Carry On, My Wayward Friend

Yeah, it was nice when I'd shoot an email out to Eric and...oh, ninety seconds or so later had a reply. Even...ok, especially, at two in the morning.

So I ranted the other day about Cybertron. Felt good. I think I'll have to be a little more moderate in future rants, though.

And Cybertron called me yesterday. They wanted my cc number to charge the difference for the new board. And you couldn't have asked for this information the first time? But at least they called, instead of making me wait a week to realize that they never shipped it and call them. It's not great, but it's an improvement, and I'm all for that.

Speaking of which, I think maybe I should have ordered this board instead of the Intel:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=240313
It's got a Radeon 9200 integrated! ATI says all you need is a nice AGP card and you've got triple monitors.

I run a Radeon 9000 Pro and dual 19" CRTs. I love it, but I'd like a TV out also. Yes, the Radeon 9000 does have TV out, but you can use dual monitors OR TV out, and that just won't work. I use both of my monitors all the time. So maybe in a year or so.

I talked the wife into letting me upgrade just a few months ago, and it'll take a while for her to forgive me.

Anyway, Eric, you know my situation. Seven computers on one DSL. You know what? It's not bad. Sometimes it gets a little droopy, like when I pull down an American Express commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Patrick Warburton as Superman (~50MB), but overall, it's pretty fast.

And I think Qwest bumped up our bandwidth without telling us. I suspected, so I did a speed test at DSLReports, and sure enough, we're notably faster than before. You won't hear me complain.

Our mutual friend Leon is thinking of upgrading his system, so it looks like that Intel motherboard on its way to me may go to him. Of course, we'll have to get him a new chip and RAM also, at a minimum. Maybe I can talk him into a better vid card, too.

The dedicated file server I built for my home in January has been running for four months now, without any major problems at all. I'm pleasantly surprised. It's a Windows box, but it runs all the time, perfectly, without anyone ever even looking at it. Frankly, I didn't expect that kind of dependability from it. At first, I rebooted it every week or so, just because I was nervous for Windows. It's been running for about a month now without a reboot, though. I have it on a UPS, so when our power drops, it still runs. It's great.

My wife, parents, sister and brother all stream music and video from the server, and have personal folders on it. I set permissions to help prevent people from accidentally doing damage. This is me, happy as a clam. Really, I had no idea it could work so well. I built it from spare PC parts I had laying around.

I'm going to fiddle with the links on the right-hand side of the page now. Sorry if I ruin it, Eric, but I do have a backup.