Pope placeholder?
If I’m being blasphemous well I guess that’s tough. Okay, I know about this ([]) much about Catholicism and conclaves, what I do know comes from Dogma and Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. I kid, I kid… okay not really. Sad, yes I know but hey I’m not Catholic so shush. I guess I could head over to the Wikipedia.
So the new pope had just been chosen and he elected the name Benedict XVI, which from the chattering in the office means the guy is supposed to be a strict traditionalist or somesuch since the chosen name represents the manner in which the Pope will reign. I’m sure much more of this will be hashed out over the next few days, as the news cycles will squeeze every bit out of this story.
The “formally known as” ignorance aside, what is up with choosing a leader who, quite frankly, may not have a whole lot of time on his hands to address the major issues facing the Catholic church. I know life spans have been increasing over the years, but I understood it as a something more in line with generation X, Y and little punk bastards. I dunno, I’m just saying that if the cut off for cardinals to even vote is 80 and this guy is 78… um yeah. Wait, why am I obsessing about this… hey look over there!
computer go down the hole
Well it finally happened. I should have paid more attention to the telltale symptoms. Failing hard drives, random intermittent hardware failures, system locks – pretty good signs of either a failing power supply or a dying motherboard (or bad cables or badly connected cables or too much dust, whatever). Seeing how I just replaced the power supply when the old one crapped out, I was left with a dying motherboard. Correction, a dead motherboard. Over the weekend another brief power outage finally killed the five year old board and I couldn’t boot up at all. Should have gotten an uninterruptible power supply.
So, much like the car, I’m prematurely left with building a new system before I had planned. But it has been way too long since I got to hunt around for components to build a new system. However, this time around I’m just going to build a low-end budget system and save as much as I can to either buy a top-end Thinkpad or build the big McHuge Large system later in the year. Good thing is that I can still reuse the case, DVD drive, monitor, keyboard and mouse. Though five years with the same keyboard, it’s getting kinda gross, perhaps I should pick up a new one. Do they still make the MS natural keyboard without all the other crap? I would reuse the hard drives as well but with all the crazy clicking noises and read/write failures, I’d surmise that they’re probably shot too. Shame, I just put in a new one. Stupid motherboard. Oh well, maybe this will also spur me into starting to setup the home network, since I went through the trouble of getting structured wiring put in the house. Gigabit network anyone? Ohhh, maybe even some wireless action!
Holy expensive batteries Batman! UPSes are fricken expensive.
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005
slight modifications
Okay the reason why a jacked up my brand new car? Ahem...
before
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after
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Yeah, the shiny engine bling. It's a new cold air intake and it's bad ass. Gains are increased peak horsepower by plus ten, ft/lb torque increase of about three to five across the rev band above 3000 rpm, and a hide your children roar when the throttle is wide open past 3k rpms! Oh it rocks. Next weekend I'm gonna install a rear sway bar to tighten up handling and have the A-spec suspension installed to complete the chassis upgrades. Although, I've got my eye on a JDM lower and tower arm brace.
Oh yeah, hacked the navigation splash screen. Just a little personal love from my car.
1600x1200
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Saturday, April 02, 2005
uh oh, that doesn't look right
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Friday, April 01, 2005
google bytes
Okay so I'm checking my Gmail and now I've got 1.594 GB of mail storage! Cruel April Fool's joke or unfortunate timing?
I guess not, check it. A woo hoo! Imagine Pinky, with unlimited mail storage, I could rule the world!
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