Alex's Stuff

Canada, eh?

2006-07-17T19:55:00.000-04:00

I just got back from a week-long mission trip with my church's youth group to Kitchener, Ontario. Here's the website of that particular trip, (put on by Serve) and here's the photo gallery. It was a great experience, growing in my faith, making new friends, and finding out what bagged milk is, eh. ;-)

A couple non-related things:

Blender is a sweet (Free! Open source even!) 3D modeling program. I'm still learning it, (the interface is different... but very easy to use I've found out) but it's pretty cool.
I've gotten into speedcubing. (Solving a rubik's cube as fast as you can.) My personal best is currently 44.4 seconds. (I set it in Canada. :-P)
The cube I'm using and I recommend is a rubiks.com DIY cube. You assemble it yourself, adjusting the spring tension and stuff. Then you lube it up with silicone spray that you can find at Lowe's or wherever. Also, when the Rubik's brand stickers start wearing out, get some new ones at cubesmith.com.
Also, I changed the style for my blog. Lemme know what you think!
I think that's all, but I don't wanna waste sweet bullet points on just 3 things.
There, I think that's good.

Well, see y'all later!

New PSU

2006-02-20T16:02:00.000-05:00

OK, I got my new PSU (plus a UV cathode light) on Friday. (Which is really nice, because we ordered it Thursday evening around 5:00 our time [4:00 TigerDirect's time]) They have this "Buy today, ships today" thing.... Very nice. Got it out of the packaging, hooked it up... WOOHOO, it works! The LED color changing feature is really nice, but I think I like blue best with the UV light and green UV-reactive cable mesh. I actually think I'm gonna get some other blue LED case fans to replace the ones I have currently. (They're the ones that were included with the case I got... One's red and the other's bluish-green)

Well, I think that's all for now.... Bye!

I didn't do it! I promise!!

2006-02-16T09:49:00.000-05:00

ACK.

OK, so here I was, just minding my own business, when *CLICK* my computer just died. What happened you might ask? My PSU went blooie. :-( I actually had smelled something kinda like burning plastic earlier (you know the smell) and I could *kinda* tell it was coming from the vicinity of my computer, but I couldn't be 100% sure. Well, apparently I was right, cuz *blooie* and it's gone. Now that I have it out, I smelled near the fan on the unit itself, and - WHOO - um, yeah, it was the PSU. BUT, everything else is OK. (I'm typing this on my computer, currently using a loaner PSU from my Dad) The plus side? I get to get a really sweet replacement! I was looking around on Tiger Direct, (great computer place, I must say) and I think I found just the one. Features:

550 watts
Adjustable 120mm fan
Color switchable LED lighting inside (shines out through the fan)
The cables are wrapped in green UV reactive cable sleeves
You also get a blue UV-emitting 120mm fan to put anywhere in you case, along with a fan speed control knob thing that can control up to 5 fans (I think you just plug one fan into it, then just daisy-chain the rest from that one, and it controls all of them at once [most case fans have a power connector pass-through] )

I think it'll go well with the rest of my computer, (in the lighting department) because I have 2 LED fans, (one blue and one reddish-pink) and one of those bright blue "cold cathode lights" that I can switch on and off.

I'll make sure to post details (maybe some pictures too) when I get it. Bye for now!

No, I'm not dead....

2006-02-04T16:53:00.000-05:00

*sigh* It's been a while since I've posted. Well, here goes.

Recently (post-wise...) I posted about my new desktop, and Windows XP, and all my favorite freeware apps, and the possibility of installing slamd64, a 64 bit port of Slackware. Well.... I ended up installing Gentoo (they have a 64 bit version) on a second partition, and I love it! I used to wish I could be one of those linux gurus, but never quite figured it out, or something. With Gentoo, you manually install (a neat learning process in itself) a very minimal base system, then build it up with only the stuff YOU want installed. You end up with an extremely personal installation. I've definitely fulfilled my goal to become a "linux geek." I don't even remember the last time I booted into Windoze. (See what I mean? I'm spelling the name of my previous favorite OS the linux user's way!) Right now I typing this in Firefox running in Fluxbox. There's another topic of discussion.

Fluxbox is a linux window manager, and I've fallen in love with it too! It's very simple, but very efficient. The themeing system is very flexible, allowing very simple, to very sweet looking themes. This is what my linux desktop currently looks like:

(If the page that comes up says "This image has been scaled down to fit your computer screen. Click on it to show it in the original size." then click on the image. It's worth it. Otherwise it looks all pixely and junk.)

The system monitor in the upper left-hand corner is called conky. (Don't ask me why) It's a really sweet app that displays right smack on your background, and is TOTALLY configurable.

Another thing: one of the coolest screen savers I think I've ever seen, it's called "fireflies", and it is pure eye candy. Make sure your system has enough oomph to run it though. According to my system monitor in linux, it sucks up about 20% of my 2.4 GHz AMD Athlon 64 3400+.

Last thing: POVRay.
(BTW, I know POVRay has been around for a long time. I'm not posting this because it's new. It's just new to me)

POVRay is a 3D image renderer. It's not a graphical 3D modeller, with a nice GUI, and a drag and drop interface... it's just a renderer. But this program RAWKS!! Pretty much, what you do, is you type into a text file in povray language (a very easy to learn yet flexible language) what you want your scene to look like, and then tell POVRay to render it, and voila! It generates near-photo-quality images from your text file. A very good tutorial can be found here. (The documentation/tutorial included with povray was very confusing to me) I've messed around and made some test/example scenes...

Neat, huh? As you can see, it produces very high quality images. I'm still learning, and these are just sample/just for messing around images.
The POVRay Hall of Fame is here. Note, however, that some of these might have been helped, (external modellers that export to povray, etc.) but they've all been rendered with POVRay. Amazing.

Well, I think that's about it for now. See ya'll later!

Customer support stinks even if you aren't a customer yet

2005-11-23T21:49:00.000-05:00

Well. This past week has been fun. My Dad came home from work Tuesday last week with pizza, because it was time to celebrate! He said he checks every few months to see if we have anything broadband around us (here in Timbuktu), and he checked that day, and Comcast had high speed cable in our area! Like 4 Megabit high speed! Like 100+ times the speeds we're getting now with 36k dialup! The person on the phone said they would have to run cable to the house, which would take 3-5 days, then they could wire it in, install the cable modem, etc. This week Monday (2 days ago), the 4th business day, my Dad called to check on the status of things.
Wait -- say what? No record of us? But we called last week and signed up!

O_O

So my Dad orders cable service again, and the lady said they'd make it fast because of the delay. My Dad called again today, the 2nd day after that took place, and after getting the address...

Phone rep: "Wait, are you in Illinois?"
Dad: "No, we're in Michigan."
Phone rep: "Oh, well you'll have to call this phone number:..."

Weird, because my Dad used the generic 800 number the last 2 times...
He gets on the phone with someone else, they have to transfer him to a different number... finally he's talking to the right person. They get the address, look it up, and -- huh? No...... service???
[long, drawn out, Darth Vader style "Nnnoooooooooooooooo!!!!"]

Apparently, the other people he talked to didn't know anything, or they got the wrong place, or something. I SOOOO want something better than 36k dialup. A (relatively) small 5 MB file? Go do something else while you wait. 20 MB download? Start it at bedtime, HOPEFULLY it'll be done by next morning! (a little sarcasm...) Online gaming? Bah!

*sigh* Oh well.... So close, yet so far......

ps. Happy Thanksgiving!

New desktop and Freeware

2005-09-22T19:09:00.000-04:00

Well, I'd say my new desktop is finished.
I've been working on building it most of the summer, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out:

AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1 GB DDR Memory (2 x 512, cheaper and failsafe)
Chaintech GeForce 6600 w/ 256 MB
250 GB SATA drive
DVD ± RW/CD-RW drive
Plain ol' CD drive
An old Seagate tape drive (and a few tapes) that my dad gave me. :-P
A really sweet case (got a 550w PSU for $12.99 extra!)
Windows XP w/ SP2 ;-)

I just got Win XP a few weeks ago, got it installed, and thanks to SP2, it detected my 250 GB drive correctly! Apparently, XP pre-SP1 and Win2K pre-SP2 don't detect drives over 137 GB. So I now have a 150 GB main partition (for XP) and I think I'm gonna put slamd64 (an unofficial port of slackware for AMD 64 processors) on a secondary partition. As always, after I get my OS installed, I start installing my favorite freeware apps. I thought I'd list my top 10 here:

Firefox. Oh yeah.
Thunderbird. Again, oh yeah.
Gaim, the best (only?) multi-protocol, multi-platform instant messaging program.
VirtuaWin is a free, small (~300 KB for the installer) virtual desktop manager that's packed full of features, including mouse-switching of desktops (move your mouse to one edge of the screen, and you go to that next desktop. You can also drag wiindows to the other desktops with this.)
HT Fireman is a free CD/DVD burning program, that is really quite sweet. It has a very simple to use layout, you can drag and drop files right from explorer, and can burn almost anything, MP3's, misc. data, ISO's, etc.
NotePad+ is a replacement for notepad that has just a FEW more featurs than notepad.... ;-) It can have multiple windows open inside the main one, it displays line/column numbers in the status bar, etc.
Uxtheme.dll patcher to allow the use of non-Microsoft signed skins in Windows XP. Some good places to get skins are here, here, and a few here.
OpenOffice is a good open source replacement for Microsoft Office. (I don't currently have it installed on this machine, need to download the newest version...)
Dimension4 can synchronize your pc clock to an atomic clock of your choice
Clipomatic. I had searched for somthing like this many times before, and could never find anything quite right. (free) All you do is hit ctrl+alt+v, and it pops up a menu containing a cache of things you've copied recently. (the default number is 10) It is extremely handy, especially for programmers.

Well, that's all for now folks!

Coworkers...

2005-09-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

Some coworkers have too much time on their hands....:

ps. I might have just copy/pasted the html for all of these picture links from Info Nation... but you can't prove it! :-P''''

Dumb laws...

2005-09-20T11:49:00.000-04:00

Ok, I'm probably posting stuff that everyone's seen before... but WHO CARES? :-)

DumbLaws.com is a very complete, very organized collection of weird and just downright stupid laws. (And they're not just US laws either)

LawGuru.com doesn't have as many, but all the states are laid out in one page, so it's easier to read them.

Some funny ones:

In Elkhart, Indiana, it's illegal for barbers to threaten to cut off kid's ears.
In South Bend, Indiana, it's illegal to make a monkey smoke a cigarette.
In Louisiana, it is illegal to rob a bank and then shoot at the bank teller with a water pistol.
In Florida, you may not fart in a public place after 6 P.M. on Thursdays.

Wow. And remember, these are just some of my favorites. There are alot more at those sites.

Sidewalk Chalk Art

2005-09-13T22:11:00.000-04:00

Alright, I'm finally gonna post here... :-P

I found this one on Info Nation (my uncle's blog.)
3-D looking sidewalk chalk art. Wow.
Do note however, that these drawings can't be viewed correctly from many angles at all except the one that the picture is taken from - the last two pictures demonstrate this.

Another funny image, Internet Explorer Security Settings. Aahhh... so true. This is from the same guy that's made portable (USB key-friendly) versions of Firefox, and Thunderbird.

ps. I hope I'll be posting more often... ;-)

First Post

2005-07-25T14:02:00.000-04:00

This is my first post! My name is Alex, I'm 15, and I thought it would be k00l to start my own blog. So far, I really like the Blogger service (it's from Google, why wouldn't I like it?) and I can't wait to mess around with it more. Here are some links:

I'll post more as I think of them...

p.s. HI MOM!!!! HI DAD!!!!! *waves*