Wednesday, April 28, 2010

To be carried by the love of useless knowledge

Background music to play while you are reading

It all started with this post on Stage1st about tattooing, then boredom led me to the Wikipedia entry of such:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattoo

And Blutgruppentätowierung was mentioned in the "See also" section

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo

Not very interesting on its own. Nonetheless somewhere in the article they mentioned British Free Corps, which turned out had never been more than a handful of nutty Poms.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Free_Corps

That entry was particularly meticulous and confusing, however one Frankish name really stands out of all the Teutonic hullabahoo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pierrepoint

Fascinating figure, must be taken together with the story-within-a-story part of The Sandman #55.
The content even branches out to include some interesting criminal stories, which I am still reading through ATM. A few of them more or less relate back to the previous entry of people committed of treachery (How do you pronounce that word again?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Joyce

A.K.A. Lord Haw-Haw, we all know about him, but of his boss....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley

...who married someone of a prominent family.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitford_sisters

...one of which owns this piece of outstanding estate!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatsworth_House

This is how far I have covered tonight, wait and behold, it may even go on and cover every page there is in Wikipedia.

Monday, April 19, 2010

GIFs: How to change white background to transparent in 5 seconds using photoshop

Step 1: Open the file (duh)
Step 2: Select the background with magical wand (hint hint)
Step 3: Hit the "delete" key usually found on your 6 o'clock.
Step 4: Save your changes and make a nice cuppa to celebrate.

That simple
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I have started to get random NMI errors since I upgraded my motherboard, I have had a few in the past weeks however it occured twice today. Prime suspects?
1. My 8GB of memory, two sticks run at really unusual timings, however it could have caused more problems than a general NMI.

2. Razer Sound card, even less unlikely since no similar issues have been reported by users.

3. My frail RAID5 array on ICH10R, hmmmm no thanks, I have seen arrays fail and this doesnt look like it.

4. Probably video driver issue, I have updated it now anyway because of CS5 launch. Let's see if the problem goes with it.

5. Finally, the omnious "Extended Shadow RAM" that I had to bite to be able to use Matrix RAID and SATA optical drives together. If #4 failed to prevent this from happening I will consider replacing my DVD with PATA.

6. Power stability, will connect that 4-pin 12V plug once I can be bothered to open the case, heheh.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Underappreciated recent classics

Go on, get off home, go make yourself more beautiful than you already are... if that's possible. Another East-end crime flick, however done with much class and superior cinematography. Realistic, gritty and surprisily apprehensive at times, this film stomps all heist-themed Hollywood produce in the last 10 years to the ground.



"This business of... being such a fucking prick, what is it really getting me?" Huh? 
 
Oh I love Tea Leoni, too bad she gets only two kind of casts: in a really bad film, or in a good one that failed to gain popularity. The latter category include other gems such as You Kill Me and of course, Ghost Town. Technically a comedy, it managed to blend the comedic absurdity well with the more serious content. I understand others may find it average, however Dr Pincus do reflect a lot of my own mental state from a long time ago, and till now.



Although I love the union, I love Virginia more.
A prequel and spiritual successor of the mess called Gettysburg, Gods and Generals follows the events through the eyes of Stonewall Jackson, from the start of Civil War to his own death after Chancellorsville. True masterpiece, not for the eyes of the narrow-minded hippies.



They say, "Evil prevails when good men fail to act." What they ought to say is, "Evil prevails."
Reminds you of what really goes on behind the scenes, and strips all the false glorification of politics.




...I need her....

I own three copies of this, one for my own viewing, one for collection and one for lending to other people. I will write more about it when I have time, in the mea time, WATCH IT!

Monday, April 12, 2010

Cough...stock....cough

In good news, found the song I have loved since childhood,

Tama and Friends is such a great show back then, still fond of it no less. I do realise that I had Oh dear, you never missed any chance to diss me for never growing up did you?
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Work is entering the final stage, told that site would be ready for launch today but heck no news came through by now.
Mari's dad suggested that the fair salary for a (competent) IT system designer/admin is 2% of the company's operational income, LMAO, I'd become rich soon. /irony
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Procrastination: something that will kill me well before prostate cancer or coronary heart disease. Problem is, altough I am aware that I only needed to endure the minimum time of discomfort to get things done, I still tend to ignore the tasks on hand till the very last minute. What could I have done?

Friday, April 9, 2010

Legendary Trap

NOT this 'shopped swimsuit photo you pervs, I am taking about Facebook, yes, facebook.
So I was trying to help a local business to sign up their fan page, which was pretty much nice and easy till I hit the submit button. It said in bold YOU ARE ILLEGIBLE TO REGISTER FOR FACEBOOK before kicking me back to a locked homepage:



Is it because I have multiple account to play mafia wars, or I used a new gmail account that did not fall on their radar? I had to google it and realised that facebook were trying to block access from potential users that were underage, if you had put an age under 13 you will be locked out, not sure how long but at least it wont be short. What I have done is forom the company's perspective, put down their date of incorporation as the page's birthday, which happened to be back in 2001....

Other equally innocent parties will also fall for the trap, such as parents trying to reserve their kid's place on facebook, or someone could simply have chosen the wrong year of their birth.The legendary part is that there is NO warning or explanation of what went wrong, and the signup form had all the years up to 2010 available.

To get around it you will have to manually delete the coockie from facebook.com, or for the less technical users, flush out all their saved passwords and settings for the particular browser before they were given a chance of starting over.

Sucks to be you.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

And you never can tell


Hurrah for real html tags, embedded videos does not get much easier.

So the throat discomfort is mostly gone, however I started to develop a really bad runny nose, so bad that I fear that may die from asphyxia every two minutes. Oh and I rammed my mom's car into a pole in the last mile home (literally). Irony has it it felt more like a closure since I knew I might as well crashed on the motorway with my mind all fuzzy. Before you start getting worried, just to let you know that I am not hurt, the car is drivable, all the damage done is the dislodged bumper and couple of lights smashed, which will be patched by tomorrow the quickest.

The morale of the story, don't drive while on a hypoxic high, especially in a car that you are not totally familiar with.
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Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.
Robert Heinlein

I wish I am able to take his POV into real life, and his statement is the most correct. The grass is always greener, and you will find out that other people's shoes are a lot less comfortable when you get to wear them. At least everybody deserves 8 hours of sleep everyday.

What still bothers me? I can totally see my significant other leave me because she cannot make me happy, not going to happen.

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And the game: Synopsis, a blend of authentic 8-bit visual experience with some quirky gameplay, especially suited to Nintendo fanboys.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Sickness, kindle and other things

First of all, not been totally well for the past few days, I suspect strep throat however it could have been anything and the outcome would not be any different. Getting better now, but will need a few more days to fully recover.

Finally made some progress towards my backlogged project lists, have installed the water loop before realising that the tubes with quick change connectors are larger than the pre-cut holes, which means there will be more gruesome action of dremelling in the upcoming weekend.

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In other news, bought myself a Kindle 2 in response to the recent implosion of the evil forces, sure it has a lot of character like PC, even manages to crash from time to time, however I quite like this little bit of crudeness.

Despite the small screen, manga appears to work pretty well out of the box, a bad scan can always be dealt with the appropriate software. Ahh I will be busy for the break, good to know that.
(Milestone Note: First time to include pictures in any post)

Saturday, April 3, 2010

3 Apr 2010

Uneventful Easter Saturday, got up date and wasted too much time wondering what to do. The loop is still in parts and I will have to get it sorted tomorrow.

Leo visited near the end of the day to have the fan assembly replaced, pretty straightforward but I accidentally poped his escape key and lost one of the the nylon tidbits, had to do some pretty complicated keyboard graft and he ended up with a naked Break/Pause key:-(. Then became somewhat depressed again for the mess, but Leo was good at cheering me up. Bless him, I am still the perfectionistic loser.

Still dizzy from the two stouts I had

Supermicro C2SBX+ 1.2a BIOS changes

This is what I have received in mail and hope this information will help other people out there wondering at SuperM's infinite wisdom of keeping users in the dark. I will postpone the actual upgrade till all other unfinished business could be settled because the upgrade has already caused one premature RMA.

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BIOS Rev 1.2a Update: CBXPC198.ROM Date:12-19-2008 ver. 1.2a

1. Add menu item "CPU Overheat Alarm". (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

2. Fix system can't boot with IEEE 1394 card. (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

3. Support BIOS editor change BIOS default BOOT order. (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

4. Support BIOS editor can set default supervisor password. (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

5. Add BIOS revision in setup menu. (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

6. Add DMI event log to log system error event and IPMI event log. (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

7. Microcode updated. (All X7 & C2 Phoenix BIOS Project)

8. Fix system can't boot from Compact Flash card via IDE or IDE-to-SATA adapter.

9. Fix AHCI mode SATA hard drive detection issue.

10. Enable hard drive S.M.A.R.T. feature.

11. Set add-on slot PCI bus master default to enable.

12. Only display warning message for keyboard error. (C2SBX/C2SBX+)

13. Fix USB keyboard hang up on USB 2.0 HUB issue.

14. Add setup item to enable/disable EHCI controller.

15. Fix S3 resume issue.

16. Enhance 1600MHz XMP/non-XMP memory support. (All X48 chipset)

17. Fix BIOS display incorrect memory size in POST screen.

18. Add PCMCIA (CARDBUS) device support.

2 Apr 2010

FORCING myself to write something, already missed two days and I knew this will happen, if I did not force myself to write today the entire endeavor may have been abandoned indefinitely.

In various news:

Test season is over, finished BIOSCI349 lab report on Thursday too so no uni work for a while from now.

Been to the shore this morning to pick-up a UPS bought on TM a while back, encountered several speed cameras at speed near 60kph, let's hope that I did not trigger their mechanical wrath...

Spent the rest of the day cutting the metal part of a Thermalright HR-01 LGA775 pushpin kit to fit a Zalman water-block, the finished product is crude however serves the purpose well. Was testing the loop but had visitors so distraction ended the day.

My folks are planning for a trip somewhere during the break but I am not keen, will keep myself occupied with my various projects and work commitment.