just to let you know, I'm not actively maintaining this blog. PLease go to:
entropc.blogspot.com for my tech blog.
Thanks,
Kevin
Back for more news. For those of you who have my infrequent blog, you may also want to check out my other blog at entropc.blogspot.com. On this blog, I'll talk more personal projects and events. EntroPC will be my techie blog.
So this blog will be about some of my personal passions: cars, beer, brewing beer, wine, photography, Maui, art, etc.
But no more computers!
BTW, Batch #2 of my beer is whittling down. Next weekend or Thanksgiving weekend I need to brew batch #3.
The big news this week was the 5.4 earthquake. We were at the Maxim's restaurant off Saratoga when it hit. Long rolling waves. So smooth that nothing even rattled. I thought the long wave meant it was far away, but it wasn't that far. I felt the aftershock of 3.4 yesterday at 3.54PM while at work. A bit if a stutter, then it was gone. The Tuesday quake was the biggest quake I've personally felt. Still, it was not a good representation of "the big one." It did remind me I need to do some more quake-proofing around the house.
That second batch of beer came out very, very dark. It's like a double dark porter. It's OK to drink, but I'm sure I over cooked the wort and needed to add in more water. Next batch will be much better. But despite the work involved, it's still fun to make my own beer. Next batch will be for the Christmas party. It will have to be better for Fely's family to drink. Definitely lighter though.
He's a quick update on projects I'm working on:
I'm brewing Batch #2 of beer. The first was so that I could enter the Samual Adams Longshot contest. I didn't win, but I got some pretty good scores and it wasn't a bad beer. It turned out to be a Brown English-style Ale, but with a light body.
For Batch #2 I'm going for a Porter style, but I've messed up the ingredients so it may be more like a Porter-Stout. (Pout?) I'm also trying to add a bit of Coconut overtones to match the CoCoNut Porter from Maui Brewing.
The Game PC rebuild may have finally turned a corner. I've replaced the processor, motherboard, memory, and graphics card, but kept the disk drives, case, power supply (previously updated), DVD drive, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. After struggling to find a way to save and restore the original WinXP MCE disk image, it seems we have a stable system. Let me back up for a second. The problem was that the original system had the C Drive set up on a RAID 0 configuration usined two 256G WD drives. When you replace the motherboard and change the RAID controller, the RAID drives won't work with a different RAID controller. So I had to save the original disk image using Norton Ghost 10 to a third drive and the rebuild the WINXP image fresh with the new RAID controller. In the process of tryingot restore the image, I found that Ghost 10 was not compatible with the NVIDIA RAID controller. Luckily, a sale at Fry's allowed me to get my hands on Ghost 12, which worked fine. Some WinXP repairs atfer the recovery, repartition with Norton Partition Magic and everything looked ready to go. Yet, the system was still unstable with blue screens of dumps. One last tweek was needed: updating the BIOS seems to have fixed the instability. Yeh!
Now I need to find time for BioShock and the new Quake Wars demo.
The blogging tools are pretty good, but I'm using only a fraction of the capability. I haven't tried videos or othe embedded content. My blog is really more text oriented.
I also am beginning to believe that this site is better for personal blogging, rather than business oriented. I came here based on a rosy review by Leo Laporte and he still uses Vox. Dont' get me wrong, I think they've created a very nice tool for blogging, but I just don't think my content fits in this neighborhood. I don't like that in order to comment, you have to setup up an account. It limited the opportunity for feedback. But, of course, that can actually be a good thing.
I may revive my Blogger account. I'll think about it.
Over and out.
But based on the aftermarket rise of AMD stock, it wasn't bad enough for some people. Still, AMD's only lever to sell processors and GPUs is going to be lower prices for some time to come. Barcelona will help their server business, but in the other CPU markets, Intel has clearly superior products.
AMD is talking about being now a platform company, rather than a processor company.
The only savings grace for AMD is that the ATI integrated graphics is much better than Intel's iGPUs. At least for now.
Expect good things form Intel. They have a well publicized lead over AMD. The real question is what will AMD announce on Thursday: just how ugly was Q2. Volume may ot be bad, based on the indications that the Dell PCs are selling well at Walmart. The problem is going to be the margins: both CPUs and graphics are selling, not based on superior performance, but on lower prices (superior value).
I know I'm boring the vast majority of readers on Vox, but this is what I'm interested in. This is my passion. In some ways it's very interesting to be at NVIDIA watching this story unfold, but at the same time, I feel sidelined. I loved being a part of Microprocessor Report, but hated that it was owned and operated by a corporation that didn't have a f*cking clue how to leverage it; how to develop it. RBI's business model is based on writers as interchangeable cogs, but MPR was based on the personal charisma of Michael Slater and a group of great technologists. MPR needed to be treated like RBI treated another of its properties: Variety. Unfortunately, when Michael left, so did the aura and the buffer from meddling managers. I tried to be the GM and still write, but that wasn't viable. When I came back as editor in chief, things were fine for me until I was being dragged into more business issues that were the purvey of a publisher. Being both publisher and EIC is a bad combination. Still, I do miss the great team we had on the report. I really like small organizations rather than larger companies. The feeling of accomplishment and impact is more immediate.
I'm mostly a PC gamer, so for me the nirvana is Crysis. It looks amazing.
I'm planning to build a new gaming PC in order to play it. My gaming PC is over 3 years old and it's well overdue for an upgrade. I'm also working on a mediaPC for our family room. I have it hooked up to a 720p front projector and display it on a 106" screen. Looking forward to some driving games on the big screen.
We have an XBox360 and a PS3 (I know, we have a spoiled 17-year-old), but I use them mostly to play movies. I'm thinking about Project Gotham Racing. Looks pretty.
As a PC-keyboard-and-mouse gamer, the console games don't do much for me because i never developed those thumb controller moves.
Sorry, that it's so dry. I know many bloggers talk about their lives in great depth and that's what people want to hear about. But I'm an analyst/engineer; I'm more obsessed with technology and technology companies.
Tonight I'd like to promote something. I'm tired so this will be short. It's the Hot Chips conference. I'm on the organizing committee and I think it's got a great program. More info to follow.
