Took pretty much the whole day to get ophi set up.  Well, Linux anyway.  Building him and installing / setting up Win7 was mostly painless (just a few CDs lost in the drive...) and that was the day prior, surrounding Casey's meat party (not gay).  The onboard audio is nice in only one way: It has a headphone jack on the front of the computer that plugs directly into the onboard audio card.  This is actually only half of one way: The headphone cuts out the back speaker port in Windows (as it should).  They both run in Linux.  OK, that's not so much of a problem, just a minor annoyance.  I don't even feel like moving my speakers over to the computer yet anway, might just keep them hooked up to the Gamecube.  The onboard audio sucks in that alsa won't give me built in bass/treble sliders for the card.  It did for the Sound Blaster PCI512 and the Audigy ZX.  I just popped the Audigy into ophi and, while it detects that the card is plugged in (lspci), alsa doesn't detect it.  Oh well.  I'll probably just let it sit there, or rip it out later and ebay it or something.  Even though the Audigy would put out such better sound, I dont really feel like fighting with anything more right now. 

Jeremy might give me something for the GeForce 7600GT from Andy as well. 

I found a software equalizer solution, and the settings given on the Arch wiki are a lot better than it normally sounds, but I need to learn how to play with equalizers and what each band means / effects (I'm just given numbers that correspond to each band... no sliders for me).  Also, the software equalizer eats some CPU.  With only Opera, mpd, and the equalizer running, both cores are idling around 4%.  Without the equalizer, with Opera, they'd both be at 1% or below.  But hey, at least the cores are being used, yeah??  I see it fluctuate between three and six percent on the first and four and five on the second.  I love seeing two arch logos on boot representing the two cores and having two percentage/usage bars in conky :D

(03:47:16 AM) Jeremy: you put about as much time into switching arch around as i do my windows, its just a matter of what your primary os is

Sort of.  I spent most of the day just trying to get shit downloaded and installed on this shitty stolen wifi (cocmast dude comes on Tuesday).  Afterwards I spent a lot of time fighting with sound and a couple other things (why does gnome-settings-daemon set my background on the laptop but not on the desktop?  Both machines start it when openbox runs, so they should behave the same).

I think it's just about done.  This means I can go about looking for jobs again.  Or playing Team Fortress 2 with Casey, Matt, Sarah, David, or whoever else come Tuesday.  I think I might have a "Happy Real Internet Day!" party on Tuesday.  I think I'll have been stealing wifi for nearly two weeks by that point!

Anyway, fucker is orange.  See the bottom part of the white section?  The dvd tray pops up VERTICALLY FROM THERE.  LIKE A GODDAMN TOASTER.  HOLY SHIT IT'S AWESOME.  Except when I lose the teeth that are supposed to hold the disc in and drop a disc or two IN the drive.  It's a pain in the ass to get those fuckers out of there.

• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.8GHz
• 2GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM
• Geforce 8800GTS 512MB (with free copy of Call of Duty: World at War, normally a $50 game)
• 1 160GB SATA II HDD
• 1 320GB SATA II HDD

I think that's all the important stuff?  Clearly decidely a mid-range machine.  That's all I need.  It'll play TF2 beautifully.  It was only $500.  Andy was $800 when I bought her years ago.  The motherboard is your standard microATX motherboard.  I was originally planning on going for a smaller case (similar to Mom's new one), but most of them don't hold graphics cards, let alone beasts like the 8800 and above.  My case is not as deep as most, though, so it is still easier to carry around and it just feels lighter that both andy AND Mom's new one (thing is DENSE!)!

I'm using andy's old 19" display in the middle of my desk.  Got Sarah's 19" off to the left and am displaying the laptop on that.  The laptop itself sits on the elevated laptop stand to the right, but I couldn't read the display from there.  It serves as a place to set things for now.

Got synergy and hamachi all set up, had to change a few aliases on feldspar's end and change the synergy config, but otherwise it was pretty easy to migrate from andy to ophi. 

Somehow in playing around with oss (not much better than alsa for what I want) and reinstalling alsa, I got sound working in Doom3.  The standard Quake3 engine maxes at 1000 frames per second, but refuses to give sound (not able to map /dev/dsp for whatever reason).  Even though I set the cap at 9000, the game hardcaps at 1000.  I think with the 6600GT (never tryed the 7600GT) I was able to get around 300-400 frames.  If I uncap the frames from 60, my character constantly looks at the floor.  If I cap it again, I can only look up or down.  If I restart the game and keep the frames capped at 60, I can look around like normal until I uncap it again.  The ioquake engine refuses to run, giving some OpenAL (like OpenGL, but for audio, derp) error that I don't feel like dealing with yet.

I, sadly, deleted UT2k4 quite some time ago.  I would love to play that game right now.  I need more native Linux games.

I opted to put Openbox on ophi instead of going the XFCE+Compiz route.  I would like to have the flash of Compiz, but since both Openbox and Compiz are window managers... that can't happen.  The main reason I switched was because XFCE 4.6 no longer has customizable right-click menus (on the desktop).  Since that is my main method of launching programs, I'd rather have a menu that has only what I need instead of the generic crap that the new XFCE menu gave.  Customizability > eye-candy.  Plus Openbox is light.  XFCE was already light for a desktop environment, but Openbox ain't even that.  Just a straight up window manager, nothing more.  Shit is snappy on the laptop, it SCREAMS on the desktop. 

The case is really pretty.  I love it.  The blue power light on the front has a red LED in it for HDD access.  I just LOVE the way it looks.

I think the most CPU intensive game I have under either operating system is actually Dwarf Fortress.  For some reason the Windows version through wine runs better than the native Linux one..  I haven't actually ever run the game under Windows.  While it doesn't take advantage of multi cores, the second core should at least prevent the game from grinding my system to a halt.  I could barely browse the web on andy while playing dorfs.

Shit yeah it runs well now.  I wonder how many people get new rigs just to run dorffort well.

I should also figure out sleep/hibernate under linux. 

It's ten in the morning.  Sarah woke me up by calling me at four in the afternoon...  My sleep schedule is so nasty right now.

I was all type type type for the longest time with this post.  Now I've run out of steam.  I think it's time to call it a day.

Also, six days from now marks seven years of journal-y-ness.

I got the deal with newegg sorted out, newegg was still looking for my old card, but I had put in the details for my new card (the old one expires at the end of this month).  He should be here tomorrow (Thursday) or Friday.

There are two cats here now.  Black one is Uhura, the Orange one is Zoey.  They hate each other.  Orangey likes to rub up against everything in site, including me.  She'll rub her body along my legs while I'm cooking or washing the dishes, which is not the ideal time for such an activity.  It's really funny the way she leans her body when she does it, though.  Also, she sheds like crazy.  These two activities may or may not be related.

I just burned myself trying to light this candle with a standard bic lighter... ugh.  Ow ow ow.  I hope this doesn't blister.

I was gonna write more but the cat and customizing OpenBox has distracted me so much I forgot what else I was gonna say.

Good night.

Ordered Ophiuchus.  I hope.  Money I need for rent.. newegg/Charter One constantly declining my card.  Newegg claims C1's fault; C1 newegg.

CMC still hasn't approved resume.  Cannot upload files (to monster.com) from Wii.

Dumb.

I miss Sarah.

I have always been of the minimalistic point of view.  This is evident in my no icons on the desktop belief as well as my attempt to use programs that take up the least amount of resources.  Amarok did get a bit heavy at times, but it was really nice so I kept using it.  That is until I just got fed up with its performance (it's really a good piece of software, no one else seems to be having the same problems as me).  Well, I haven't really listened to music much on my computer in the past few months.  Until I found MPD the other day.  Because it's server/client, it's inherently light on resources.  The server end runs as a daemon, it plays your music and manages your collection in the background.  When I want to switch tasks or load a playlist, I can load up one of the quick-launching client programs (I currently switch between a nice command-line one and a Rhythm Boxish GUI one), load a new playlist/song, and close it and everything is great.  This also frees up a spot in the system tray that would have an icon for the program (though I just installed an XFCE panel MPD controller that takes up like quadruple the visual space a system tray icon would).  It really is a neat way to implement a music manager.  There's also a webclient that I am interested in trying that will stream my music to another computer over the internet.  That'll be nice when I'm back at the reg office next semester.

So, basically, with the little bit of python I have done for extending the Mumbles Pidgin plugin, I decided that I should learn more about the language ad use it to develop a client for MPD.  I could then stick in what features I want and make it exactly how I want it; I could even make it send dbus messages and intercept them with Mumbles!  I bet the hardest part will be figuring out GUI stuff.  It'll be interesting getting used to Python's method of Object Oriented programming, I'm sure, but once you've done that stuff once, you've really done it a million times (I'll probably end up eating these words).

So, with the recent discovery that my graphics card no longer displays low resolutions (boot screen, Linux TTYs, etc.), the possibility of my computer failing has suddenly become very real.  While I really do not have the money for a replacement (nor should I spend the money on one in the near future), I should at least ready a list of parts so that I can make a sudden order just incase AndrAIa decides to call it poops.  What?  Yeah, I could just buy a new video card, but I'd essentially be wasting money.  Why should I buy a graphics card for a deprecated interface?  AGP cards are no longer the standard.  It's all about PCI-X.  But to get PCI-X, I'd have to upgrade my motherboard and with a new motherboard comes a new everything else.  I wanna go something midrange, sorta like David's which was a total cost of $450 while reusing as much as possible from his old machine.  Mine'll probably cost maybe $100-$300 more than his due to the fact that I will be reusing VERY little from AndrAIa.  Andy originally cost $850 when I bought her four or five years ago.  I'd say she was fairly high-end at the time.  She's served me well, and I hope she would continue to do so even after I build Ophiuchus (which I hope you'll remember is the thirteenth zodiac, because I'm an asshole like that).  Maybe she could be that media centered machine hooked up to a TV and stereo.  Maybe.  She'll serve some purpose, I just don't know what yet.  Anyway.  Back to Ophiuchus.  I'm thinking he'll (yeah, Ophi is a he) look good in either this case or this one.  Neither seem to have all too powerful power supplies, but I haven't done my research yet.  The problem with whitey there, despite how sexy it is, is that the power supply is of an incredibly ODD shape and quite weak to boot.  The only other similar power supply that newegg sells is... well... the same one.  So, whitey is out of the question.  Blackey seems to be using a regular power supply, but even at 400W, it seems a bit... weak.  But again I must first do my research and confirm that I should actually buy another power supply.  At least blackey is still pretty cool looking.

But wait Tony!  I know computers and that case looks kinda small!

Yeah, it is.  It's a Micro ATX case.  Brian got a Micro ATX machine last summer and, while his case is a normal ATX Mid-Tower case, it's a fair bit smaller than a normal ATX motherboard and...  I could do with a size reduction.  As stated earlier, I am not going for a high end machine here, it's not going to need everything a full ATX motherboard will offer (namely PCI slots).  Plus, you know, size.

Ugh, I wish I were in Windows so I could whip this up really quickly in Fireworks...  I haven't quite gotten used to The Gimp yet..

It's not a whole lot, but is definitely enough.  Considering that, at the moment, I lay Andy on her side so that I can place a fan on her graphics card to account for the fact that the card's fan died almost a year ago.  It actually keeps it pretty cool, I'm surprised.  But yeah, imagine skinny little Ophi taking up no space on my desk.  I would have so much room to.. do things with, maybe.  It'd be nice.

This was probably a pretty boring post to you not-so technically inclined/interested.  I've been writing a lot of stuff down while at work lately.  Maybe I'll post that eventually?