Metallica

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Tuesday night I had to skip out of class a little early, but man was it worth it.  Seeing Metallica in the Target Center was pretty darn fantastic.

I have to confess that Metallica is my #1 favorite band by far, despite the horrid St. Anger release.  I’ve been listening to their new Death Magnetic album since Kristin bought it for me (thanks, babe!) just about everytime I drive anywhere.  That said, I really enjoyed the concert depsite how much they had the bass and drums turned up.  Maybe the aucoustics for where we were (up a bit) were just off.

Of course, I forgot to take a decent camera.  Crappy phone pics will have to suffice.

Blurry pic of them playing...

Blurry pic of them playing...

Pyros!

Pyros!

Thanks to Derek M. and Kevin for coming out for the concert.  I hope you guys enjoyed it too 🙂

If/when I got to another Metallica concert, I am buying a Met Club membership so I have a shot at buying good tickets and probably traveling to another venue.  The Target Center is fairly underwhelming.

–Nat

AMD launches new video cards…

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…and continues to offer better value than nvidia across the board at normal prices.

The new 5750 and 5770 launched today are lined up against the 4830 and 4850, respectively.  It looks like they are about half the die size of the 4850/70 which means that AMD will be making a healthy profit on them if they get the same prices (or more, like they are currently) for the 5 series cards.  I would expect that within six months we’ll see the 5770 at $149 and the 5750 at $99 which will completely replace the 4xxx series.   If the line up for the cards moves to 5750/$99-$119, 5770/$149, 5850/$249, 5870/$349 which makes sense, that leaves a pretty glaring hole in the lineup.  Makes you wonder if we’ll see a 5830 type card packing DDR3 at the $200 price point.  That would probably make a lot of sense.

It will also be very interesting to see what the 5600 series cards are going to look like next year, but with price points and performance levels being covered it is hard to believe there will be more than two 56xx series cards available, something with ddrd2/3 and a 64 bit interface with a slower core and a speedier part with ddr3 and 128 bit interface.  My guess is the core will be basically half  of the 5750, which would follow the trend AMD is setting as that part is half of the 5850.  The weird things that that AMD is still talking like they are going to launch four lines of cards (and this is the second launch wave)- does that mean an uber-low end or are they referring to inevitable x2 launches?  Time will tell 🙂

With the x2 launches we might see the 5850 drop to $225 and the 5870 drop to $325, which would also help AMD close the gap they have at the $200 and $300 price points.  That would leave precious few places for Nvidia to make an impact unless the really drop the prices on their GTX260+ line of cards  and even then the AMD cards hold the distinction of being DX11.  While that is probably a check box at this point of time that will have limited if any relevance in the future, if the cards from both chip makers perform equivalently it would be a safer bet to take the newest card with the most features which again leaves Nvidia at a disadvantage.

–Nat

Sunday night musings… (mostly football)

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Well folks, its been another weekend that has swept by too fast.  It was great to see so many friends, a huge thanks to everyone we were able to see this weekend.  The big bummer about why we visited with so many friends is that Kristin is going to be in another country and seperated by a huge time differential for seven weeks.  Booo.  Remember you have friends and family here who love and miss you, baby!

There will be upcoming posts about what I am going to be doing to keep myself busy that will sound pretty fun.  The fact of the manner is that most of those things would happen anyway, it would be so much better if Kristin were here through all of them.  Let’s all hope that she has an awesome time 🙂

The Vikings game was a snoozer as predicted, although I think they let the Rams score the most points in a single game that they have scored this season, ten.  Much more unfortunate were the twins being routed in the baseball playoffs.  That means they won’t get a game two here in the cities which has to mean millions of dollars in revenue lost not only to the Twins association but to the surrounding area.  Keeping all those folks here for another two days would be have been huge money.  The best case scenario would have been splitting the first two games with the Yankees.  At that point, Yankees fans would have felt obliged to come to make sure they didn’t miss the final game of the series.  Since New York won the first two games fans knew that no matter what happened, they wouldn’t miss the game where the Yankees had a chance of being eliminated.  Joe Nathan, you blew it.

The Cyclones managed to not win their game either.  It is heartening to see how close they have come the last two games to winning.  This means that wins against Baylor and Colorado should be possible.  Let’s face it, they won two games last year.  Four or five would be giant steps in the right direction.  As we can see in the NFL even more clearly, coaches make or break teams (See Broncos, Titans etc.)  It could be that Iowa State actually has a really decent one on their hands.  A couple bowl apperances with a win would be pretty awesome and make Iowa State known for something more than their tail gating.

Kristin should feel pretty good about beating me at Fantasy Football after giving me crap about not teaching her enough about how it works 🙂  As a matter of fact, she would have beat anyone in our league.  My Pick ’em league also looks darn bleak, eight incorrect choices so far, although it looks like Peyton is giving me my fifth correct pick.  I was pulling for Denver but picked the Patriots.  Doh.  Baltimore!  You lost to Cincinatti!  How horrible!  By far my worst week in that league so far…

Work & Class tomorrow.  Yay.  😉

–Nat

WSUS is up and working!

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The last straw was confiuring the 2008 R2 server to act like it was on a home network and not a public one.  I think that allowed the some relaxed firewall rules.  As soon as  I did that and logged back into my XP test box some 17 updates were downloaded and ready to be installed.

 

After a few hours of effort, at least it doesn something...

After a few hours of effort, at least it does something...

Being the cool guy I am, I skipped reading any documentation and jumped right to the adding roles in 2008, which is really too darn easy.  That downloaded and installed WSUS 3.0 SP2, I believe and installed IIS as well.  The only piece that needed to be added manually was the 2008 report viewer.  After figuring out how to manipulate windows upate settings in the local GPO settings byrunning  gpoedit.msc and navigating to computer configuration, administrative templates, windows configuration, windows updates and setting the intranet server I was good to go.  There is a command to manually check for updates that I didn’t have to use: wuauclt.exe /detectnow  which could be very handy…

Now I need to figure out how to get it to work with Windows 7 and Vista and I’ll be set.  After that I’ll need to look at fixing DNS – basically I need to add something from my DHCP server  so that leases including a dns suffix, like atlas.xxxx for which I can make my DNS servers authoritative.  It would be cake if I had a domain but running Windows Home Server complicates that a bit…

Moving from one issue to another, I guess.  At least we finished the laminate flooring in the office today so I can mark down at least one real accomplishment 🙂

–Nat

Messing with Widgets, installing WSUS

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Do you see that cool looking “Linkedin” badge over there?  Yeah, well, when I added it all of my widgets were reset in WordPress.  What’s a widget, you ask?  A widget is what you see over there as the archives, calendar, meta, etc.  All gone!  Hopefully it is close to how it was but that was quite annoying.  I thought it was going to be a straight up plugin like the google analytics thing and add it at the bottom of the page or something.  Glad it was easy to resolve.

Since I took the trouble, go check out my Linked in profile and write a recommendation for me if you have a few minutes 😉

Another challenge I took up today was configuring WSUS for the local network here.  I am tired of constantly getting prompted to install updates!  I plan on scheduling a once a month forced push and reboot so that I don’t have to deal with that annoyance anymore.  It should also speed up bringing newbuilds (especially XP) online.  This has so far led to me to the fact that my DNS is still pretty much half baked and to really get it done right I need to setup DHCP on a server and stop trusting my router.  The cool gigabit wireless-n router doesn’t allow for any DHCP configuration.  I really need to make sure I can flip it all the way into bridged mode…  I’ll be sharing more about the WSUS adventure as I have it.  Right now the server 2008 R2 VM I setup to host it is tanking the WAN and itself trying to build down what I can only guess is several gigs of updates and service packs.

–Nat

iPhone gets features I’ve never used on my BB

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So, over at Dailytech (my once a day news resource) they have pointed out that the iPhone is getting support for Google Voice.   Reading through the article, it talks about how long Blackberries have had this support, even on AT&T.  I thought about that for a while… I have an AT&T Blackberry.  A nice, shiny, top of the line Bold which has wifi and the whole bit.  Could I not be using VOIP and Google Voice right now?

Well, I would try but Google Voice is currently invite only which is quite the bummer.  As soon as I either mooch an invite or they open it back up, I’ll be signing up and seeing how it works.

Oh yeah, I guess the iPhones can now send MMS’s despite the ape-like intelligence of iPhone owners.  Congrats.  I just sent my first one ever from my Blackberry to commemorate the occasion.  Again, congratulations.  I know you fought hard to get it.

–Nat

Tracking down my frequent flier miles…

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Because of the work I do, I typically get to fly around the county four or five times a year.  For a while, I was accumulating FF miles regularly and easily as the local travel folks were putting my frequent flier number in when they scheduled my flights so the miles just kept racking up.  Then we changed how we did travel and since I wasn’t paying good enough attention, I didn’t notice that my NWA FF number was no longer being used.

Realizing this now, I tried to determine how I could get retroactive credit for my miles.  This is a piece of cake, actually, except for one aspect.  You must have your e-ticket number, which is evidently only on the ticket or the baggage receipt.  I was able to find several of these and the miles showed up a couple days after being entered into the “mileage credit request” form on the website.

Now, you would think that I would be able to view my entire flight history on NWA and grab e-ticket numbers from flights that I have been on through their website.  It is hard for me to imagine that NWA wouldn’t be data mining the crappola out of this type of info and have it for some long periods of time, even a year.  The unfortunate truth appears to be that you can’t.  So I have two trips I went on this year that I can’t claim credit for because I don’t have the e-ticket number.  I realize this is partly my fault, but it would be nice if NWA could show past flights as well as ones that you have reservations for.

Moral of the story – enter your FF number into the NWA website before you even go to the airport or email yourself the e-ticket number in case you lose your stub.

–Nat

Week 4 in the NFL, etc.

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Whew, so many great games today and we haven’t even gotten to the best one – the Vikings vs. Packers.  🙂  I enjoyed seeing the end of the Pats vs. Ravens game and really enjoyed the entire game of Denver vs. Dallas.  Who would have thought the Broncos would look so legitimate heading into week five, and that Dallas would look so poor?

There is a pretty big bummer goin’ on right now, however.  ESPN fantasy football is broken due to login issues.  Very lame.  I want to see how my rookies did today and I am out of luck.  Pulling for Big Ben tonight as I sat Tom Brady to play him.  I hated doing it, but I figured that the Ravens defense would be a little more stingy.  I am looking forward to the Ravens vs. Patriots post season game, that should be pretty awesome.  Maybe I am wrong, but I believe the Ravens just lost home field advantage in that game and playing if Foxboro in January is huge…

It was a bummer that IA State had the field goal blocked.  So close to that first conference win, and now they are so far away…

Shout out to Dan Tonkin today, who finished his first marathon in literally five ticks under five minutes.  Kristin, the Mooneys and I supported him along the way at three stops but the mental fortitude required to accomplish running 26 miles is nothing short of amazing.

*UPDATE 10/06/2009*

The Vikings beating the Packers 30-23 was incredibly fun to watch.  Kristin watched the game with me, so that was pretty awesome too 🙂

–Nat

QAM tuning in Windows 7 with Comcast

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I finally gave into the siren call of clear QAM tuning on Windows 7 here in the Twin Cities north metro.  Our TV pulls in the clear QAM signals without issue for all of our local channels so it stood to reason any tuner capable of clear QAM would give the same result.

Clear QAM is great because it (an unencrypted digital TV signal, both regular and high definition rebroadcasts of local channels) comes into the house over the cable and not over the air.  I have long used Over The Air (OTA) tuning to DVR high definition content but this is incredibly finicky in any type of inclement weather.  The final straw was missing the entire Vikings vs. ‘Niners game because it was windy and that messed up the reception on the OTA.  As many of you have probably experienced so far, OTA digital TV sucks sometimes because it doesn’t degrade, it just goes away.

Recently, NewEgg ran a great deal on the Hauppauge HVR-1250 and I couldn’t resist picking one up to try.  I am glad to report that it works as advertised and was really easy to install.  I installed the newest drivers from Hauppage’s website and their softmce software and was good to go after running the TV setup again.  I then went through the four channels that matter, the high def versions of CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC and “split” them – making the OTA and QAM channels both showup in the guide so that we can explicitly choose which one to use at a given time.  Probably took about an hour of effort overall, but I highly recommend it.  The quality is pretty decent and it is obviously much more reliable than the OTA reception.

One item of note is that my system was able to capture two HD recordings at once (while time shifting and watching one) and it isn’t too beefy – an OS hard drive and a capture hard drive, a 2.3ghz dual core AMD processor, 2GB of Ram and Windows 7 Professional on a decent AMD motherboard with integrated graphics.

Finally, the fact that it is PCIe was a  configuration life saver.  My Hauppauge HVR-1600 is PCI, so is the wireless-n card I have.  That left me with only PCIe slots to fill  and precious few reasonably priced options.  Thanks Hauppauge 🙂

–Nat

Yellow Bricks Blogs

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Seems like I keep coming back to this guys as great sources of content.  This is a great blog entry about getting esxi4 running in workstation without sacrificing all of your ram to it: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/05/08/running-vsphere-within-workstation-will-take-up-a-lot-of-memory/

I need to build another box to be a secondary virtualization box at home, I think.   It would be interesting to see if I can get esx4 up in VMware Server 2.  I’ve got two boxes that have 8GB of ram each in them right now, one of them being my VMware Server box and the other one being my main box.  I really don’t need 8GB there, although I think turning my main box into another server platform and buying some new stuff to replace it is going to be tough to get by Kristin 😉

That link sure looks like a pretty WordPress Permalink though, doesn’t it 😉

–Nat