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!

The Aura is Black as Oil

BOOM SHALOCK LOCK BOOM



Oil prices should be going up again thanks to news that Abqaiq, one of the biggest oil refineries in the land of our good friends the Saudis, had an attempted gank go down today. Luckily, the brunt of the attack was stopped by Abqaiq security, but there were some explosions. The article I read didn't specify if the attackers caused it or if it was an unrelated accident. Barrels of Oil went up $2 so far in response to this.

The Aura is a Blinding White Fury

I stole this GIF because it suits me well lately:


I hate my journalism minor right now. Feature Writing, a class that seemed to be the highlight of a journalism minor turns out to be my worst class in years. We've had to sit through three guest speakers in the last two weeks. It seems like the prof is looking for any way possible to get out of having to actually TEACH us some shit. Oh, don't get me wrong, she's full of insight when it comes to scratching down some aloof comments at the end of my 1800 word article; too bad it never translates into me actually learning how to go about my writing in a "better" way.

I've contemplated dropping this class and the whole minor more times in the past few weeks than I took shits. I hate when this happens because I'm trying SO hard to forget all of the real-life problems my family and I face everyday to be able to get this fucking degree. I put aside overwhelming hopelessness and frustration just long enough to squeeze out some articles and i get worse grades than I could had I actually squeezed out some grunt in the teacher's hand.

keeping the 6800GS cool

I recently upgraded my trusty NVIDIA Ti4400 card to the 6800GS by eVGA. Since the necessary power supply upgrade (went with Enermax again) I've enjoyed amazing graphics performance on my over 3-year-old system. My only concern is that the 6800 runs at 60C, and over 70C while running WoW.

Today I ordered the Arctic Cooling NVsilencer:


I'll let you know how it goes, but from what I've read, it should knock 10-20C off both the idle and the working temperature.

OMGWTFBBQFTW

new blog

probably my fourth or fifth... but only a few of them are still up:

my blog for the electronic musically inclined: kidko.em411.com
the obligitory myspace: myspace.com/kidko
my built-in website blog, which i might as well shutdown now: kid.koexist.com