A Badass Survey You Need To Take

A Post-Graduation Grasp of Reality Survey

I'm a Slut...With a Cooler-looking PC

I think Xoxide has been reading Seth Godin. It was just a few days after they sent me $30 for reviewing a Zalman 9700 that I decided its’ beauty was going to waste, trapped inside an opaque shell.

So I did what any sane person -- by consumerist standards, anyway – would do. I bought a new transparent case (to show off the Zalman, of course!) And in the process, Xoxide has made me their bitch.

Now I’m not one to jump on a fad, and I’m old enough to remember how cheesy neon lamps look underneath a car, but for some reason I like the look of naked electronics.

I present some pix showing various stages of completion.

Unpacking begins

Installing drive bays

Lots of different fasteners

Ready for mobo insertion

Almost ready for power on

Needs more cowbell, I mean LEDs…

I love the new look, so much that I’m going to buy some more LED-encrusted fans to fill up the remaining holes -- the case has five fan mounts – but I must let my cult following know a few things.

Acrylic / Lucite shows fingerprints. The makers understood this and included a set of white gloves to wear while assembling the case. Too bad the gloves won’t fit anyone except small Asian women.

The case does not come even partially assembled. Assembling the case poses no problem for someone handy with a (power) screwdriver, but it can get tedious.

I worry about the top fan sucking dust into the case. Sadly, the case doesn’t come with block-offs.

Now I worry that my power supply won’t withstand the load of the additional fans – back to xoxide.com…

Who Needs n00bs?

Dedicated to CarpetDuck, v Shredder v, Superfly21, DaDoomday, spookytime, punkboy722, Bonghitkevin11, Liff13, and Junior32909, who said and did the things that put me in the right frame of mind.

I was playing a particularly horrible game of Halo 3 last night when one of my teammates started riding my ass for not pulling my weight kill-wise. He said something like, "the guy who has only two kills should never play Halo again."

After a few minutes of disparaging the person's parentage, sexual habits, and nasally tone of voice, I thought to myself, "I wonder how good the average players would be if all of the scrubs left?"

Imagine Bungie or Microsoft announcing tomorrow, "In response to the feedback provided by our very best players, we've decided to make Halo 3 n00b-free. Everyone with 500 or more matches and a K/D of less than 1.00 will be banned from Halo 3 permanently. You will be given a full refund for your game, including any Microsoft points spent on maps. We feel our decision is a small price to pay for the devotion of our best players."

"Furthermore, the stats for all remaining players will be reset."

OK, you can stop laughing now.

Sure, the idea is far-fetched and an extreme measure to produce exclusivity, but one hears a lot about the notion of firing your worst customers. Why wouldn't it work for Halo?

But think about it a little more, and you'll see that those of you obsessed with K/D might have a problem maintaining it without the padding provided by the clueless, the inaccurate, and the slow.

But worse yet, you should realize that excellence cannot exist without the mediocre. The top few in any field will always be called "the best"; everyone else is called "the rest."

You should pray for more n00bs, not fewer.

PS -- my team's tactics were suicidal; notice my +/- was comparable to theirs. We should have made the enemy come down and get us.

PPS -- Bungie wouldn't have to actually fire anyone. It would be easier to create a new playlist accessible to only the best players, using K/D, rank, or other criteria.

Raffing Part 2

This post comes from a zoomwidth exercise (actually, it's in Godin's "Small Is The New Big", p.27) where I bought a magazine that I hadn't read before. The title of the mag is "Fine Woodworking Furniture" and showcases some beautiful pieces. Here are the links to a few of my favorites:

www.sethrolland.com -- I want the Tsubo Coffee Table
www.bigtreeturnings.com
www.gregbsmith.com
duncangowdy.com -- the extra depth he gives to his work with his carving astounds me.
www.customfurniture-doub.com -- check out the Mystic Bed


Most of us, especially if we have pets or kids, will probably only dream of such art in our homes, and as for myself, I'm planning on keeping my Rooms To Go and Ready for Goodwill furnishings for a few more years. But oh, when I'm ready to redecorate my living room...

I'm a Ho...With a Cooler PC

It all started with a problem. My PC kept shutting off without warning during the middle of my favorite game, Call of Duty 4. It would sometimes last an hour or two, sometimes not, but my frustration grew with every aborted match.

At first, I assumed it was the power supply – after all, the PC was a bare-bones with a no-name power supply, so I replaced the power supply with a better one and the upgrade seemed to help.

Then the shutdowns happened again. And again. And so on. But only when playing COD4 – my web surfing, emailing, and youtubeing didn't cause any trouble.

So I gave up playing COD4 on my PC and instead spent more game time on my 360.

One day I was jonesing for a new game and picked up a copy of Unreal Tournament for my PC. And guess what happened? The shutdowns began anew, and the pattern was a lot easier to figure out – they were occurring 100% of the time while playing UT3. Coincidentally, my CPU utilization while playing UT3 was also 100%.

So I began looking at the CPU temps in BIOS after a shutdown – and in one case, the temperature – after memory cycle and waiting to enter BIOS – was 80 C! For you one-world resisters and haters of all things metric, that is 176 F.

Gulp.

Luckily, the P4 chip has a built-in thermal overload (http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7275012/description.html), which caused the shutdowns.

Now that I knew the problem, I could research possible solutions. Thanks to Tom's Hardware, I discovered the Zalman 9700, because I preferred an air-cooler to a radiator. Thanks to Yahoo! Shopper, I found Xoxide.com, whose prices were close to the best, but who also carried Artic Silver thermal paste and whose website was easiest to use.

No hassles arose from Xoxide – it shipped quickly and arrived cleanly.

I wasn't sure if the copper tube / big fin design would work better than the aluminum block / fan of my old heatsink but at 80 C, what did I have to lose? I had seen a similar design in the 360 – yes, I took one apart – and was not impressed.

But damn if it doesn't work. For comparison, with the old heatsink, my CPU temp in BIOS after a cold start was 65C, and my ATI Tray was showing mid-50s when CPU was at rest. With the Zalman, it's 40C in BIOS and mid-30s in ATI Tray under same conditions. The more astounding fact is what you see below – after a long game of UT3. Notice the CPU temp never goes above 50C with 80-100% utilization.