Computer (upgrade?)

Not sure if it’s really that much of an upgrade but the process of moving did some damage to my PC.

As a result of (stupidly) buying an off the shelf PC last time, I had to get a new case, DVD drive and Mobo.

I ended up w/ a much better motherboard than came stock in my Gateway - much better chipset (Nvidia Nforce 570), and it allows me to run my ram at full DDR2 800 (PC6400) speeds where the Gateway’s motherboard limited me to DDR2 667. Just that (along w/ the better chipset) has made a marked improvement in FPS in my games (not that I’m a hard-core gamer anymore).

One thing I did “splurge” on was my CPU cooler - an OCZ Vendetta. Thought I’d share a picture of it’s massiveness!

The joy of a good shower…

This is kind of a weird thing for me to be blogging about, but I felt like sharing.

First, some background. For those who don’t know, or don’t know me personally I just went through a move this past weekend. My last place was so horrible, in so many ways, I can’t describe them all here.

There were two things, however, that were relevant to showering. First, over this past summer our well went dry. Our sorry landlord didn’t believe that was the case and sent several people to look at the pump (none of them in the pump, well or plumbing profession), as she was convinced that something was wrong with the pump, not the well. The first symptom was a “spitting” in the shower, and it was always it seemed the Hot water that would cut out, leaving the cold going - very, um, shocking while you are in the shower. Eventually, we had no water at all and she pretty much HAD to put down a new well, but that process took over a month and a half, so I had alternating hot/cold showers for quite some time.

The second thing about that house that almost ruined the joys of showering for me was the fact that I could never get one of those rubberized suctioned bathtub mats to stick in that old ceramic tub. Tried everything (except maybe super-glue). That in itself wasn’t all THAT bad, except that this house was old (over 100 years old) and over time developed quite a lean - which incidentally also got worse during my year there - I was literally getting scared my house was going to fall down. Anyway - back on topic, as I said, the house had a lean, and my bathtub/shower was pointed downhill. Every morning, I put my tub mat at the back of the tub, got in, and my shower was over when I was almost out of mat at the front…that’s right, I would slowly slide the entire time I was taking a shower and the mat would end up doubling over itself at the front of the tub. I was just there for the ride - I got used to it, and would simply adjust the shower head as I went forward, but it did tend to put me in a grumpy mood first thing in the mornings.

The new house, however, has renewed my love of the shower. I have generally always been a Morning shower person unless I did something like cut the grass that required an evening shower. Well, on the move day of Saturday I was so hot and tired, I decided to take a shower that evening, and then come downstairs to watch TV. That shower was absolutely the best shower I’ve ever had in my life - well, maybe not, but it sure seemed that way after all the crappy showers I’ve had over the last year!

I was so relaxed that evening, I’ve not only taken my usual morning shower, but I’ve also taken a shower every evening since. It feels great after work to come in, eat supper, and then take a nice hot relaxing shower. It’s like washing the day away - freeing you up to really enjoy a relaxing evening at home…it has literally made every day this week feel like a weekend day to me.

The internet makes for a very small world…

I had seen the news story of the Psychiatrist killed in her office NYC through my RSS Feeds, and briefly glanced over the story. I didn’t think much about it until I saw a news story on TV and heard her name…

Kathryn Faughey was a very active member of the Martin Guitar online forum where I hang out, and I have known her through her written posts for going on four years now.

Please keep her family in your thoughts and prayers.

VMware Weirdness…

I was experiencing an odd “weirdness” in my VMware Virtuals (All of them) recently - it was as though they were running super fast. I do not mean the time was just going by fast, but that everything was too fast. If I played a movie clip, it played too fast, if I typed, it would enter multiple characters, and if I double-clicked, I had to do it really fast.

I did some searching and found a fix - if you experience this (seems to be commonplace on Vista hosts), enter the following into your VMX files:

host.cpukHz = “3400000″
host.noTSC = “TRUE”
ptsc.noTSC = “TRUE”
processor0.use = “FALSE”
processor1.use = “TRUE”

Not 100% sure what it does, but I do know it works!

What’s in your VMware?

I’ve noticed by watching my blog stats, a lot of folks read my VMware Tweaks article, and while I don’t have any more tweaks for ya just yet, I thought I’d share what was in my VMware!

I’m running VMware Workstation on a Vista x64 host w/ a AMD x2 64 with 4GB of RAM.

Currently I’m studying for my MCSE, so I have a Server 2003 install and a couple of XP machine (x64 and x86) that are my “test network” (I plan to dupe that x86 XP a couple of times to give me more machines in my “virtual domain”). I also use VMware to test out new Linux distributions in a non-distructive fashion.

So, I ask, what’s in your VMware?

Full Circle…

I decided to move my SLED license into VMware. I’m still glad I purchased it, as it really felt good to “give back” to a project I believe in, I just decided that SLED wasn’t the right distro for my home-use laptop. I can really see this in a true enterprise setting, but I felt constrained as to what I could do with the OS as a whole. That, however is another topic altogether and once I get those thoughts in order, I’ll post a separate article about that.

Now, as to what I’m excited about right now (I know you are all just dying to know!).

First, a little story. My first adventure into the world of Linux was fueled by the interest of a friend (and future co-worker) Daniel P. He first got me interested, and since I didn’t know anything, I did what he said. He said run Red Hat with KDE, and that’s what I did. I learned a lot, but after learning that, I moved on. I ended up running Slackware for a long time in a dual boot setup on my main machine, and I really really loved Slackware, but when I got an AMD64 machine last year and since Slackware don’t have an official AMD64 version yet, I started distro-hopping all over the place looking for a x64 distro I could feel at home with. I never was satisfied with anything, as nothing gave me that flexibility and control (not to mention sense of accomplishment) I got with Slackware. Slackware is a beautiful thing, sleek, fast, and configurable as all get out! Slackware was one of the earliest distributions, having been around since 1993, and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity, and aims to be the most UNIX-like Linux distribution.

Now that I’m back to running Windows (Vista x64) full time on my desktop machine (that very same AMD64) and I’ve relegated Linux to VMware workstation on that machine, I use my Laptop as my Linux box. Running Linux on that machine alone really makes since, as everything I use that machine for, I can do easily in Linux without resorting to running software in Virtual Machines or in Wine.

My laptop isn’t an x64 machine, it’s a 1.5 Centrino, but the thought never crossed my mind to try Slackware on it…until today. I downloaded CD’s 1 and 2 of Slackware 12, and decided to give it a go.

I did things a little differently than in the past. I’d often heard of the awesomely light and fast Desktop Environment called XFCE, but I’d never really given it a go, but with all the drama going on with KDE around KDE 4.0, I thought I’d let the dust settle there a bit and try out something totally new, and boy I’m glad I did!

I spent the afternoon happily typing away commands on the console, getting everything configured just right, and then i hit up www.xfce-look.org and got a nice icon theme, and wallpaper, added in the MS core fonts and replaced the little “mouse on the X” start button icon with a nice Slackware icon I found on the web, and I’m very happy with my creation.

That’s what feels so great about Slackware - once you get it set up, you really feel like you accomplished something, and almost like you built something yourself. You can’t get that w/ one of the ready-made “newbie” friendly distro’s that are so popular today.

Attached is a screenshot to show my creation