{"id":125,"date":"2004-10-09T23:57:30","date_gmt":"2004-10-10T06:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/wp\/?p=125"},"modified":"2004-10-09T23:58:41","modified_gmt":"2004-10-10T06:58:41","slug":"open-box-surgery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/open-box-surgery\/","title":{"rendered":"Open-box surgery"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, Microsoft tricked me into turning Kaleidoscope, my desktop machine, into a brick<\/a> (but with pretty lights). It wasn’t too much of an issue, because Kaleidoscope is almost exclusively a gaming and video editing machine. <\/p>\n

At a LAN party last night<\/a>, I was able to get the computer bootable again, on a seperate pair of hard drives, but I was unable to rescue my semi-important files from the other RAID 0 partition, so I mostly wasted a lot of people’s time and didn’t get around to actually playing anything on the desktop. But this is where nice laptops won at robotics competition kick-offs come into play.<\/p>\n

After watching me flounder like a beached whale over my computer for a few hours, we finally got down to the business at hand: 5-on-5 CounterStrike, but using Kleinoscope (the laptop from which I perform most of my arguably useful computer-related feats outside of work). It took me a while to get used to the 1.5 feel again, and the differences inherent to the laptop (such as a lower framerate, slightly different feel, etc), but after I was warmed up, we played some de_clan1_mill – in my opinion an excellent, well balanced, interesting map perectly sited for 5-on-5 battles.<\/p>\n

Blu<\/a> and I got down to business fairly early, despite playing my un-favorite terrorist. The rounds were each quite intense, but we got the upper hand mroe often than not, thanks to Cheuk’s leadership, Blu’s mad AK skills (including an early ace<\/abbr>), and my AWP<\/acronym> pwnage (although I traded for a Colt M4 dropped by a CT<\/abbr> in a heartbeat. I was pleased to end up with the best ratio and the most kills of all players while we were terrorists, a feat I repeated when we played 4-on-4, with mostly the same teams (Cheuk Hung was the traded player), on the other teams. As a CT, I played almost exclusively with the Colt M4, and it paid off quite well. At the end of the match to 15 wins, I had racked up 30 kills with just 9 deaths. My best moment had me watching the door at the second bombsite, and beginning to fire right as it opened. Three died almost immediately, and a forth followed quickly,though the ace eluded me. I had another chance at an ace later on, but I got too excited and only ended up getting two before being gunned down. Such is the way of CS though.<\/p>\n

But I digress – I digrss a whole bunch. The whole point of this post was (supposed) to be about the computer. Well, the good news is that I performed some open-box surgery and recovered the video files and configuration files that I wanted to retain. And now I’m in the market for some Y-shaped power cable splitters, so I can power all four of my hard drives and my CD drives at the same time (novel idea, no?). Then I can whip up a 320-gig 4-drive RAID 0 setup that will (ideally) blow my socks off.<\/p>\n

\"Open-box
\nFor your (supposed) enjoyment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, Microsoft tricked me into turning Kaleidoscope, my desktop machine, into a brick (but with pretty lights). It wasn’t too much of an issue, because Kaleidoscope is almost exclusively a gaming and video editing machine. At a LAN party last night, I was able to get the computer bootable again, on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,8],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything","tag-life","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}