Yep, it's my birthday. The big 2-6. Odd how I didn't feel any different about my birthday this year, or the last, or the last. I think after you turn 21, they all blur together.

Birthday presents? Well, I got a new computer (a "slammin' setup" according to Jenn) and some money so far. I'm going out to eat with Jennifer and some friends, where Jenn says she has a few more gifts for me.

update: I had a pretty nice birthday. Thanks to everyone that was able to make it to the dinner party. AW won ropepull, that was pretty nice. It took 59min 55sec to win - but it's another win for the house. We went to Pietro's Italian cafe to have dinner. I got some Dale Jr. gag gifts ("yeah buddy!"), a Dave Matthews Band - Live at Central Park DVD , Google Hacks & The Zen of CSS Design books, some Tommy cologne (ha! get it? it's funny.) exchanged for Lacoste Essential cologne, my niece got me a foam growing turtle and a message bean (rock on), a portable USB hub and USB light & some clothes from Old Navy.

Where will you be at 01:02:03 on 04/05/06? Though I could stay up until 1AM my old man complex I've recently developed puts me to bed well before that. I'll be up for the second one, though!

Grendel sez: That's 01:02:03pm for our more dense readers.

This has to be the hands-down easiest mod I've undertaken. I read last year about the OpenWRT team playing with linux on the Linksys WRT54G router. Cool, but not much use to me (especially since I had a wireless router at the time and didn't even need wireless!).

Well, as many of you know, last holiday season, Jennifer and I got a laptop. It has wireless built in, so, obviously the next step is to get a wireless router. I bought a cheap router from a goon on SA-Mart for next to nothing. (It had a few problems, so it didn't really do the job.)

After looking around at several stores for a good router, I finally found a pre-5.0 serial number WRT54G at Office Depot. They price matched WalMart, so I bought it and took it home. I downloaded the proper .bin image for the 4.0 model that I bought. I hooked up the router, connected the laptop, uploaded the new image and voila! OpenWRT was installed.

Package management is very straight forward and the system is layed out the same as any other linux system - so it was easy to get around.
So far, all I have installed is the WakeOnLAN, NTP client(which checks time at midnight) and I have MAC cloning setup on the WAN.

Well, it's that time again. That time when I've been wanting to upgrade, but was putting it off until I both needed and absolutely had to, and until I had the money to go for an all-out new system. (Something I haven't done in years.)

With the Athlon64s on the market at very reasonable prices, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go that route, this will require a new motherboard and RAM - and probably a power supply as well. Heck, might as well throw in a new video card and case while I'm at it. A new HD wouldn't hurt (I'm only on 80Gb right now - and the campus network has plenty more goods that I want).

Why do I have to upgrade? Well, my power supply is the culprit. I've been having issues playing any game for the past month or so. The system seems to "hiccup" (the fans slow then speed back up) and the system never recovers. I believe this is the system requiring more power than the PS can provide. It could be just a single back component drawing too much current, but I've swapped processors, RAM and video cards.
I haven't swapped motherboard or power supplies, simply because I haven't had a spare...

I recently found this price guide from digg, and it really got me thinking about a new system. Then last night the machine hiccuped again, but I wasn't in game. My birthday is in a few weeks, tax return should be in by that time, and I think it's about time* I got a new system. (*Nothing's changed in this system in almost 2 years - and that was because I worked at AMD!)

Any specific hardware suggestions or packaged deals you know of?

Grendel sez: Besides, now that I know what newegg looks like on the inside, I can envision my parts coming down the conveyor belt and getting the peanut gun treatment.

Prepare the the onslaught of new web-clients, new client releases/updates, plugins, website AIM widgets, and countless computer magazine articles on how to write your own AIM client. AOL has released the AOL Instant Messenger SDK for public use. This is just one of thousands of articles hailing its release. It's been a long time coming, several years that I've been watching for it. When IM clients decided to use one protocol last year sometime, I thought the released of the SDK would be right along side the protocol decision.
I haven't looked at it yet, but I'll probably wait til someone else reads the documentation and comes up with a more friendly HOWTO. (Besides, I really don't care to write my own IM client anyways.)