Current Mood: Meh

For Christmas this year, I got money, candy, and books. These were great gifts.

What I didn’t get, was a round toit.
So, the standard site design is still up.

I had downloaded a Christmas design, and I suppose I could put it up now anyway, but it seems like a waste of effort to change it for just a week or so… So, I guess I’ll look for a more generic winter design instead.

Which I may or may not get around to implementing…

Christmas was fine this year, but I’ve got a real case of the mehs now anyway. I seriously do not want to do sh*t! Except I think I could force myself to drive 1200 miles, southbound, on I-75.

It’s probably the horrid weather. Sooo gray, RIDICULOUSLY FREAKING COLD, and dreary! And it gets dark too soon, and gets light too late.

I’m a bit jealous of bears. At least they can just hibernate through this crap!

A new custom T-shirt company has hit the internet. They have actual custon shirts that end up looking like a pro did the design! And, they not only have printed-on possibilities, they offer custom embroidery, too!

Despite their “BlueCotton” name, these aren’t denim, or even all blue. There is a wide variety of color choice.

You make your custom design in their easy, feature-filled Design Studio. What makes me call it “feature-filled?” The huge amount of options! There are cliparts, shapes, personalized names and numbers, and you can upload your own design–and, of course, there’s the option to add your own text. You can even choose which colors to use in cliparts, as well as many other options!

Design Studio use is intuitive, with everything clearly labeled. Sizing and moving-around options for things like cliparts are easy to spot, thanks to arrows which appear at element edges. Once you think of a design, it can be entered into the Studio in mere minutes. The visual editor even shows a shirt behind the design, so you don’t have to “imagine” what it’d look like on one.

Best of all, the fun isn’t limited to people of “average” sizes. They have shirts from size S to size 5XL!

So if you want a truly personalized shirt, custom fraternity t-shirts, or even a punchy design for your company shirts, BlueCotton is the place to go!

Current Mood: Erm…

That was sarcasm.

A few posts ago, I talked about hearing the sound of a fan dying. I thought it was the CPU fan–a simple job. Really simple: Unscrew old fan, unplug from mobo, plug in new one, screw fan to heatsink, turn computer back on. And, I’ve got a spare sitting right here, so I wouldn’t even have to wait for delivery of a new one.

So of course, Murphy couldn’t have that! It’s against his Law!

Yesterday the thing was sounding off rather badly and I downgraded its survival rating from “up to a year” to “mere weeks, better get on it.” But for some reason, I decided to look in the case with my keylight to make sure it was indeed THAT fan.

And, it’s not.

When I touched the case, the bad fan was actually vibrating it on each revolution. Grind…grind…grind, it went… and each grind rattled the whole box. I looked with the light, and all the fans were spinning away, with no visual clues. So, I touched the fan case of each one.

CPU fan case…no strong vibration. Graphics card fan, no strong vibration. Case fan? Nope.

That left one. The power supply fan. Sure enough, that PSU was jumping around like it had a jet engine inside!

So, I “get to” tinker with a type of part I’ve never opened up before! (sarcasm) Goodie! (/sarcasm) Well, somewhat sarcasm. It beats buying a new PSU or paying some clod to do what I can do for free (labor-wise). On the other hand, I only bought that PSU a few months ago and the fan shouldn’t be dying yet! But, it’d cost more to ship it back than it will to just get a new fan.

So what’s different about this fan other than it’s in the PSU? The PSU isn’t made to be opened by “the consumer.” But I’m opening it anyway. So, chances are, it won’t have an easy-peasy plug for the fan’s power intake, and I’ll have to splice the new fan in. No biggie from a technical standpoint, but it’s a pain because I’ll have to find or buy some electrical tape as well as a new fan.

You may be wondering why I’d need to buy a new fan, when I’ve got one here! Simple: It’s a different size. The PSU has a big 120mm fan. The CPU one is 70mm. And the case fan I’ve had laying around here for 2 years daring me to forget about its presence and step on it one night, that’s 90mm.

So Murphy’s done a fairly good job of making a simple fan switch into a Job. I just keep reminding myself, I can:

Get a new PSU of this size and type: $89.

Send back the old one for an exchange: $10-12 shipping to California (via DHL)…AND about 2 weeks of being offline while it’s in transit both ways + another 3 days or so while the new order’s being processed

or
Just get a new fan and a little roll of electrical tape, timed to arrive before the old one’s death: $10-$15, free shipping, and no significant downtime.

Needless to say, I’m going for Option 3 and adding another Thing I’ve Fixed to my portfolio!

My geekness! This from a site called JustSayHi:

70% Geek

*Looks at code for that widget*

Unfortunately for them, said geekness level means I also recognize the code for the payday loan link they have hidden in there! Sorry guys, but the only way a business link gets on the Capitalist Chronicle is if it goes to one of my sites, I’m commenting about that particular site, or you pay hard money. And none of the above apply to that link!

*deletes that extra link*

(On another note…hmmm, offering quizzes…there’s a way to get n00bs to spread a link…)

Now some may wonder, even after all this time, how being a geek ever got to be something to brag about. Thank Bill Gates for proving the uberness of Geekdom to the unthinking masses!

I’m going to put a cool Christmas theme up for this blog. So if you see any: glitchage, missing sidebars, oddballized tag cloud, etc… just imagine me on the other side, cussing and pulling on my hair…

Once it’s up and running right, you should see a nice holly and ribbon design, and all the nav should be somewhere or other, but still present.

And knowing how I dislike doing updates? It’ll be Christmas here til around Valentine’s Day

The internet is weird. We who are on it all the time know it’s weird, and that’s just how it is. Random, funny…everything from highly educational articles to the most far-out cloud-cuckooland conspiracies can be found somewhere on the millions of servers which make up cyberspace.

So when I started seeing these odd links showing up in forums, I wasn’t too surprised to find more inexplicable randomness on the other end. But the marketer in me can’t help but wonder, “what’s the point?”

Anyone know if this guy is trying to set a record, prove a point, sell something…or what?

That mouse I wrote about here finally made its error.

After I made several trapping attempts last month, it had laid low and stopped making any telltale sounds. Sure enough, it dropped off the priority list: Out of hearing-range, out of mind.

Until today, that is. Today, I comes out of the bathroom and there it is–during the day, no less–in plain sight on the floor, running around in little panicked circles! Like a squirrel, it couldn’t decide whether to try to run away or run to wherever it really wanted to. A whip from my wadded-up robe (which I had been preparing to put on) made its mind up…AWAY was quickly chosen!

Needless to say, getting completely rid of Mr. Mouse became Priority #1.

First, several new-style traps were set. But, along with them, an old wooden Victor was employed.

Then, I started playing my game. Every mouse that gets in here eventually realizes that when they hear the game du jour actively making noise, that the Human is definitely NOT coming, and therefore figures it can act boldly. This mouse was no exception. Within a few minutes…SNAP! The old wooden trap had been triggered.

The Dumb Luck Mouse did manage to get somewhat lucky again, in that didn’t get any parts smashed by the thing. It had managed to pull its head back in time to get a glancing blow from the Bar of Destruction, without actually being trapped. It was, however, quite stunned. This gave me the chance to slap an old jar over it and take it to the window for deportation. It managed to wake up for a few seconds and run up and down the jar like a living pinball, but soon lost strength and went back into a stuperous state.

Then I sent it flying out into the snow, where it slowly righted itself but then laid still. After about 1/2 hour, though, I looked and it had gone away somewhere. Probably into the garage *groans*.

Something seemed wrong with this mouse, even before getting its head pounded by a speeding trap bar. I’ve never seen one just run in circles; usually they know exactly what to do (run for a shaded/dark spot). So, it might not be long for the realm. And, of course, the bang on the head may still cause termination.

In any case, I hope it doesn’t come back into the living area. A helping of “green grain” (mouse/rat poison) awaits it if I detect it again…

The Sound has started.

Ra-vzzzzz….shhtshhtshht…tickatickaticka
And variations thereof.

So what is this mystery noise I refer to in such a foreboding way? It’s the sound of a dying CPU fan.

When a CPU fan dies, it starts to make noise. The noise gets louder, and louder, and louder. It becomes annoying. Then, when you’ve finally gotten used to ignoring the industrial-level racket…silence. Suddenly, it’s very easy to get into the game (whatever game is being played at the time)! Or, easy to concentrate on getting something done.

Then, about 10 minutes later, comes the Heat Fault shutdown.

Thing is, trying to predict just WHEN it’s going to from dying to dead is not too easy. My first fan racketed for a year before it kicked off. The second one, only a couple of months. This is the third one.

A fan seems to make it in my computer for a year before it starts signaling impending demise. From what I understand, under normal usage, they’re good for about 3 years…but this isn’t normal usage. It’s often about 10 hours of games a night, which not only mean the fan’s running, but it’s running at full blast to make up for all the extra heat a decently-modern game causes! So they die quick.

This one made it longer before starting to make The Sounds–about a year and 7 months. Fortunately, when I last had to hunt down a replacement fan last time, I bought 2 of them. The reason for this is because my computer has an oddball fan size which is extremely hard to find, and I didn’t want to be hung up trying to find yet another fan on the old clunker (the one I use when this one’s needing my mechanical attention). It’s 10mm smaller than the norm. These latest ones are fancy-looking metal jobbies. They’re not the uber kind with the mega-sized heat sink (Zalman), though…just polished aluminum versions of the normal plastic kind. Zalmans look cooler, but the comp runs fine with plain square so that’s what it gets.

So now that I’m hearing The Sounds, I’m wondering how long it’ll take before this one stops altogether, or slows down so much that it’s not doing any good. It’s sounding worse very fast…not nearly as gradual as the other two. I’m tempted to just chuck in the backup fan this week instead of waiting for the inevitable, but on the other hand, I know I might get another year out of the thing before it kicks the bucket, so there’s quite a temptation to just wait, too.

The bigger question now, though, is whether to go ahead and get another backup (for when the next fan dies)! This comp is actually obsolete (obsolete = it won’t play the very latest games on the highest settings), and chances are, I’ll replace the entire thing before I’d need to get yet another fan. And one thing I’ll make sure of when I get a new computer is that it uses a STANDARD-SIZED fan!

Current Mood: Cool & Ecstatic

That describes it.

The glories of the Christmas Buying Season!!

When everything has a glow, when the email alerts are not all “somebody spammed the forum” notices, when the stuff that’s been sitting here all year becomes a hot commodity, and the already-hot items become ON FIRE…that’s the High Retail time of year!

I’m just lovin’ it! Not only does all the above happen, it’s possible to tell almost instantly whether a new product line is any good, because there are enough buyers coming in on generic terms that it doesn’t take long to see what they’re going for. For instance, I added these Escali digital food scales a couple of weeks ago, and they’re flying out the door! They really are a good deal, but not only that, they come in a zillion colors, and people seem to like to see the food scale section with a lot of choices. There’ll be even more choices soon–there are a lot more Escalis to put up.

The affiliates over at ABestWeb are on Cloud Nine, too–the spike in volume means tons more commissions. And in years past, I would have thought that was Some Thing, too. But now that I’m a merchant? I could put it a few ways, but…

If business was coffee, the affiliate-side is actually the decaf version. When it’s your own stuff going out the door, THAT is caff!

Seems I actually learned something worthwhile…

in high school!

Usually, when I think back on those years, I can’t for the life of me come up with one thing I learned in high school that would count as “worthwhile”–that is, something I’d use in day-to-day life–at least, not something that I wouldn’t have learned somewhere else along the way anyway.

But today, I found myself using mnemonics (mental tricks to help remember things). And when I thought about it, I realized I had indeed picked up the concept during a high school psych class! While I have indeed come across that very info elsewhere, it was the HS that had the best explanation.

So what’s the trick?

The trick of mnemonics is to associate what you’re trying to remember, with something ELSE that’ll stick in your memory better.

Today I needed to remember the weights of two boxes, one that’s 7lb 11oz, and one that’s 5lb and 6oz. Perfectly random stuff, you would think, no? Well, by being able to associate them with other things which are more memorable to me, I am still aware of their weights hours later.

It goes like this:
7lb 11oz. That’s 7-11. There’s a song that includes the line, “7 come 11, and she could be mine.” So, I turned that box into 7 Come 11.

The local PBS station here is Channel 56. So, the 5lb 6oz box became “Channel 56″ and all I have to remember is to seperate the digits and that’s the weight.

Associations like that make seemingly random things easy to remember. I actually remember an association from about 10 years ago that I made this way! “Heinz 57.” That meant to enter the code “57″ into the charge machine at the store I was w*rking at then.

Unfortunately, since I knew the reason for the entry at the time, I didn’t do a mnemonic to remind me just what on Earth it was that the entry of the number 57 did…