Author: Tommy

So, I'm on my way home from the SFA Observatory Tuesday night/Wednesday morning (whatever 12:20a is), heading south on Highway 59. I'm just inside Nacogdoches city limits, when this stupid breezy pulls out from a side road, blows thru a stop sign, across the highway and into my right lane. I hit the brakes to avoid plowing into the backend of her. The brakes squeal and I start to slide, I counter-steer to try to stay on the road, but going about 60mph its almost useless.
I nail a curb, get airborne for about 10 feet in my lovely little '96 Mazda Protegé. I dig into the ground about 6 inches when I come down, clip a telephone pole, which rips off my front passenger-side wheel, strut and axle.

The airbags came out as soon as I hit the curb, I don't recall ever seeing that pole I hit, and I was not injured (from what I can tell). I get out of my smoke-filled car to see her driving away!
Fortunatly this nice guy, Craig, chased after her to get her license plate. A couple of her friends from down the road came down to say that she had left their house and gave her name and address to the Nacogdoches Police. The police contacted the girl, got her insurance and informed her of what she had done. I am going to file with her insurance and let them know what a stupid, blind moron she is.

Rest in Peace little Protegé, we barely knew ye.

For those of you blessed with AMD-based computers, a new BIOS-tweaking HOW-TO has been posted. I originally found the link off of Slashdot.
I'll time the boot process before and after the changes to show if there is any change.

To read the how-to, and find out how to optimally set your system's BIOS, click here.

I got an email from a friend linking me to his newest project, the photoshopping of Dave Zhang. Apparently, Dave's dad forgot to wake him up one Christmas morning. Feeling bad, it appears Dong (huh-huh), Dave's father, edited his picture from that Christmas morning and just put little Dave in the picture. "No, really, Dave was there... don't you see him? He was there! Leave me alone!"

What a great dad! So, to give Dave every chance in life that his father always wanted him to have, Brent set up http://www.drunkrhino.com/dave/. Now little Dave can enjoy all the experience life has to offer, without ever really being there!

Last January or February I purchased a PNY Verto GeForce4 Ti4600. Very nice card. I was very happy with it. ---up until about a month ago. It started crapping out on me for some reason. It started showing a repeating pattern of green, pink, and yellow dots.

So I called PNY's tech-support (that was a story in itself!). After a couple of days I got an RMA number for me to return the video card back to them. The catch was I had to enclose a copy of the original receipt. Something I didn't have. I informed Havoc of my plight, he told me he had a receipt from NewEgg.com that I could probably pass off as the original receipt. Good idea!
So I edited the information to fit my situation, edited the price to make it fit, and made up a neat, official-sounding order number. Put that in a box, shipped it off and crossed my fingers.
About 3 days later I got an email telling me the package was received and they were sending me a new card to replace the bad one.

So the package finally gets here. I open the box to find it's not a Ge4-4600 like I had sent to them. Instead its a GeForce FX 5900! A faster and better card. Bonus! Not to mention it has S-Video, DVI and a copy of Splinter Cell to boot!

The card rules. I've maxed out BF1942's graphics settings and still no lag. Only when I turned on 8x FSAA did any lag show up (and it was quite noticeable!) --- this whole time I had 8x Ansiotropic Filtering on too!

All this to say, I'm happy with PNY's return policy, lifetime warranty deal, and feel lucky that they don't check order numbers on forged online receipts.
And GeFX cards rock. Especially when you see the Dusk graphics demo from nVidia.

MrPresident sez: Damn you are lucky... I want to be like you when I grow up.
Havoc sez: Tommy's my hero.

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music has been remade. It is a great sampler of all the many, many genres of electronic music that are out there. You'll like some, hate others, and laugh at the rest.
The new update now includes several clips of each type of music (instead of just one clip like previous versions had). It should give you a decent taste of each of the types of electronica out there.

Tommy, you mean its not all called "techno"??? *gasp* No, although most people call it "techno", Techno is but just one class of electronic music. So check out what all is out there.

By the way, props to Ishkur for adding the seperate Downtempo section - I'm ALL about that stuff. And the time-maps, lets you know when things came out and what/when they evolved from.