Oddball Update

Greetings, folks. Sorry for abandoning you all here. In a few minutes, I’ll have the maintenance department come by and remove the inch-thick coating of dust that seems to be covering the place. Seems my own site forgot who I was; when I came here to post this, I was logged out and all of my UI arrangements had been lost. (I probably just deleted the cookies some time ago and forgot, but it was still a telling reminder of the length of my absence.)

Anyway, since I got back from my trip to Michigan, I’ve posted next to nothing here. I must thank my friend Pooch for helping carry the torch for a while and posting some entertaining stuff in my absence. Still, there’s really no excuse for such a long hiatus — well, actually, there is. I’ve been working some zany hours over the last few weeks, but thankfully, a couple of days ago the whirlwind pace slowed back down to a nice, even stroll. Just as I like it.

Since returning from Michigan, I’ve been working at my day job for at least 8 hours a day, and in several cases, as many as 11 hours. A new customer support application and concurrent website update were responsible. Simultaneously, I was undergoing a redesign of my former employer’s website, which ended up being a 28-hour affair rather than the 18-hour affair I originally anticipated. I had to spread that time out over a couple of weeks to get it all done, due to heavy workload at my day job. I was also developing some artwork for a friend of my mom’s, who has her own blog and wanted a spiffy masthead image. I wound up developing a few different designs, tweaking them a few times and then making some CSS adjustments to her site.

At last, though, all is settled, and I’m back in a more normal working pattern. Over the course of the last few weeks there have been several things I’ve wanted to post about here, but could not get to — so I thought I’d take a few moments today to clear some of that backlog. The rest of this post will basically serve as a spool-up of things that have happened to me personally, just a random “stuff going on” recap. I’ll follow with an in-depth review of my most recent purchase for the Xbox360, a game that threatens to have me addicted to the console like never before.

Daily Workout Report

My biking exercise regime continues unabated. Five days a week I ride five miles in the morning, and it seems to be paying off already — I feel much better, for starters, but there’s more tangible evidence as well…I’ve lost five pounds. I’ve also shaved three minutes off the time it takes me to complete the ride, meaning that eventually I’ll probably start biking some extra distance every day to make up for it. So far, so good.

I take my iPod along for the ride and listen to stuff — usually MP3s of my old cassette library — but was reminded shortly after our return from Michigan that its internal battery is made from pure, absolute suckage. In a fit of rage I ordered a brand new MP3 player, a Cowon iAudio X5. After a couple days worth of playing with it, I love the thing. If the Apple iPod is like Mac OS, and a Creative Zen Vision:M is like Windows XP, then the iAudio X5 is like a good Linux distro, giving you complete control of your music storage. It requires no special software like iTunes or Creative’s crappy stuff; you just plug it into a USB port and drag-n-drop your files to it with Windows Explorer. Meaning, of course, you can treat the thing as a 30GB flash drive if you really want — you can put any kind of file on it.

The X5 plays a wide variety of audio formats, including OGG and the enthusiast-grade FLAC. It has a built-in FM radio (which you can record direct to an MP3 either in real-time or on a preset schedule), a good quality voice recorder, views JPEGs and plays videos, and even reads text files. It can also act as a USB host device, so you can plug a digital camera directly into it and copy the pictures to the X5 without needing a computer. The audio playback quality is stunning; there’s a graphic EQ and several effects settings, and this thing pumps some mega bass, even through tiny headphones.

It’s not for the faint of heart, though; the X5 has no ID3 database system whereby you can elect to play songs by genre, artist or whatever else. You have to browse through it by folder. However, as an old DOS vet, this is the way I’d prefer things to be — plus, if that doesn’t suit you, later this year the open-source Rockbox firmware will support the X5, and then you can get your ID3 fix (as well as play Doom on your MP3 player — how sweet is that?).

Computer Corner

The time has finally come — well, almost — to put my new computer together. I’ve had a fair number of reliability concerns with my current hand-built rig, the most annoying of which is the fact that it takes nearly five to ten minutes just to boot up in the morning thanks to some elusive power problem. I don’t want to deal with parts headaches again, so I’m ordering a custom-built machine from Puget Systems instead. They’re like a “boutique” computer builder somewhere between warehouses like Monarch and the ultra-elite, overpriced outfits like Falcon and Alienware — and their customer ratings are second to none, so I figured I couldn’t lose.

I spec’ed out an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz) system with 2GB DDR2 PC800 RAM, an Asus P5WDH Deluxe motherboard with built-in wireless and a variety of other things. You can see the complete system specs here. I need a minimum of two video cards to run my three monitors, so I ordered a new Geforce 7600GT SilentPipe (a passively cooled card with no noisy fans) and will toss in one of my existing Geforce 6800GTs to complete the picture. The 7600 is just a stop-gap, because in a couple of months the Geforce 8800 series will be out, and I’m going to pick one up to finish things off. Gotta be ready for BioShock, ya know!

I’ll also be picking up a new Samsung flat-panel monitor from Newegg…the time has finally come to retire my 22″ CRT and go LCD-only. The savings in heat and electricity should be grand, but I’m just hoping the color reproduction will be sufficient for my needs. It’s tough playing games and doing work on the same rig — sometimes the best parts for each task are mutually exclusive!

Xbox360 Madness

I was going to post about my recent exploits with various games for the Xbox360, but this section ballooned to half the size of the entire post. Thus, I have posted those thoughts in a separate entry instead.

The Wrap-Up

Join us again shortly here on Oddball Update as I post yet more backlogged items of interest from my stack of stuff over the coming hours and days. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the maintenance crew has arrived with the feather dusters.

Categorized as Life, Randomness