Welcome!

I realized that I have been somewhat neglecting my blog of late.  I have a very valid and perfectly acceptable excuse however – I have re-addicted myself to WoW.   World of Warcraft has, of course, become a perfectly acceptable reason to miss work, ignore your spouse, neglect your kids, and make new “real” friends that are approximately the size of my pinky.

Personally, I’ll never quite have the character or personal fortitude and dedication that my fellow (WoWites?  WoWers?… Idiots?) have.  While I will admit to sometimes being sucked in and staying awake until 2 AM in the morning… somehow I manage to pull my lazy ass out of bed at 6:30 and still make it to work on time.  Every night, somewhere between the hours of 6-8 pm, I even manage to get off the computer and go sit with my wife and kids around the dinner table and eat something so I don’t wind up being found dead at my computer from starvation.

Maybe it’s just me… but I seem to be perfectly capable of leading a normal, everyday, life outside of Azeroth.  It’s called self-control people.

Unfortunately…. my blog did suffer :).  So, while my real life has remained in tact, my online life has shifted from re-compiling software, breaking internet tablets, reloading ATI graphics drivers on my Gamer for the millionth time, and blogging… to looking at the ass of a cartoon character running around pretending to be bad as hell.

To add a note and further nerdify myself I shall say that I actually preferred Everquest 2 to WoW; but unfortunately everyone I know plays WoW and I’ve heard that saying “When in Rome…” and all that.  Guess I’m becoming a conformist.

On a more serious note, I have managed to switch myself to HandBrake instead of using my custom mencoder scripts mentioned in some previous articles – but it required compiling the SVN version as the released version doesn’t support Karmic Koala.  Or at least didn’t… it appears that they now have a 9.10 deb available and ready on their download site.  Mayhaps I’ll try it.  Anyway, HandBrake has proved quite easy in selecting my MKV specifications and ripping movies.

I missed the update last month to the ATI drivers, hard to keep track now that Ubuntu has permitted me to be a lazy bastard and get my drivers direct from the Karmic repositories.  No more compiling or manual installing hassle anymore.  That also means though that I no longer have to keep refreshing ATI’s website waiting for the “next release” to fix some glitch.  For the past couple months my Gamer has been running flawless…………. playing WoW :).

Oh, I don’t think I blogged this so I shall mention it here:  I finally got a stable overclock with my Gamer that I am content with!  After many, many, many….. and many more…. reboots changing between every possible combination of FSB, voltages, and Memory timings (since I do not have an AMD Black Edition processor) that I could think of I finally got it.  Initially I was *very* conservative about my CPU voltages which was causing my instability problems.. I did not want to go too far into the “red” according to my motherboard on the stock cooler.  I feared I’d cause some real damage.

I broke down and to ease my mind I bought a Xigmatek Dark Knight with an AM2 Type-X Adapter to allow me to mount it horizontally on the processor.  After this I cranked up the voltages.  I ended up with a FSB of 250@1.5v, the cpu multi dropped to x14.5, my memory set to 1333mhz with 6-6-6-24 timings giving me a 3.625ghz.  So I basically have an AMD Phenom II 945 acting as a 965 but without the Black Edition.  Probably should have just bought the 965 :).  My temperatures now never break 40c, even under a torture test.  It gives me great joy just thinking about that :).

Let’s see.. is there any other nonsense that most of you won’t care about anyway?  Oh, I wrote a small “Texts from Last Night” RSS app for the Android phone I have, but I haven’t added any finishing touches to it or published it to the market yet.  All it is currently is an RSS feed that pulls only from TFLN, may as well get a normal RSS feed app and just add TFLN’s URL to it :).  It was more of a proof of concept for me anyway, as I haven’t fully decided if I want to get into the whole mobile phone development scene.  So much work, all my stuff would be free so very little profit, and… I got WoW to play damnit!

So there we have it… I easily could have filled 3-4 whole blog posts with each of those topics individually if I was truly an attention whore… but I’m not completely.  Honest.  So instead we get a single blog post spanning several completely unrelated topics and jumbles together into an incoherent mess!!!  I blame WoW…. everyone else does!

Go play WoW!  Maybe you too can join the thousands of people that seem to ruin their lives over a damned game!