Mattazuma's Revenge

My Carbon Footprint = 0

Good News!  I am now carbon neutral!

Just like all of those fancy Hollywood stars & Presidential candidates.  I feel greener already.

Check out my carbon offset certificate:


















Go here to get your own offsets!

My XBox 360 is Dead :(

My 360 died today.  I never had a problem before today.  Now it freezes up continuously.  It started after I downloaded an update for Call of Duty 2.  Not sure if it is related to the death of the XBox, probably not.

I'm getting it fixed, it's too much fun to toss.  The repair process is pretty painless.  Microsoft is sending a box to me, all I do is put the console in the box with my RMA number & mail it back.  I should get it back in less than three weeks.  Just in time for the tail end of the Halo 3 beta.

More time for poker!  Or, more likely, more time spent at work.

Mookie!!!

Mookie Wilson has always been my favorite Met.  So, obviously, The Mookie is my favorite blogger tournament.  Especially when I win.

Got amazingly lucky, too.  I was in really bad shape chip-wise and made an all-in bluff with QJ from middle position to try to steal the blinds.  Well I ran into 77.  The flop came down 789, the turn was a 5, and the river was a magical 6 to split the pot.  Felt bad for a minute.  The next hand I got 10 10 and almost doubled up and all was well.

With two tables left I started getting amazing cards.  In the last half hour I had KK three times, as well as some other good stuff.  Once again, good cards can help you to beat players who are much better than you are.

Shiner in Chicago!!!!

All is right with the world tonight.  Shiner Bock is finally available in Chicago.  I have been looking forward to this day since I first tried Shiner Bock when my parents lived in Houston in the mid 90s.  A case was $33 with tax at Sam's, which is a little high, but it wasn't like price was going to keep me from my Shiner beer.

It's as good as I remember.  I admit it isn't as good as my current favorite beer, Dogfish Head Beer IPA (either 60 or 90 minute varieties), but it is very good for a mostly "traditional" brewery.

Cory Doctorow's RIAA / DNC Delusion

I like Cory Doctorow & BoingBoing but every once in a while he seems to forget how things work in the real world.

He had a post today about the Democratic National Committee hiring a PR person for their 2008 convention who also works for the RIAA.  Cory is treating this like the world is ending:

The DNC can do better. This represents a potential shear with the left-wing blogosphere. I hate what the GOP has done to this country, but the RIAA isn't much better.

Guess what, political parties reward the groups that support them, and the music production industry generously supports the DNC.  According to Open Secrets, between 1990 and 2006, 78% of the donations from the music industry have gone to the Democrats, to the tune of $13.6 million.  The Republicans only received $3.7 million in the same time frame.  In the 2006 election cycle, Democratic congressmen (and candidates) received $1,064,944 while Republicans received $458,677 (per Open Sources).  Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein were the biggest recipients of the music industry's largess.

There is only one class in Congress, the incumbent class.  Congressmen of both parties, for the most part, are more interested in staying in Congress than protecting the rights of kids who may or may not have downloaded MP3s using Bittorrent.  The DMCA was passed in 1998.  In both the House and the Senate, the final bill was passed unanimously and Bill Clinton  signed it in a big Rose Garden ceremony.  Doesn't sound like a Rovian plot to me.

It may be that Cory is more upset with the person that the DNC chose than the fact that she works for the RIAA.  In his post he documents his past run ins with Jenni Engebretsen:

Engebretsen's PR approach is centered around stonewalling and avoiding difficult press calls. She contacted me in 2005 to deny that the RIAA had sent a takedown notice to a website called RPGFilms.net, and promised to answer my followup questions in a day or two. After four months of emailing and calling her, I finally got through to her (by calling her from a different phone, so she couldn't see who was phoning).

And it isn't like she's new to working with the Democratic party.  She previously worked for Dick Durbin & Chuck Schumer in their communications offices and before that in the Clinton White House.

There probably is a time & place to "bring down the wrath of the liberal blogosphere"  on the DNC for something.  I personally would pick the $20 billion in pork barrel spending in the Iraq war funding bill & an unwillingness to follow the requirements of the earmarks reform act passed earlier this year, but that's just me.  Spending political capital on who the lead PR person is for the 2008 convention seems to me like a waste of time.

A little PC knowledge is a bad thing...

So, I've been trying to build a new PC for the past few weeks.  I generally know what I am doing, but I made a few really bad assumptions which made the whole process much more painful than it should have been.

Lesson 1:  There are only 3 things that break in a PC

If your PC is on the fritz, there are only three things that are (most likely) the cause.  It's either the RAM, the hard drive or the video card.  If the PC is new, maybe the processor is bad, but it's probably one of the other three things.  Of course, when it's my PC, I'm looking for different and weird things going wrong so I assumed the obvious things were ok.  Big mistake.

Lesson 2:  The new parts aren't broken

I put my old memory & video card into a new system with a new hard drive, motherboard and processor.  And it started acting flaky right away.  The correct thing to do is assume one of the old components is broken and replace it.  What did I do?  I returned the motherboard, because it had to be broken.  Not surprisingly, once I reinstalled windows with the new motherboard, the same problems came back.

Lesson 3:  Remember what old parts you have

So, next I figured "it has to be the new hard drive".  Violating lesson 2 again.  So I drive 30 miles out to Fry's in the 'burbs and buy a new hard drive.  When I was driving home, I remembered I had a perfectly fine hard drive sitting at home.  I installed the "new" old hard drive in the PC, still not fixed.

Lesson 4: When in doubt, replace the memory

So, this whole mess had been going on for a few weeks before I got around to replacing the memory.  At least I had to go back to Fry's anyway to return the unneeded hard drive.  I put in the new memory, and now it works just fine.

My suggestion to everyone out there is to buy a PC from Dell or one of the other big online retailers.  Yeah, making your own PC isn't hard and it is nice to be able to pick out the parts you want to use, but it's a big pain in the ass when things go wrong.  Don't buy a PC from Best Buy or the other big electronics stores, the components are generally worse than what you get from Dell, it will cost more money and despite what people have said about Dell's support over the past few years, it is way better than how Best Buy will treat you if something goes wrong.

Here's what the mess looks like with the new PC:

Computer still broken

The new motherboard I purchased is messed up.  I ordered a new one from Newegg but it won't arrive until tomorrow.  I should have just bought a pre-built PC from someone, the building your own thing isn't hard but it's a real pain when things don't right.

In the meantime, I am drinking some good beers recommended by the semi-intoxicated guys at beerschool.com.  The podcast is good, but the level of discourse goes down as they drink more beers.  The superstar bartender show is especially silly.

Cool Astronomy Page

Check this site out.  It has scale pictures of every object in the solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter.  It is really cool.