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Pictures of the city beach, county, music school are high!

Sex lyrics are sometimes free, not for home sale on the high center of the map.

What is this nonsense, you may ask? I just wanted to see what would happen if I made an entry the included all of the most popular search terms. Probably not a whole hell of a lot.

Sex. Lyrics. Map. Pictures. Pow! A free sale? Home, city. Home.

To make this post more interesting, here’s a “what-if” vision I had: what if Willem Dafoe was cast in “Driving Miss Daisy” instead of Jessica Tandy? (and what if it was in French?)

That’s what the boot screen says on my new computer. The same phrase can also be found at MSI’s site promoting their “Core Cell” technology. Core Cell is kind of explained here in case you care. On a related note, I found a good link for getting rid of that stupid boot screen.
While it’s not quite Engrish, it is confusing and grammatically questionable. I’m guessing they forget the phrase “the most,” but it’s hard to say.

I still can’t get networking to work on my SuSE Linux install. I probably just need to play around with the drivers some more, but that’s not fun on a computer without networking. My Linux skills are a bit rusty; I don’t remember off the top of my head how to uninstall drivers. Other’s who’ve had this problem apparently solved it by adding an additional PCI ethernet card, but it would make me really sad to have three stupid ethernet ports when I only need one.

So far, I’ve only been playing one game on it, Far Cry. With the new hardware I can jack up all of the graphics settings and get a lot more detail, which is really nice. I also installed the 64-bit patch, which might not do all that much besides add some additional content. What’s worse is the game is quite unstable. It’s not just crashing the game; it’s making the machine reboot every time it pukes. Nice. I had very few crashes with the old version. I’m not sure if the 64-bit version is buggier, or if it has something to do with my new hardware setup or associated drivers.

On a more interesting note, there was a flock of some sort of noisy tropical bird in the huge ficus tree that hangs over our back yard. I didn’t get a close look, but I think they were green with orange heads…maybe a red-masket parakeet or a red-headed Amazon parrot? I’ll try to get a picture if they come back. Flocks of feral exotics have been observed in San Diego since at least 1998.

Update: found this Union Tribune story about wild (feral) parrots/parakeets in San Diego. Though they are most often associated with Ocean Beach, Point Loma, and El Cajon, I guess it was only a matter of time before they discovered Birdland.

As with cars, I am rarely 100% satisfied with my current computer, but I’m also loathe to blow a lot of money on something that I’ll regret later. The last time I built myself a new system was in November of 2002. In a nutshell, an AMD XP 2000 cpu, 768 MB of RAM, and a Geforce 4 TI 4200 video card. At the time, it was considered a “mid-range” system (which means that you might not be able to play games less than a year old at full resolution/detail, etc., but it’s more than enough for just about everything else).

I started seriously thinking about an upgrade last year, and even filled up a shopping cart full of stuff now and then…but there’s always new stuff coming down the pike (which drives down the price of the not-so-new stuff).

Anyway, enough drumroll. I decided the time was right to put together an AMD 64 based “dual core” system, and to make it really crazy, have Windows XP 64-bit edition installed on one drive with SuSE Linux on the other.

Our adventure starts with the purchase of the following components from NewEgg:

motherboard: MSI K9N Platinum AM2 nForce 570
video card: eVGA Geforce 7600GT KO 256MB
power supply: ENERMAX Liberty ELT400AWT 400W Power Supply
processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2000MHz HT
memory: CORSAIR XMS2 1GB (2 x 512MB) DDR2 RAM (PC2 5400)
hard drive 1: Western Digital 250GB 7200 RPM SATA
hard drive 2: Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM SATA (cheap from eBay)
DVD-RW: BenQ DW1655 16X Dual Layer DVD±RW (from ZipZoomFly)

How did I pick out all of this stuff? AnandTech’s guides are a good place to start. I sort of following their pre-AM2 mid-range guide, except that I went with an AM2 system anyway. Because I’m funny.

Assembly wasn’t too bad; I’d grabbed a pimpin’s case (neon lights? check) from Fry’s last year on sale, and had either misplaced the instructions or never had them to begin with. The hookups for the front panel audio are goofy; they just throw in 2 1/8 jacks that I guess you’re supposed to run outside the box into your soundcard. I haven’t bothered with them yet.

The Enermax power supply is quite cool; it’s modular, meaning that you only plug in the power cables that you need. It also has “dual 12 volt rails,” which supposedly provides more stable power. Or so I’m told. They even included a little folding soft case to hold the extra cables I’m not using right now. Thanks, Enermax!

This is probably the third MSI motherboard I’ve used. I often gravitate toward MSI because their boards usually offer a nice bang-for-the-buck without being over-the-top.

So I get everything put together, and it fires up the first time without a hitch. I install Windows XP 64, and boot up to the horrible 640×480 VGA screen. First things first: I update all of the motherboard and videocard drivers. Here I encounter the first problem; the machine will not reboot into regular graphics mode; I’m stuck booting into safe mode. To make a long boring story short, I tried everything I could think of with the video card (tried different drivers, checked voltage settings, temperatures, etc.) The nice folks on the eVGA message boards came up with some good ideas, but still no dice. As a last ditch effort, I installed the latest BIOS for the motherboard (which was tricky to find; MSI’s “Live Update” feature apparently doesn’t work on Windows x64; I ended up finding the latest driver in the MSI message boards). Bingo! B-I-N-G-O, sucka! Big problem solved.

Other than that, things have been going pretty smoothly. Windows XP 64 looks just like Windows XP (though technically, I think that XP 64 is actually Windows Server 2003 recompiled as 64-bit). There are two separate Program Files directories; one for 32-bit apps, and one for native 64-bit apps. So far, I haven’t had any problems with 32-bit apps running on Win x64 except for MSI’s Live Update (which isn’t a big deal). It looks like driver manufacturers have been on-the-ball with rolling out 64-bit drivers in the last year, though I imagine that it could be tricky to find drivers for older legacy hardware.

As I’m writing this, I’m trying to install SuSE Linux on the other drive. The good news; the SuSE installer is quite cool; it detected that I already had Windows installed on the first hard drive, and it automatically configured a dual-boot set up! Sweeeet.

The bad news; I’ve run into a problem that many other users with the newest nVidia 500 series boards have run into; Linux doesn’t seem to like the dual onboard Gigabit ethernet controllers. I can’t get a network connection. The only “fix” I’ve found so far is really a workaround; install a PCI ethernet adapter. I don’t care for that solution, though….I’m going to keep searching for a nicer fix.