That'll be the day

I love Buddy Holly! I listened to the Greatest Hits CD I have the other day, which got me thinking about this post. For a bit of a background, I, like a lot of others my age, enjoy a wide variety of music styles, or genres if you will. More explanation than that really deserves it's own post, and I'll add it to my notes for future reference. I also discovered in college that I very much prefer to see a great band in a club setting rather than in an arena. This led me to follow closely a few bands that produced several great records, but never made it "big." This is also a subject for a future post, perhaps in the same one as above. But, what I realized is that sometimes it is difficult, if not downright impossible, to capture the energy and sound a band has on stage when recording in the studio. It'll turn out to be a washed out, less heavy sound, more on the pop side than anything recorded live by the same band.

Which leads me back to my love of Buddy Holly. My wife kind of makes fun of me, and I think she mainly hears the songs as bubble-gum and dismisses them as such.* But I listen to the songs, and I picture Buddy and the Crickets in my head. I can see Buddy up there with his Strat, his Fender Pro or Bassman or Twin Amp sitting behind him. Those amps are LOUD, to say the least. I can envision those guys playing a live show, with that equipment turned up, getting all of the distortion we're used to hearing today. I bet those shows were full of sound and energy, which would explain all of the screaming teenagers and the complaining parents. :) I would like to talk to someone that attended a show all of those years ago to see how they remember it.

On top of that are the great songs. Buddy's country roots shine through and his minimalistic riffs and hooks are just catchy. Add to that songs like "Everyday" with the celeste (xylophone sounding thing) and Jerry Allison slapping his knees for the percussion, and it just becomes brilliant.

There are many acts that I'd love to time-travel back to see perform live, The Who (with Moony of course), Elvis, Buck Owens with Don Rich, The Beatles to name a few; but I believe Buddy would have to be up there in #1 or 2, possibly only behind The Who.

This made so much more sense in my head than it does here in print. Hopefully some of you music enthusiasts get what I'm saying. Right?...

* - Not that I'm accusing her of being the only one in the house that's ever done that. The biggest example I can think of offhand is "No Rain" by Blind Melon. I saw the video a couple of times and heard it on the radio and dismissed it as pop drivel and quit listening to it. Many years later, I watched the "Behind the Music" on Blind Melon. And just seeing some of their live performances and getting a personal insight into the band kind of opened my eyes to them. Now when I hear that song, I turn it up instead of turning the station.

1984 (Not the Van Halen one)

Since I travel a lot with my new(ish) job, the company provides me with a cell phone with unlimited data and a worldwide plan. We had service through Cingular, and I had the 8525 smartphone, which I loved. It had windows mobile and mobile versions of the office applications. I even kept up with the gas mileage on my truck with excel. Websense blocks all gaming content from work, so I would use the phone to keep up with geezergamers.

Then one day Cingular crossed the line. One of our guys was in Brazil for two weeks, and at the end of the month, they billed him $8k! The charges included a download 200+MB (data is unlimited, but not out of country, apparently). To his phone, mind you. He had wireless at the hotel, so he didn't use the phone as a modem, so how the heck did he download that much? Anyway, the company tried in vain to get Cingular to negotiate. It went on for 6 months or so with the backcharges and penalties adding up. They finally settled for some large amount, and we dropped Cingular and moved to Verizon.

The only world coverage phone that was available from Verizon was the Blackberry World Edition. I just got mine in a few weeks ago. I don't like it near as much. It's ok, but I miss the touch screen, the bigger hide-away keyboard, and the windows mobile and its simpler integration with my outlook email and calendar. But the main reason that I don't like it is that, somehow, the web browsing is filtered through my company's network. So no more geezer gamers or webmail from my phone. :(

This is really going to suck when I'm in an airport bored out of my mind. Or when I'm at my parent's house 3 hours away, who don't have an internet connection (or computer for that matter) and I'm wanting to surf the web.

I'm hoping someone in the wireless communications biz can tell me how they do it. Just to satisfy my own curiosity.

What, me worry?

The quick update is, it's all together and working! Thank goodness.
Here is a list of what I used:

• Motherboard - XFX nForce 680i LT SLI Socket 775
• CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz
• Fan - Ultra X-Wind Socket 775
• RAM - Corsair XMS2 DHX 2048MB Dual Channel PC6400 DDR2 800MHz
• Power Supply - Ultra X-Finity 600-Watt SLI Ready
• Case - CoolerMaster CM690 ATX Mid-Tower Case
• RAID Array - 3 each Seagate Barracuda 750GB Hard Drives
• Graphics Card - NVIDIA GeForce 7200 GS 128MB (PCIe)
  
• TV Tuner Card (PCI)
  
• Parts used from previous build:
• 120GB IDE Hard Drive for OS
• NEC DVD RW
• Wireless Network Card (PCI)

I've installed XP Professional with the intentions of upgrading to Vista. As I've mentioned before, most of my free time is spent on the xBox 360 and I want to use the Media Center aspect of Vista to enhance my experience. I'm also hoping to be able to stream to the laptop downstairs and use it if I want to watch something in the living room.

So all of the players are in position, now it's time to implement. Until I get Vista installed, at least Glenda and I can begin moving our CD collection to the server, and she can begin arranging her digital photo albums. That alone should keep us busy for a few years. :)

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I only had off-white cd-rws in the old machine, but I had a black faced external DVD-RW drive that I had bought. I just took the case apart and put the drive in the new machine and put one of the cd-ws back into the enclosure.

Made in Malaise, yah?

Just a word of advice. Never buy a mobo, chip, and fan separately , or a barebones kit & a separate cpu fan. I've 'built' several computers for myself, but this is the first time I've gotten a mobo that didn't have the chip and fan already installed. Really, the socket 775 mobo and chip were no problem together. The way it's done now, without the need to press all of those pins down into place works great. Except, I later unclipped the bar that holds down the cpu cover plate to look at something, and when I was closing it back, I heard a loud snap... Not sure what that was about.

But the fan... sheesh! I worked on installing that thing for well over an hour and ½! I was putting so much pressure on it trying to secure the clip that my thumb hurts this morning. I have no idea how I kept from snapping the mobo in-two. I read reviews of every socket 775 cpu fan on the website and chose one that someone specifically stated fit my mobo with no problems. Well, I had problems. (I'll add mobo and fan specifics later for those that may want or need to know) The fan has a plastic mounting plate that clips to the mobo and then some metal clasps that fit onto that mounting plate to hold the fan and heat-sink down onto the cpu. It's made that way because the heat-sink is huge and you wouldn't be able to mount it to the mobo if it was all one piece. So, I chose the orientation of the mounting plate so that the metal clips would be on the sides where it seemed they would cause the least problems. If the hold down clips had just been oriented 45º from their actual position, all would have been right with the world. In one position, the metal clips would have had to have been forced between the mounting plate and some kind of (what looked like) key components that didn't need to be disturbed. In the other orientation, they would have to be forced down next to a small heat-sink on one side, and a small fan over a nVidia mobo chip on the other. I chose this latter orientation because it seemed to be the less chance for harming anything. Well, the small heat-sink also interferes with the mounting plate, and even after using a knife and shaving it down a bit, it doesn't fit all of the way down completely. So, after fooling with this thing for an hour with it slipping all around on the thermal grease on top of the cpu, I finally got it clipped into place, but I still don't know that it'll be 100% effective because it may not be sitting flat on the cpu. (and I may have broken a dozen different things...)

Anyway, I should be done installing all 4 hddrives and the add-on cards tonight, so I'm hoping to fire it up to BIOS before going to bed to make sure it's at least working at that level. Jeez I spent a lot of money on this stuff.

Before you accuse me

Since I'll be complaining a lot about stupid people, I might as well start close to home. As in with myself. Warning, there will be a lot of geek talk in the next following paragraphs.

I have a really old desktop that I have replaced everything at least once, most things at least twice. The mobo is older and only supports usb 1.0. It's sloooowwww. I've been debating for over a year now, trying to decide between a desktop or a laptop replacement. My wife, aka Glenda, has a new Nikon D40 digital SLR, I have a newish Zune, and Gleda will be getting some sort of mp3 player soon, and iPod classic or a Zune probably. So we want a lot of storage space and want our data to be protected. What I decided on was to get a laptop we could use on the wireless network to store our data on a file server. I kept looking but never buying, then this past black friday, I made an impulse purchase on a Dell Inspiron from Wal-Mart. Pretty nice computer for the price. With that trigger pulled, I started scheming for a low cost server. Tigerdirect had some 750gb hdds on sale, so I decided to get 3, buy a pci raid controller and use my old desktop as my server. To overcome its hardware shortcomings, I figured I would buy a docking station for the laptop and use it to do anything more strenuous than server maintenance. So, for $598 for the laptop and about $500 for the hdds, I was getting 1.5Tb of storage and some mobility. Not too shabby.

Now for the part about my stupidity... I browse ebay and find a Dell docking station and monitor stand for a steal. Bought it and installed it. I go to set the laptop in and I can't get it to seat properly. I remove it, turn it over, and guess what. Yes, that's right, I didn't even check to see if it had the port replicator attachment built in. Sheesh. So now I've got to decide where to go from there. Ended up today buying a barebones kit for $695. Socket 775 mobo, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 & fan, 256mb pcie video card, 600w p/s. I'll turn the server into a workhorse type and just use the laptop for mobility.

I'm out a lot more than I originally wanted to be, but chances are I'd be replacing the mobo or 1.1 ghz amd on the old machine soon anyway. Now I have the hardware to set up a nice DVR also.

Guten Tag, sunnamabadges!

Hello from the world of TheGuns1ing3r. I'll use this space to mostly complain about my job, complain about stupid people (of which there seems to be an abundance), complain about... a lot of stuff. I'm a firm believer in the idea that having a good attitude and concentrating on the good things helps to keep you happy and stave off depression, so I try not to do a lot of complaining out loud, so I will use this space here to do most of it. ;-)

I'll also try to completely bore you with the monotony of my everyday geek-life.

So, a brief intro for those that don't know me. To quote from "my"space, "Your typical uber-geek / engineer. I love to quote Monty Python, Mel Brooks movies, Caddyshack, Airplane, etc. You know, all the cool stuff..." Most of my free time these days is spent in front of the xBox 360 playing online with my friends at GeezerGamers and the GG SouthEast Clan.

I'm a mechanical engineer by education, and now in vendor quality surveillance by employment.