Empty Notebook

In case anyone has an upgrade issue from Wordpress 2.5.1 to 2.6… check out the following link… you might have to hack up a value in your database to get things working again.

I had a professor in college at FSU that I really ticked off. I didn’t realize that her entire dissertation and research was on the Bluetooth radio technology that had not yet become prevalent back in 2000. Sure, it was on it’s way but so was a lot of other technology. When it came time to write a paper for the class, I did some research and concluded that Bluetooth basically sucked. 33 feet? Blah. Power consumption? Blah. She didn’t agree, and marked down my paper for it just because she didn’t like my points.

I just didn’t understand the big deal, and to a degree I still think Bluetooth sucks.

Yes, my mono Plantronics headset works nicely with my LG Voyager for calls. Yes my LG HBS-200 stereo headset (thanks honey for the birthday gift) works well with my LG Voyager, when it’s on a desk. But put the phone in my pocket and neither one of those is a very good option.

Why? I googled, and found that since the human body is so much salt water (duh) it wreaks havoc on radio signals (Bluetooth). So what I have is a really stupid technology than works for 30 feet when it’s in a room, but not even 3 feet when it’s in my pocket. Brilliant. I guess I’ll have to get one of those goofy looking arm bands so that the phone (and Bluetooth antenna) are out and near my great new stereo headphones.

Thanks Bluetooth, you still kinda suck!

Before…

After 16 hours, 5 power supplies and fans, 3 disks, 2 N95 masks and 1 SCSI cable and a RAID controller card…

So I’ve made a switch here on Empty Notebook and on my FSU sports blog, ScalpEm.com to Akismet from Spam Karma 2. We’ll see how it goes, but SK2 doesn’t seem like it’s developed a lot, and it’s been letting all kinds of Pingback / Trackback spam into ScalpEm.com. We’ll see how it works out over the next couple of weeks, with ScalpEm.com being the bigger test. Incidentally, I installed WP Super Cache on EN yesterday, and it’s pretty darn great from what I can tell.  It’s a definite “maybe” for the future over at ScalpEm.com.

I’ve recently decided to ditch my personal email account that I’ve paid for for the past few years in favor of Gmail. I used to access my old account with Mozilla Thunderbird, via IMAP, and that’s worked fine for a while. I decided to check out Gmail again, since I’m tired of spend $25 per year on my email account, and because I don’t really like the Yahoo interface, or the Hotmail interface. I found out that I’ve been pretty stupid in delaying my email address change.

First of all, Gmail is fast. I mean, super-fast. And, labels (which I realize are now in Thunderbird) are WAY better than my old style folder system. Multiple labels, multiple sort views, it just kicks ass. I have the power of Google to search through my email. Sure there are some advertisements, but who cares? I hardly notice them, and to be honest, once in a while they show me a product or service I might actually be interested in.

The detractors will tell me that my privacy is at risk. It might be, but so is the email that is downloaded to a local machine if someone really wants to take a look at it. In fact, Scott MacGregor’s main argument at this Wired.com article is, “Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control. Furthermore, you can integrate data from different applications on the desktop in ways that you can’t do with web-based solutions, unless you stick to web solutions from a single provider. For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird. We’d like to continue to expand the kinds of data you can share between Thunderbird and other apps (both web and desktop applications).”

Okay, those are good points, but I think most users out there really just want to check their email. I don’t need to integrate my Mom’s Zucchini Casserole recipe, with anything on my computer. I just need to save the email and figure out where it is at a later date. Labeling under “Food” in Gmail has me there in a couple of seconds, without having to fire up my computer. Plus I can grab it from my mobile phone if necessary. Maybe I don’t get it because I’m not a power email user. I don’t get 100’s of emails each day to my personal account. I keep it simple that way, but then again, I think a lot of people do. So really, for the average user, like me, web-based email, especially Gmail’s superior interface, is perfectly fine.

Now if I could just get my email subscriptions to update from my old email address.

I’ve been researching HDTV’s quite a bit the last couple of weeks, even though I didn’t have an intent to purchase one yet. I had narrowed my choices down to something in the 40″ to 42″ range and LCD. I chose LCD, because my viewing room is so bright. Then I thought about why I really wanted an HDTV. Why am I bothering to look at them?

Sports Is My Main Reason
I’m an avid college football fan. I’m an even bigger baseball fan. When the picture is clear, I’d probably watch just about any sport. When viewing on a digital signal, Golf is amazing. I subscribe to the Major League Baseball Extra Innings package through Comcast & inDemand. Wouldn’t it be great to watch a bunch of games in HD? Sure. Too bad the content isn’t offered yet. That’s right, I’d spend close to $2000 on a TV that can’t fully be used. (Forget about the fact that Comcast in Tallahassee isn’t offering Game 11-14 yet as part of that package, either.) I really have no idea WHEN it will be fully used either.

Geek Factor Is Another Reason
I’m also a geek at heart. I like my tech toys. I didn’t NEED an 20″ widescreen computer monitor at home, but I bought one as a replacement for my old 17″ CRT. It saves power and looks great. An HDTV is a fun thing to have, and it’s a fun thing to show off. But those aren’t sound reasons to buy a one.

Why I Decided That Don’t Need An HDTV
I have a four year old 32″ Sony Wega standard definition television. At the time, it was expensive, but in comparison to today’s HDTV prices. I can’t beat it for DVDs (it has a 16:9 enhanced mode), or for the digital channels on cable. I can’t say the same for the analog channels, but that’s Comcast’s fault or, most likely the Motorola DVR’s fault, not the television’s. The biggest difference in picture, for me so far, has been the difference in the quality of the signal. ESPN HD down-converted to 480i looks way better than my regular ESPN. But, I wonder just how much better it’s going to look on a new HD TV? As for network shows, I don’t need to watch sitcoms in HD. Even Planet Earth on Discovery HD theater looks amazing on a down-converted signal. On top of that, it uses far less power than a replacement is going to use. If anything, I wish that Comcast would just switch over ALL of the channels on the Digital Cable Box to actually BE DIGITAL.

Until I can watch my Mets in HD almost every night, I might as well stick with my Standard Definition television, and save my cash too.

It’s not as good as Ivan Drago, but it’s fun nonetheless. Go destroy a 3rd world village!

McVideoGame

What’s better than watching the video of Buckner over and over again?

Watching an RBI Baseball reenactment of it with the announcers dubbed on it.

Kathy Sierra hit the nail on the head again, this time talking about how so many companies are like bad marriages. Her visuals are funny, as usual, so check out the article.

I wonder why companies behave like that so much. Maybe when a company is big, they forget about what could make them great because so many people are used to the “bend over and take it” treatment. Her point about marketing literature vs. user manuals is a perfect example. Why do I get generic help files and black and white documentation with poorly translated directions and diagrams? Because companies LOVE to outsource support.

For every good support experience, I’ve have at least 10 bad ones. If anyone needs an example of good though, call up BFG Tech. I had to wait on hold a little longer than I would have liked, but once I was through to an operator, my issue was resolved within 5 minutes. In all fairness, I had an advantage of the typical user, I could identify my motherboard and everything else I had tried, but BFG was great about not flipping through the “helpdesk script of death” and making me check if there was power to the card. The guys knew what they were talking about, pointed me to some new chipset drivers and I was on my way to SLI.

Thinking about that experience, I have to say, it’s not always all on the company, just like it’s never all on one person in a bad relationship. Slightly more educated users can also help the tech support vs. marketing vs. consumer battle.

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!