Archive for February, 2009

I’m Your Captain…

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

It wasn’t but a few months ago that OCC and I were still at odds. But you wouldn’t know if if you looked today, matter of fact, you’d probably think I never left… and in heart, I hadn’t. ;) It wasn’t but a month or two ago, when I was asked to help out on the news team. To be perfectly honest, I’d have been happy staying there. Reading this site, you’d probably guess that I enjoy rambling on abut things.

I was eventually given moderator powers, not that I recall having to use them. Then last week was the big shocker, I was asked to become an admin. Yeah, if having a Mac user on the news staff at a PC enthusiast site wasn’t odd enough, they now have a Mac using admin. It’s been a busy week for me remembering how to do things in Invision Power Board, as well as getting use to OCC as the company it is today. It certainly isn’t the site it was when I left, and that’s a great thing! So far everyone on staff has been awesome.

In addition to doing the admin thing at OCC, I’ve also been asked to do some news posting over at Neoseeker. Both Neoseeker and Overclockers Club are part of Neo Era Media. I’ll try to keep getting things posted to OCC as well, so if you enjoy my ramblings, be sure to check ‘em out. :)

OverclockersClub.com Folding@Home Contest

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

OverclockersClub.com is running another contest. This time, all you have to do is be an active member of the OCC Folding@Home Team (#12772). There is a number of really cool prizes, and a chance that there will be some additional prizes added.

More information can be found in the OverclockersClub.com Forums.

Keep in mind, while you could win a prize for participation, the real goal here is to encourage more people to run Folding@Home even if you don’t continue to do so for our team after the contest is over with. By running the program, you are helping find cures for cancer and many other nasty diseases.

Coming To An End

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

In the current state of the economy I feel fortunate to have a job, much less two jobs. – Though technically I have three, although the wife continues to argue that the 3rd one is just a hobby. :P

At any rate, I’ve been able to work my ass off for a while now. Using the 2nd income to pay off property tax, bills, buy a couple of nice things, but mainly to pay down the obscene amount of debt that has been accrued over the last few years. When I started the 2nd job, which is an hour drive one way, I knew it wasn’t going to be permanent. Heck, I’m surprised that I stayed there this long. ;)

Last weekend I was notified that I should plan on that work coming to a stop by the end of April, and that for the next several weeks I should plan on training my replacement. While I’ll miss the money, I sure wont miss the 4 hours I spent traveling each weekend or the time away form my wife. Though I expect them to call me back within a few months after I’m gone. (more…)

Grrr. Hard Disk Failure

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Came home this afternoon, and my Windows Vista system was sitting on a screen everyone loves to see. No, not the BSOD, but rather the boot disk failure screen. Yippie.

After a few reboots, the system came back online for a while. Though I did notice an odd sound coming from the system. Upon further inspection, I was able to narrow it down to one of two hard disks. And about that time, the system crashed again. Grrr.

Disconnected the FUBAR disk, disabled the RAID in the BIOS, and now Windows has been reinstalled and is downloading the available updates. I reckon a 2x 500GB setup was a bit overkill for a system that did nothing more than sit and run Folding@Home. I do have to hand it to Microsoft, Windows Vista does feel like it installs much faster than XP. Granted, it’s been ages since I’ve done a full install of XP.

Amazon VoD & TiVo Working Again

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Back around November or December, an update to TiVo killed the Amazon.com Video on Demand (VoD) service. That really sucked, as I loved being able to download movies and TV shows from Amazon.com to my TiVo boxes. It had been a while, so I figured surely to God they have this thing fixed now. And yesterday evening, I logged into Amazon.com and told it to send me a copy of Supernatural Season 4 Episode 1 to my living room TiVo. I’m happy to report that the service is working once again, though it is a bit slower than I remember… but then, that could very well be my network or something wrong with Comcast.

While I am thrilled that the service is working once again, I must say that I am rather disappointed that I wasn’t notified by Amazon.com or TiVo and informed that the service is working again. A simple email from Amazon, or a notice sent to my TiVo messages should have been extremely easy for them to pull off. Had they notified me, I’d have probably been downloading a lot more moves rather than using the crappy Comcast OnDemand service.

Odd iPhone Behavior

Friday, February 6th, 2009

I decided that I’d take this weekend off from my 2nd job. While I’ll miss the money, it isn’t something I do often and I needed a break. Today I decided I’d take the wife out for lunch. Everything was good, we ate, I dropped her back off at work, and headed home. While stopped at a light, I was going to check a few things online… With 4 bars, I opened up Safari and got an error I had seen before, “Safari is not connected to the server.” I had seen this error a few times before, and restarting my iPhone always solved the issue. So, upon restart, I was surprised to see my iPhone telling me I needed to connect it to iTunes to activate it. What the heck??

Connect to iTunes to Activate

I’ll admit, this kind of ticked me off. What the heck was going on. Well, guess I have to go home now and reactivate my phone. This sucks. As I get closer to home, I decide that I’ll restart my phone again. It shuts down, I turn it on, and everything is working just fine.

I really have no idea what was going on. My only guess is when I restarted the phone the first time, it didn’t have a good enough signal to communicate with the AT&T network.

Oh, and for those wondering why it says “Para Emergencia”. When the iPhone is not active, it still allows users to make an emergency call. The text there in the slider will change between a dozen or so different languages. It just happened to be the language displayed when I took the screen shot.

OverclockersClub.com Userbar Contest

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

The submissions are in and now it is time to vote for the 2008 OverclockersClub.com user bar. There were 19 different entries into the contest, and now it’s time to vote on the winner… in addition to having their design used around OCC, the winner will also receive a Sapphire HD 3850 video card.

Go vote, and if you need help deciding on which one to vote for, I’d highly recommend #6! :D