Author: Joe

Surprise Holiday

I found out today that next Monday is Memorial Day, which is one of the paid holidays we get. Yay for a 3 day weekend. If I’d actually looked it up I’d have noticed, but I’ve been busy lately and didn’t think of it.

Today was graduation at the Air Force Academy, so they had the Thunderbirds out for their yearly air show. Unlike last year, I actually found out when it was and got to watch it from the balcony on the back of our building. It was neat, especially when they flew somewhat low right over us on the way back to the AFA.

Leaving work today (later than I intended, which has been common lately) I saw a rabbit trekking across the parking lot. I’m guessing it’s one of the ones that lives in the landscaping in front of the building, but I’m wondering what would prompt a rabbit to go that far from anything green or all hiding spots besides cars. Perhaps it spotted a bush and decided something along the lines of “that’s green, I’m going to go eat it despite standing next to all these other plants.”

Game Night

We had another organized game night on Friday (organized meaning Michelle hosted it).

I finally had a chance to try my portable ping pong set, and it went over very well. We set it up on a table that was somewhat smaller than a standard ping pong table, and since the balls are standard and the paddles are good quality it was hard to keep from hitting the ball off the other end of the table. The other problem was that behind one end of the table was the top of the stairs down to the basement, so we had a few shots make it downstairs. I wasn’t interested in keeping score (I was just enjoying hitting the ball back and forth), but Calvin and Ryan played a game where they kept score. They were planning to start another match as I was leaving so I left it. Before I realized they were going to use it more I’d packed it up and Ryan commented on how compact it was, which drew a startled look from Calvin who apparently had thought I’d brought the table (a sturdy oak table) as part of the set.

Other entertainment included a demo of Battlefield 1943 on PS3 where we passed the controller around on death. The only map we played on was Wake Island, which I believe was in the demo for Battlefield 1942. As expected, the most fun I had was when I managed to grab a Zero and fly around, though the control stick wasn’t inverted like I’m used to so I didn’t do particularly well. I’m considering finding my disks for BF1942 and my joystick and playing that a bit.

We went out to a Mexican place for dinner. Best (only) Mexican food I’ve had in at least a couple years. It was good, though I’m not generally a fan of Mexican food. I don’t go out to eat much and I generally just get a cheeseburger when I do, but the only burger I noticed on the menu had jalapeños on it so I just went with a quesadilla.

Besides game night, I spent a significant amount of time this weekend playing co-op Portal 2 for achievements. We still are lacking a couple, but we played every level in co-op at least once, and several got a number of play-throughs. The worst achievement we got was to complete all of course four (the one with excursion funnels) with no deaths. I think there were 9 levels in the course, and the last two were very easy to die in. We also got sloppy a few times on the earlier ones and died, but we know that course very well by now, including several short cuts, since we had to start over on each death.

I meant to get some WoW in with a couple people I’ve been playing with recently, but since school is over for them their schedules are somewhat more random and I don’t think we had all three of us online at the same time all weekend. Perhaps if I’d left game night earlier I could have caught them, but oh well.

Late Post

Meant to post something last weekend, but didn’t like what I managed to write so it didn’t get posted.

The weekend before last I switched my newer desktop into the case of my older desktop (that case was bigger so it would fit a bigger video card). The next Monday when my new video card (GTX 580) arrived I installed that into my new desktop and continued to ignore the fact that my old desktop was spread out all over my floor and table.

Last weekend I reassembled the old desktop and mostly put away the boxes from cases, motherboards, and stuff that I had out for the documentation on which set of pins went to which plug from the case so little things like the power button would function. Still haven’t actually hooked it up, but I’ll probably do that tonight or tomorrow.

This weekend so far I’ve mostly disassembled the video card that I was replacing (GTX 280):

Most of the purpose of those pictures was to show where the thermal paste goes if I decide to put it back together, but it also shows how massive the GPU chip is (nearly as big as a pentium 1 chip, but the pins on it are much, much smaller and closer together). I also wanted to take the plastic cover off the heat sink, but one of the tiny little screws is completely stuck and working on that more will just further strip the teeth off it or my screwdriver. I’m considering just cutting the plastic to take it off, but if I decide to try to put it back together either I’d have to glue it or let it rattle (it’s not a load bearing screw, just holds the cover on the heat sink).

If I decide not to try to put it back together the heat sink is a large chunk of what looks like aluminum (with copper heat pipes), so perhaps I’ll take that to my dad in case he gets everything to cast something out of aluminum again.