol' Northwood machine did at the ghetto quality settings. I will say this about Northwood though: I've never had a better PC. I'm typing this on her right now, and she's not going anywhere! Hell, one of the PCs I destroyed actually used the same kind of memory as Northwood, which is rare and expensive RDRAM. Northwood got a boost too out of the deal.
I must say, I can't strip a PC bare and reassemble it in 15 minutes like I could back in my hayday. It took me a solid two hours to get the thing to boot with this new "SATA" hard drive crap. That's how far behind the times I am folks. Anyhoo, a late night last night and a good morning today, and all I can say is:
It's ALIVE!
Everyone, meet Frankenstein.
Best of the BunchOctober 6, 2006 1:07 AM
Well, I got the rolls of film that I took a couple weeks ago down at Minnehaha Falls and Lock and Dam #1. I learned a few things:
- Slide film is a pain in the ass compared to print film. Print film is very forgiving, where slide film is not.
- My 35-70mm lens on the Ricoh wide-open is horrible. Stopped down, it's sharp as a razor. Probably the sharpest lens I have next to the Pentax 50 f/1.4. Lesson? Don't shoot ISO 100 speed film with it. Shoot ISO 400 or higher.
- Good film is expensive to get developed. Stick to good C-41 process color print film and call it a day.
The prints from the 400 T-Max I took sling me right back to realizing how far digital still has to go. The contrast and sharpness are frickin' ridiculous. I just went back and looked at the Minnehaha black and whites, and while they are much better with the Photoshop plugins, they still don't have that "punch" to them.
Anyhoo, I'll be sticking with the digital, color prints, and 400 T-Max.
Peace out to the revolution Kodak E100VS!
Oh, and I did outsmart myself today with the fancy-pants CMS (Content Management System) that runs this website. Every page you see on izeon.com, every link, every element is generated rather elegantly via a slick management tool that lets me point-and-click to put these pages together in no-time. I was getting a NumberFormatException when trying to delete content. I dug and dug and dug for the code that actually deletes the content and couldn't find anything wrong with where it was pointing. Turns out, there was an issue in the format for a blog post. I managed to use the wrong URL for the stylesheet that generates the link to delete content. Two clicks in the XSL stylesheet and it fixed itself.
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ABOUT
This is the word barf of a guy named Bob (Ethics major turned Software Engineer) who lives in Minneapolis.
Email me. Buy some photo gallery prints. Do whatever.
Looking for foil pictures? They are here.
New:
Unfoiled, The Movie
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My Life Applied to Corporate America
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