Yes, I know it's been a while since an update. I've been writing some software on the side, so expect a release soon in the art or computers sections shortly. That is all for now.

So the links page has a nice little addition -- our lord and savior jesus hovering ominously over the lower 48. You know you're going to burn in hell, so just relax. I've also put cowstick up in the art section just for fun. Popsicles are yummy! The projects page now has a wish list section. This should provide you, my humble viewer, an outlet for those massive wads of Benjamins that keep filling up your pockets ever-so-annoyingly. I know you find wealth so frustrating, so here's your chance for relief...just pop on over, pick something up, and send it my way. And furthermore, if you haven't been to dustinplumb.net in a while, you should scope that cause I tossed up some new material. I also tossed a few new anchors in the links page. Somehow some things of importance were forgotten in the whirlwind of stagnation. All apologies. I can't wait to see Meg Lee Chin [again] on Friday...snap! This is not a home page. This is a web site. Please note the distinction.

Sheesh, it's already September. Time flies when you're old. My last few posts were written in a pretty foul state of mind...my demeanor was meaner. I'm not feeling nearly as bad as I was. A p4 2.0AGHz drives my new main machine. I'm very impressed with it so far. I cannot say enough good things about the Gigabyte 8iexp motherboard. It's got everything you ever want. I really have to say this is probably the nicest piece of PC equipment I've ever purchased. In fact, I was so pleased with this new setup that I stuck the "intel inside" sticker on my generic case. Heh. I still have a bad taste in my mouth about AMD, but I may try and pick up a cheapish CPU to replace the old one and do the upgrade shuffle. So not that much is new. I spent a week in Lubbock on business but managed to hook up with some friends. It was a nice change of pace. The inlaws are in town with the Recreational Vehicle. It's nice to see them again. If we can convince the rest of her side of the family to move up here (hint hint) perhaps they will come up here permanently? I caught Sonic Youth live in Portland on 08/30. Rad! I had completely forgotten that Jim O'Rourke was playing with them. His addition really creates some new sounds. The set wasn't very surpristing (cause Ev already gave me a good idea about what they're playing live right now), but the show really kicked some ass. 2 encores though? A little strange. Hmmmm....I suppose I can live without Bumbershoot since I saw them down here. I posted 4 new sets of pictures in the photos section, some newer than others. Enjoy and come back soon!

I don't give a fuck what AMD says, this article is 100% accurate. A heat sink falling off an Athlon will cause instant failure of the CPU. And smoke. I learned this the hard way. Out of nowhere, the fuckin thing fell off. I wasn't 100% sure that I had it on securely after I put on the thermal paste, although my pulling in various directions seemed to hint that it was. The horrible position of some caps on this retarded ASUS board didn't help matters much. So now my main box is toast. Smoked. Literally. I'm stuck either scrapping this crappy thing entirely (which is what a smart person would probably do) or buying a new CPU to see if the MB is kaput as well. I wonder if any vendors would be willing to work with me on this...I know that most of them do not like to exchange CPUs for any reason. Fuck. I am not happy.

In my continued attempt to phase out the Infiltration Lab name stuff and phase in noisybox.net, I have created a new logo (see above). Sure, it's nothing special and it looks a lot like the old logo and I cranked it out pretty quickly...but it's still something. Again, those bookmarks should be updated to http://noisybox.net. I should really get around to fixing the bug I discovered in ChachScan the other day. It's a single character bug caused by an improper array size declaration. Ug, I only found that because somebody emailed me asking about some code and I happened to see it. I suppose since I don't have dev studio installed (yet) on my box I'll have to do it on my work machine. No biggie. I should also get around to working on the silly little article that I started for Wirehed Magazine the other day. ...and I should clean up the office and unpack some boxes and take out the trash and get out of the house more, but ultimately I'm lazy.

FUCK IT Let me go on record as saying that the ATI Radeon AIW 8500DV is NOT compatible with the ASUS A7A266 motherboard. Period. Want to prove me wrong? Be my guest...drop me a line and let me know just what kind of voodoo magic bullshit you had to perform to get those two pieces of shit working together... I today I'm running on a different power supply, and I decide to do some more fiddling. I got some cheap-o thermal paste from Rat Sham and cleaned all the old waxy strip crap off my CPU and applied the paste. I think it has made a difference in my CPU temp, but it's still kinda hard to tell. It's certainly not any worse. I decide to do some additional troubleshooting of my lock-up problems. I notice some dust crap on my DDR stick from the CPU fan, so I clean it thouroughly before sticking it back in. I tweak every possible combination of settings relating to RAM settings, with mandatory fuckin reboots in between. Still locks up. I turned the hardware acceleration (desktop properties, settings, advanced, troubleshooting, acceleration) all the way down and managed to perform my standard lock-up test (ie. loading this page in either Mozilla or IE) without a freeze. I thought it was a good start...but unfortunately that caused subsequent reboots to freeze before Windows would load. Nice. I tried every other hardware acceleration setting...everything other than FULL acceleration would freeze during windows boot. Real fuckin nice. I even tried moving my DDR stick to another slot. No go. All this on top of what I tried yesterday. I'm just fuckin convinced that these two LAME ASS pieces of hardware won't work together. Period. I like to think that I know what I'm doing when it comes to these kinds of [technical] schtuffs. I'd like to think that I'm pretty "up" on dealing with and configuring hardware. There's no fucking possible reason why I shouldn't be able to get this fucking card working in this fucking motherboard. It's absolutely fucking rediculous. So, in the event that it's not entirely obvious now, I'm a little pissed off about this whole situation. This kind of shit just shouldn't happen. I'm angry. Ug! I can't wait to build a new system...

Phew. Things have been kinda busy. Did you know that in Oregon you can carry a boat on top of your car, provided that the overall height doesn't exceed 14 feet? Neither did I until I missed the question on my drivers test. How the hell was I supposed to know that? I still passed. We saw Cootie Platoon (my friend Melodie's band) play at the Tonic downtown last night. It was a fun show and we had a great time...it was awesome to see Mel after so many years... I've done some additional troubleshooting on my video-card system freeze-ups to no avail. :( I'm so disappointed with this crap. I can't believe that I've spent this many hours troubleshooting such a crappy problem. Last night, I did a ton of message board reading, switching around various undocumented motherboard jumpers, tweaking BIOS settings, running diagnostic software...all without luck. Goddammit, that sucks. Tonight, I swapped out my power supply with the one I got back RMAd from MWave a few months ago. Still no luck. So let's recap: No problems originally and the system was stable, install new video card from ATI, problems start immediately, ensure all drivers/bios up-to-date, tweak settings, move PCI cards to different slots, RMA video card, reinstall OS+drivers from scratch on new HD, move around jumpers, swap out power supplies. NO LUCK! :( I think tomorrow I'm going to try and pick up some thermal paste for my CPU, I'm convinced that my cooling sucks...although I really don't expect this to fix my lockups. The only possibility I can think if is memory problems, but I still find it weird that the system was stable with the same RAM before I installed this ATI crap. And now to top it off the fan on my server's power supply went out sometime today. Wonderful.

And yeah, again, it's been a while since I've had anything to say...but I have been quite busy. You may [or may not] have noticed a new domain for the ilab. I'm in the process of phasing out the "infiltration lab" name and switching over to noisybox.net. I still need to create a new logo, so look for it eventually. I will probably keep the ilab.webhop/homeip.net entries valid, but I am considering putting up a redirector page to motivate people to change their bookmarks. Downtime turned me on to a nice free DNS service that I'm using now to host DNS for my brother's site. Rad. My computers are in a state of disarray right now...my Windows box still has problems, I'm entirely convinced it's a conflict with my MB and video card. Sux. I'm going back to Pentium...screw AMD...this has always left a bad feeling in my mouth. I should be more stubborn about things sometimes... We saw Modest Mouse on Monday downtown at the Crystal Ballroom. The show was excellent! They pretty much played all my favorites and the encore was quite long. I was impressed! The 'Ballroom is a great looking venue...very sweet looking inside. The rubbery wood floors are a bit unnerving in the oh-crap-we-are-going-to-fall kind of way, but it's still fun. I can't wait to check out Sonic Youth there later this month! We've been painting/staining an entertainment center slash arm-wah (yeah, like I'm even going to try and spell that one) and bookcases that my mom bought for us unfinished. It's been entirely too much work, but I really think they're going to look beautiful when done... We were also on a movie kick for a while. Went to see Goldmember in the theater (just because, c'mon, it's damn funny) and rented several DVDs, including The Royal Tenenbaums, Shallow Hal, The Others, and Ocean's Eleven...but goddamn if Hollywood Video (the closest rental place to us) only has 2 copies of Amelie on DVD that are always checked out...blah.

Well, my Windows box is going to be down for a bit while I attempt to reinstall the OS. I'm doing this in hopes of obtaining some kind of stability from my piece of shit motherboard and piece of shit videocard...both of which I probably paid entirely too much for. :( Blah. If, for some goddamn reason, this reinstall doesn't fix the problem(s) I've been having, I suppose I will have to buy a new setup. Oh well, crap crap crap... bbl...

Well, Stacy and I took the MAX train downtown today, and guess what we just happened to pick up?

and

Jealous yet? I'm totally excited! I wanna go see Cornelius as well, but I just wasn't in the mood to drop that much $$$. We may still do it though. I'm not entirely sure if it's just summer or if this town always gets this many good shows, but damn, there are so many good shows coming up here...it's awesome.