Door dog update

Never mind, it was a mouse. :-) Now I need to trap it.

Door dogs

Last night I saw a black flash run down my hallway. I haven't found any rodents, so I think it was a door dog. Normally they only show up around 3AM when I'm really tired, and are only visible out of the corner of my eye, but I almost saw this one clearly and it was only around 9PM. I'm surprised I couldn't find much about door dogs on Google, but Google Books does have an excerpt from The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs, who was the first person to give a name to the creatures.

Speaking of Burroughs, I think The Western Lands was the first book of his that I read. I actually read most of his books in reverse order, following The Western Lands with The Place of Dead Roads and Cities of the Red Night, next reading some other stuff including The Wild Boys, then the "cut-up" books, and ending with Naked Lunch and Junky. That actually wasn't a bad way to do it. It's been a while, so maybe I should read them again in chronological order and fill in the gaps.

I even have the Giorno Poetry Systems The Best Of William Burroughs CD box set that I haven't listened to in a while. In fact I'm not really sure where it is -- ah, it's filed away with the LPs. My favorite is still Dead City Radio, though. I notice that most of the Burroughs CDs on Amazon date from the early '90s, which corresponds with when I was buying them and also when I was in college. I think the whole thing was probably started by Material's Hallucination Engine album, which featured Burroughs, since I was a big fan of Bill Laswell at the time. I remember anxiously awaiting the release of Seven Souls and the remix album The Road to the Western Lands, which focused solely on Burroughs's work. I'm not sure if I waited until then to read his book, since Seven Souls was actually originally recorded in 1989 and only re-released in 1997, but that explains why I started with The Western Lands.

Anyway, just like my reverse reading of Burroughs, this post is kind of a reverse chronology of my interest in him, which started in college, continued while I was living in Japan, and popped up again last night when I saw the door dog, which since then has remained invisible. Maybe if I pop in a CD, it'll make another appearance. Then again, maybe I should be glad it's gone, because as WSB said, "Door dogs are not guarders but crossers of thresholds. They bring Death with them."

Computer updates

I still haven't updated my computer web pages, but as of today I've finished updating my computers and taking pictures, so I'll try to wrap up the pages soon. A couple weeks ago, I realized my Home Server needed more than 1GB of RAM, so I decided to double it to 2GB. While I was buying RAM, I decided to double the RAM in my HTPC as well.

The Home Server upgrade was really smooth, but when I finally popped the extra 2GB in the HTPC today, it wouldn't boot. I checked online and found that there was a problem with older versions of the BIOS and 4GB. I checked my BIOS and discovered I was still on 1.0! After some struggles, I got BIOS 1.7 installed and now everything works fine. The HTPC is still 32-bit, so I can only use 3GB for now, but maybe I'll switch to 64-bit when I upgrade to Windows 7. I need to test the codecs under 64-bit first.

I learned a good tip. Nero has built-in tools for creating a bootable CD-ROM. I couldn't get my bootable USB flash drive to work, but the CD-RW with the BIOS files on it worked great. That's how I'm going to do all future BIOS updates.

Deerblogging

I took this on July 4. I could have done some groundhog blogging too, but the critter got away before I could grab my camera.


Deer in the backyard

SKULLCANDY

Is there a better name for a female-fronted Japanese ska band than SKULLCANDY? (I guess Ore Ska Band is a close second.) That's all I really wanted to say in this post, but the MySpace pages for these bands are fantastic. First of all, unlike YouTube, you don't have to worry about the videos being pulled by overzealous copyright holders. Check out SKULLCANDY's guitarist in their videos, and also be sure to listen to my favorite song, "Go! But reality!!"

Next, the friend links are great for finding new bands you might like. I'd never heard of 蕾-TSUBOMI- before, but when they list friends like Ego-Wrappin’, Bonnie Pink, Shakalabbits, and GO!GO!7188 (all huge personal favorites), not to mention SKULLCANDY and their compatriots Witchery SKANK, I knew I had to check them out. I also love that EGO-WRAPPIN' are friends with Patti Smith.

Finally, you get up-to-date news, like SKULLCANDY has released a full album called MERRY MERRY!! (not to be confused with the excellent EGO-WRAPPIN' album merry merry). Also, not only will ORESKABAND hopefully be at the Vans Warped Tour again this year, but you can also buy their album and gear in the US! I'm sure there's more cool stuff waiting to be discovered.

BlackBerry blogging

This is my first attempt to blog from my new phone. Here's my Storm's custom wallpaper.

Update: OK, so posting images don't seem to be working from my BlackBerry, so I had to fix this post from my desktop. The screenshot was taken using Capture It!

I found a prime!

By participating in the No Prime Left Behind project, I discovered that the number 493 x 2⁶⁶⁹¹⁵¹-1 is a prime number. If you perform that calculation, you'll get a number with 201438 digits, which makes it the 891st largest prime number discovered as of today.

The NPLB project is using well-sieved files, which means that most of the non-prime numbers have already been eliminated. That means there's a good chance I'll find some more primes in the future, although maybe not as big.

DC Update

(That's Distributed Computing, not District of Columbia. I try to avoid the latter.)

I'm continuing to fold @ home, now as part of the FreeRepublic team. I just hit #6 on the team, and I'm currently producing about 50K PPD or 1.5 million points per month with only three PCs. I'm also still helping the [H]ard DC Commandos, and I just set up my stats on Free-DC, so here's an overview:



If the image looks weird it's because I'm still playing around with the colors. The commandos are up to #12 on DC Vault, so hopefully we can reach the top 10 soon.

Bhavani is complete (almost)

The case finally arrived for my "slightly smaller" gaming PC, named Bhavani. Dave at PC Design Lab is a nice guy and builds good cases. I'm very happy despite the wait.



I still need to install some pimp UV case lighting, but after that it should be done.

This marks a milestone in that I don't want to spend anymore money on PCs this year. However, one of the hard drives in my main PC just died last night, so maybe I'll have to add a clause allowing replacement parts. Now that everything is pretty much built, I'll try to take some nice pictures and update the PC pages.

If you remember my previous post about every PC I own having a different operating system, Bhavani has Vista Ultimate 64-bit, which is different than my laptop which runs the 32-bit version. With Girija running 64-bit Windows 7 beta, I suddenly have a shortage of PCs able to run 32-bit BOINC projects. I need to upgrade to the RC of Windows 7 anyway, so maybe I'll install the 32-bit version this time.

Quote of the day

Mark Steyn, discussing gov't regulation of cars:

...and soon nanny-state regulation will require every American under 37 to be in a rear-facing child seat, which is a pretty good metaphor for where the country's going.

Read the whole thing.