Empty Notebook

This might just be my favorite Weird Al song of all time now. It’s “Close, But No Cigar”

The Week 4 Update…

1. Healthy Eating - Mwahahahaha. I kicked the scale’s ass again.  After 4 rounds, it’s me 4, scale 0. The scale put up a good fight in round 3, but lost it’s motivation in round 4. Take that scale!

2. Cleanup - Not happening quite yet.  Hopefully I can start to organize the stuff next month.

3. Website Growth - ScalpEm is having a very good month. I hope to see it continue its growth.

This one is for the gamers and techies out there.

Last night, my new $89 BFG Tech 7600GT arrived from Newegg. It’s actually my second card, for SLI. I bought my original card last March for about twice the price and it’s performed liked a champ. Before I bought the card, I knew that there were plenty of horror stories out there about mismatched BIOSs and general weirdness with SLI setups.  But, I figured, hey what the hell, it’ll work for me.  Thanks to my gaming buddy Anubis (”Yeah, keep talking smack before you have it, you’ll have SLI hell), I was also cursed with the SLI Setup From Hell.

So my 7600GT arrives and when I pull it out of the box I noticed one big potential problem. The board is shorter and blue, so it’s not an exact match to my original green, longer version. Uh-oh. I put it into the system, did all of the necessary motherboard changes to my ASUS A8N-SLI Premium and jumped into Windows. To my surprise, Windows booted up and looked to be working fine.  I reinstalled the nVidia graphics drivers and Enabled my SLI setup.

Then the problems began. I tried 3dMark06 and it bombed out.  Unreal Tournament froze on Exit, and Call of Duty 2 still only had 40 FPS in DirectX 9 mode. Hardly what I was looking for, right? It was time to track down how to “flash” the new card’s BIOS to the old card’s BIOS to match them up.  Maybe that would help? After a bit of searching I tracked down my boot disk, and slapped a copy of NVFlash on it.  Reboot. Backup the BIOS on the new card, and attempt to flash to the old card. No dice. NVFlash started yelling about the boards being different. Lovely.

So I jumped back into Windows and searched Google for my specific problem.  Low and behold I just had to add some switches (-4 -5 -6) and it would force the BIOS onto the old card. So I booted back to my boot up disk, ran NVFlash, and after various warnings and pleadings to not flash that BIOS onto a different board, I had two functional cards with matching BIOSs.

That should fix everything, right? Wrong.  It was a 50% improvement, but UT was still freezing the system and Call of Duty 2 was just jumping around like a mad man.  So I complained, whined and moaned.  I tried switching the cards around without any improvement.  I switched them back.  Nothing seemed to work.  So after a Yahoo Chat with Gump and Anubis, Anubis told me he had the answer to my solutions. His magical solution was for me to call BFG’s Tech Support at 1-866-BFGFIXX (1-866-234-3499). I said, “Yeah Right.” Anubis made a good point, “Um, you’re going to call in three days anyway after you’ve been bitching, why not try now?”

So, I called. I held on the phone for nearly 30 minutes and gave all of the good geeky info to tech support guy. His professional response to the blue card, “Hmm. Uh. Hmm. Well, weird I’ve never seen a blue 7600GT, but that should matter. You’re getting some weird errors. Who is your motherboard manufacturer?” So I told him it was ASUS and he directed me to find out what chipset I had running, which I already knew and told him it was the nForce4.

“Great, go download the newest chipset drivers from nVidia, that should clear you up.”

I said thanks, that I’d try it and hung up. I had to admit I was skeptical. But, SLI Heaven was a chipset update away. I reinstalled the graphics drivers again after the chipset and low and behold my SLI works at 99% stability now.

3dMark06 went from the low 3000s with one to 5500+ with SLI

Call of Duty 2 is getting 75 FPS in multiplayer DX9 full everything at 1680×1050 resolution.

Unreal Tournament Single Player with Highest everything and 1680×1050 averages over 200 FPS.

Thanks BFG Tech Support and Thanks Anubis!

If anyone is looking for some crazy softball pants go check out Boombah.com. Mine should arrive today and my turfs should arrive just before the season begins in March. I’m looking forward to softball this year, probably because we didn’t all burn out on a fall league last fall.  Plus, we’ve got a couple of new guys, which is always fun.  Especially, if they show up consistently.

Two new updates for my techie side.

Wordpress just released version 2.1.  I’ll start playing with it soon enough for my ancillary sites.  ScalpEm.com will always be the last to upgrade since it needs to be stable. However, I’m going to get the old Groomlake site going again, so that ScalpEm.com will have it’s fun test best for templates and new versions before I go and break anything on the main site. I’m happy to hear that they are supporting 2.0.x branch until 2010, but I’m not sure that I like the Ubuntu method of major releases on a regular schedule.

In my other techie news, I picked up another BFG Tech 7600GT graphics card. My final plan for the computer is complete and it will be running SLI.  That should tide me over until the next major upgrade of the computer two or three years from now. The only reason for me to upgrade to Vista anytime soon would be for gaming, and since UT2k7 will be DX9 to start, there is no reason to rush to Vista and DX10 AND a new $500 graphics card.  The prices can come down on that.  By the way, NewEgg.com is running a special on those 7600GTs, for $89 after rebate.

Well, the scale didn’t win this week, but I didn’t kick it’s rear end either. After further review of the food journal, the ruling on the field stands; I didn’t do so hot over the weekend with my choices. However, I’m not getting down on myself. I still lost some weight, and I’m still feeling healthier than 3 weeks ago. I’ve also adjusted my goal to be an interim one, which will be follow by part two of my goal. This interim goal lines up with softball season, and it’s doable. Tough, but doable. Wish me luck!

As for the cleaning up of some of the house stuff. I’m slowly getting some Goodwill items together in the house. My old computer monitor might be useful to someone for a while an I need to be rid of that chair and extra night stand at some point. I’ll have to go through some clothes, but in reality most of that stuff is just rag worthy.

And the website seems to be doing very well this month. I need to get some more writing in this week, but I haven’t felt especially creative. A could 5-6 part preview of the baseball and softball season would be a good two weeks worth of posts though. Hopefully, I can get some of that stuff done soon. Also, I’m looking forward t seeing how I did with the College Football Blogger Awards.

Every now and then, life throws me a nifty little curveball.  Granted, I couldn’t ever hit one of those very well, but the kind that life throws don’t need to be hit.  Sometimes they are there just to be appreciated.  I got one of those this weekend, and it was a much appreciated one.

Other than that it’s the same old stuff, darts, bowling and softball. All in all, a good weekend. And I’m hoping to kick the scale’s rear end again tomorrow morning.

It’s early on Friday, but I’m going to go out on a limb and make my picks for the playoff games. Both the Saints and Patriots will win their games. The Saints win, because they have the best offense left in the playoffs and because Rex Grossman doesn’t have two good games in a row.  The Patriots win because they are the Patriots.  I can’t pick against them.  They’ve been there, done that so many times now that they’ll probably be on autopilot.

In other news, softball practices for rec league have started. Yay!

Sunday morning, I specifically checked the City of Tallahassee’s website, TalGov.com to make sure that there weren’t any schedule changes for recycling pickups. There weren’t, even though Monday (my scheduled pickup day) was a holiday.  Imagine my surprise when the recycling wasn’t picked up!

In reality, I wasn’t surprised at all.  Since I moved to my home in 2003, there have been at least 10 missed pickups of recycling and/or trash. Each time I complain, and each time they come to get the waste on the next business day.  However, this time, nobody came on Tuesday either! At 7AM this morning, I heard the recycling truck. At 7:15AM I checked my now empty recycling “smart cart” and it was empty.  There was one problem though, the rest of my street still hasn’t been picked up!

They skipped at least 50 other homes, empty my bin and then TOOK OFF.

The city wonders why more people don’t participate in their lackluster recycling program. I can’t imagine how many others have stories like mine. On top of that, the recycling program is ancient.  Collier County, where my parents reside, picks up once per week, instead of every other week, and they take nearly any kind of plastic, glass or whatever else you can recycle. Maybe the City of Tallahassee will wake up and smell the coffee, but after nearly 4 years of this, I think they’ll probably continue to sleep in.

Did I mention that ScalpEm.com was nominated for two College Football Blogger awards? Pretty sweet if you ask me, but while it’s nice to be nominated, I really want to win Best ACC Blog and The Job Award.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I get enough votes from other bloggers between now and Wednesday. Either way, it’s been great for traffic to the site, which I always appreciate.