The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Caryn bought me this hitachi sata drive recently. She said it had great reviews and that there was a software utility to enable sata 3Gb/s.

I thought OK, lets get this utility and see if it helps. WD has a jumper on their older drives for similar compatibility issues. Not only can you adjust speeds, but you get control over accoustics, power consumption optimization, etc. Its quite nice. While I can't see anything in windows that is different, it seems like the disk is more active at times. In MidnightBSD, dmesg reports SATA150 but atacontrol list shows Serial ATA II for that drive and Serial ATA 1.0 for the western digital. Interesting.

Our furnace was going on and off a suprising amount.  We couldn't figure it out last night.  Caryn called the office and someone came out to look at it. While they denied everything, he did something in there. 

They admitted there was mold in there!  Wow! 

Who could I be talking about?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6074182.stm

I had to reinstall Windows already on my PC. Windows decided to change the drive letter for the boot drive and wouldn't restart. Nice. Microsoft sucks. It should use %systemroot% or similar.

I still haven't gotten a response on my fingerprint reader either.

I just tried out GameTap this morning.  They have some neat titles in their "vault".  I'm not sure if its worth the subscription price or not in terms of how long i'd play it, but its very neat. 

I installed my copy of Windows XP Home that I ordered from Newegg.  OEM distributions are strange.  It installed as F: which pissed me off.  Seems that my secondary sata drive (port 1 instead of 0) was seen first and allocated a drive letter.  That really screwed me up. My fingerprint reader is no longer working on this pc.  I emailed microsoft, but am doubtful they will help.  They never replied to my email about Windows XP Home support for dual core.  Yes, it supports 1 dual core cpu on XP SP2 Home if you ever need to know that. 

My PC is somewhat fast now with the new hard drive and things.  I've noticed occasional lag and that could be thermal..  i still can't get the intel utility to give me valid readings of the fans. 

I'm getting 30fps in WoW at 1280 x 1024 with my nvidia geforce 7300 GS.  Don't have et installed yet.  I can post numbers on valve/steam games soon. 

I wish i could have afforded a pentium d 900 series or a core 2 but overall i like my new system so far.  I'm happy about the video card even though its not performing better than my radeon.  With hdcp and other issues coming up its good I went lowend.  I'm sure in a year or two i'll have to upgrade anyway. 

The hard drive i got last night seems to be reasonable on speed.  Its very consistent.  I was able to download 8 steam games and update windows without major "lag" in pc operations.  Not bad.

I got some work done on the server at work last night.  I think I've got a game plan with that.  I'm happy about that.

IE7 has been released.  I will no longer support IE6 users on any websites I make.  Hot damn! 

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pca.state.mn.us/artwork/kids/toad-b.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.pca.state.mn.us/kids/coloring.html&h=521&w=576&sz=8&hl=en&start=71&tbnid=lueKOE3sWEoKeM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=134&prev=/images%3Fq%3DFowler%2527s%2Btoad%26start%3D60%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DN

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6050408.stm

I don't think this will work. Upper cast indians will just start treating indians of other religions poorly. The "default" will change.

I'm going to bed soon. Things are interesting today. I've made real progress with MidnightBSD. If I manage to get the ata patches working this weekend, its possible I could run MidnightBSD on my desktop soon.

This windows client actually works on vista! Yes! I've got iTunes integration working as well.