Checksum Arcanius

Well, after a bad powersupply and a slew of Blue Screens of Death during Windows installation, I finally tracked down the problem to the memory — either a dual channel issue, or just the particular DIMM that I pulled is bad. I had been steered away from this possibility by Memtest86, but it looks like it ended up being the real culprit. I’m sorry to the friends that I pestered with constant error messages in my frustration (each a new blue screen of death!). Some point soon I will try to verify that the DIMM I pulled is actually bad, or figure out if the Motherboard I got just doesn’t like to do dual channel with it, or what.

At any rate, once Windows was finally running, I installed some 92 updates, installed a little bit of necessary software, and then got to the good stuff: Half Life 2 and Supreme Commander. Both play like a dreamland. It rocks.

Now I just have to finish school, then I can have some fun!

My current desktop computer, the venerable Kaleidoscope, hails from early 2004, and is certainly showing its age. Apart from an occasional GPU crash and sticky mouse wheel, it also just isn’t holding its own in gaming anymore. Although computer games are a much smaller part of my life now than they were several years ago, I still enjoy the occasional LAN party, game of CS or TF2, and for a while I’ve wanted to experience Supreme Commander as it was meant to be.

So today, with the help of Theo and further consultation with Shai, I made the fateful leap. Aiming for instant gratification, I hit up Fry’s in Renton, where the prices were not the lowest available, but they were not far off and everything was in stock. The components I ended up purchasing (after many trips to the internet-connected computers to check newegg and pricewatch to avoid serious pricing anomalies) is as follows:

Antec Nine Hundred case
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R Motherboard (Intel P35 chipset)
Intel Core 2 Duo e8400 (3.0 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 45nm)
XFX 8800 GTS Video Card (512MB, PCI-E 2.0)
2x Patriot 2gb DDR2 6400 800MHz DIMMs

To round it all out, I got a modular power supply, the Antec NeoHE 550W Power Supply. Too bad this last piece of hardware was completely and craptastically broken out-of-the-box.

One of the most disappointing moments in the life of a technology enthusiast is that moment when, after assembling the brand new system, he pushes the power button and… nothing… at… all… happens.

Of course the initial fears are the motherboard, but we pretty quickly determined emphatically that the power supply was to blame. It appears to be completely dead on arrival, outputting no voltage and refusing to turn on at all. Pretty anti-climatic way to end a computer-building session, but what can you do? Other than write a blog post complaining about Antec’s crappy Q.A., of course.

Today is my last day of classes this quarter. However, my first class was canceled and the second happens to coincide with my Dad’s retirement party. As this is a once-in-a-lifetime event, I don’t mind missing it just once.

In other news, Joel and I just spent the last hour or so on a crazy run up to about 4 million acres in Warbook. It was a lot of work, and very intense. I can see how people get addicted to this game. As if I didn’t already know…

For a long while I have passively wondered how to use access keys in Firefox. Today, I finally used Google to learn, via Juicy Studio, that to use an access key, you must press Shift-Alt-Key.

Something to add to the useful information file.

And so, I shall win.

Progress on WoW has slowed significantly since the early days, but this morning saw a significant advancement. Logins are now supported on Facebook as well as Bebo. From the log:

FYI, LithiumPolymer is my main Warbook account.

This is especially nice because it will allow me to do things like this:

p = Player('LithiumPolymer')
p.land.allocate_to_state({'training grounds': 0, 'forts': 0, 'mines': 1, 'amplifiers': 0, 'barriers': 0, 'barracks': 0})

To reallocate all of my land to mines. Currently, this takes about 30 mouse clicks and about 4 minutes. It can now be done in about 10 seconds — and all of that time is server latency.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted to the effect, but I was turned off to the iTunes music store as soon as they upgraded their DRM, breaking the tool I was using that allowed me to continue using my music player of preference, foobar2000.

In conversations since then, I have always maintained that I would become a music consumer once again as soon as I found a store that would sell me the music I wanted without the stupid (breakable) strings attached that came with other services. For example, it would have been easy enough to burn my iTunes music to a CD, and then rip it using EAC and encode it with LAME, but that required work that I didn’t have to do if I just typed a name into eMule and downloaded the song in a few minutes.

I am happy to announce that I have recently discovered the store that I was looking for, and to find it I didn’t have to go very far. Local retail powerhouse Amazon.com has introduced high-quality DRM-free MP3s at a reasonable price at the Amazon MP3 Store. I am once again a music consumer. See, music industry, that wasn’t so hard, was it?