Aura of Unrest

From Guardian Unlimited:

Paul Eaton, a former American army general in charge of training Iraqi forces until 2004, marked the anniversary with a furious attack on Mr Rumsfeld, saying he was "not competent to lead our armed forces".

Aura: of the Natives

On vacation in Santa Fe. The drive was great. We slept to snow and woke up like children at the first of winter. I took some video and lots of phone-cam pix.

My Mom is a German Guy

And that's not an insult! She's got the stem cells of a donor from Germany in her body, and they're eventually supposed to get her body to create new bone marrow without cancer in it. She's kicking serious ass in there. It makes her shiver and feel feverish, but it's for the best.

Parkour - aka Free Running

[movie removed due to slow loading. click here to find it on their site]

I saw a couple guys, a mentor and a student, on campus last week doing this. I wish I had stopped to interview them for UTA Radio at the time. Now I'm scrambling for a sports story and trying to track down one of these guys. I think it'll be a much better story than the typical "interview a coach about last night's ballgame".

I would love to participate, but I don't think I'll be in that kind of shape again any time soon!

Gearing up for New Mexico

Spring Break is upon us.

One more week of studying and projects.

Then we take the Scion on the longest journey it's seen yet. It'll also be the longest journey C and I have taken together in a car.

I have so much shit to do in the meantime, it's insane.

...just had to take a little break to say something.

Re: Re: keeping the 6800GS cool

Success!

The reason my original mod didn't work was because of an installation foo.

On the reverse side of the card there's a x-shaped plate that squishes a rubber pad into the card and pulls the heatsink down onto the GPU. The plate is curved so that it has a concave side and a convex side, and I had put the concave side toward the card.

This is wrong!

You want to put the plate on the card with the concave side facing out.The reason it's curved like this is to create additional pressure on the nuts that hold the screws from the heatsink onto the card. When I had it on backward, it wasn't creating any resistance against the nuts holding on the heatsink, so the heat transfer was weak between the GPU and the heatsink.

The instructions could be updated to make it a little more obvious which direction the plate should face. Or I could just be a little less NUBISH.

Now my card idles at 55 degrees Celsius versus 65. I haven't had a chance to play any WoW, so I'm not sure what it will look like under load, but I'm sure it'll be better than the 78-80 degrees I was seeing before.

FXFW > SXSW

I've been invited to perform my music at a local event titled FXFW (Fly By Fort Worth), an unofficial offshoot of the notorious SXSW (South by Southwest) music, arts and technology event. The musicians who play at SXSW each year often stop by our little metroplex to play a gig or two before heading down to Austin. The organizers are the very cool Dallas-Fort Worth metro area art-nerds of The Metrognome Collective.

The show info:
Saturday, March 18
10:00 PM
$8 or $20 for a 2-week pass to all of the FXFW shows!

Where is it?

1518 East Lancaster Ave
Fort Worth TX 76107

I'll be proudly opening for the original dirty rapper Blowfly, a man with an impressive history. It sounds like his Blowfly alias is one filthy dude that you must see. The rest of the acts are listed at the Metrognome Collective's MySpace page, but as I'm writing this their page is down for some repairs.

Re: keeping the 6800GS cool

I'm not having luck with this mod so far. The 6800GS is designed a little differently than the other 6800's, so I wasn't able to use the passive memory heatsink. Also, i don't think the heatsink is pulling the heat off the GPU as well as it could be. So far I'm only seeing gains of 2-3 degrees Celsius. I'm going to do a little research and see what I can do to fix it.

Music: adcBicycle LP

adcBicycle is a project I bumped into at em411. This album is one of the coolest things I've heard in a long time. Basically it sounds like happy accident after happy accident until finally an effortless-sounding cohesive album was finished.

Naturally, this probably wasn't how he created the album. I'm sure it was carefully planned and labored over, but I can't get over how naturally improvised it sounds. I've spent a lot of time playing improvised music with a lot of different people, so I'm familliar with the excitement of making something up with someone else and it sounding amazing on-the-fly. This album gives me that sensation when I hear some of the meandering electronica meshing perfectly with live instruments like drums and guitar. For you non-musicians, think of the feeling you get when you get when you're talking to someone and you both say the same thing at the same time.

For you lucky cheap-asses, the adcBicycle LP is available for free download! I bought my copy and am very proud to own it. Cool packaging too for being homemade!