This is almost scary: Cristopher Walken for President - 2008

Some quick fact-checking yields this link, which links to a story in the LA Times.  Just a hoax, nothing to worry about.

From the LA Times article:
"The person who put this together was just trying it as a hoax, I presume," said Mara Buxbaum, Walken's publicist. "My take on it is it sounds like the person who put this on the Web took his role ... in 'Wedding Crashers' too seriously and now wants him to run for the presidency."

Last Friday, Goblin, my main computer at home, started flaking out on me. It would boot up for about 2 minutes and then turn itself off and not boot up again for awhile. After 4 or 5 days of working with it (I was sick so it took awhile), I discovered 3 major problems, the biggest of which was trying to hide.

The first problem, and most obvious, was that the grounding in the power strip it was plugged into was broken. Every time I touched the metal on the computer (and the metal on the vga cable when it was unplugged), I would get that fuzzy "I'm an electircal conduit" feeling. Not enough to really hurt, but enough to make it's presence known. When I hooked the computer up to a different strip, it wouldn't happen.

The second problem, and almost as obvious, was that the northbridge fan had gone out. I replaced it, thinking that it was possibly overheating the chipset and shutting down.

Those two steps helped some, but it would still shut down. I booted up to the BIOS to watch the hardware monitor and got to see the CPU temperature rise to almost critical levels. I shut it down again.

The fan was still running fine, so that wasn't it. I noticed a lot of dust buildup on the heatsink though, so I decided to clean it out [1]. I discovered my third problem when I went to put it back in. One of the 4 posts on the plastic retainer clip on the motherboard has broken. The heatsink wasn't making good contact, but just enough to let it run a little. I think the extra voltage going through the heatsink might have hurt it some too, but I couldn't confirm that.

Then it took me two days to get a new retainer clip and put it in (Thanks for the discount, John). It's back up and running fine, but I still need a new power strip before I can put the thing back where it goes (and have my dual monitors again).

Shadow has been missing since Wednesday.  Both of the dogs got out, but I found Alex that day.  Alex & Rachel are both really sad about it.  If you have any information on her whereabouts, let me know.

One of her previous "owners" said she got out for 5 days once and came back so there is still hope.

If you don't know what Shadow looks like, you can go here.

I thought it was kinda cool:

p5-Convert-IBM390-0.20 Functions for manipulating mainframe data
Long description | Package | Sources
Maintained by: dev@fenux.net
Also listed in: Perl5

Back in August, I submitted a port to the FreeBSD ports tree because I was tired of having to rebuild it with CPAN every time I upgrade Perl on my boses. This way I can just use portupgrade to rebuild it when I upgrade Perl.

As a side note, I just submitted two more ports from the CPAN database for the same reason.

I've built myself an HTPC from spare parts the other day. I don't remember if I mentioned that before or not. I've named the machine Satyr because I enjoy the pun. I'd originally though about installing XP Media Center Edition, but I didn't have it when I built the machine. Instead, I installed Fedora Core 4. My idea was to create a MythTV box.

After playing with it for awhile, I decided that wasn't a good idea. The main reason is that the tv-out support on the video cards I have was horrible. I finally got a copy of XP MCE 2005 and went to install it last night. That's when I discovered that you can't upgrade to XP from Linux. Granted, it took me awhile to figure that out.

When I went to install XP (all versions exhibited the same behavior), it would tell me that setup was inspecting my computer's hardware configuration, and then the screen would go blank. I verified the disk worked on another box. I also tried Windows 2000 which loaded setup fine.

My next thought was hardware compatibility. I removed everything that was nonessential piece by piece, and it continued to fail. Eventually (a few hours later), I gave up and decided to try and install 2000 and run a full install afterward from inside it. On a whim, I swapped install disks on the first reboot of 2000, before the graphical installation section. It worked.

Apparently, there's something in the boot sector that the XP install just despises. I had repartitioned the drive from the Windows 2000 recovery console previously, so it wasn't the Linux data. It had to be the master boot record. Totally bizarre.

On a side note, I'm currently listening to an inteview between Jon Udell (one of my favorite columnists at Infowolrd) and Bill Gates. It's pretty informative, but it's largely techincal. They're discussing the future direction of software development ala Office 12 and .NET 2.0.

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The Super Mario Brother's Super Show is showing for free on Yahooligans TV.  I used to love this show when I was a kid. (Still do.  I'm watching it as I type this.)  They also have Inspector Gadget, Legend of Zelda and others.

I came across something interesting earlier, Duck Doom.  It's a cross between Duck Hunt and Doom.  I've been enjoying it.  The game can be found here.  There is also an article about the game and some interesting Duck Hunt mods, like a sniper rifle available here.

I haven't bought an nVidia video card in a long, long time.  At least not for my own computers.  Why?  Because I use dual displays on both of my main computers.  But nVidia supports that.  Yes, but their support used to be horrible.  As I've discovered this evening, that is no longer the case.

I finally got some pictures to come out ok of my hand after it's really started to heal. It looks a whole lot better now, but it still hurts quite a bit. The doctor gave me a "scar pad" to help with the scarring. It makes quite a bit of difference, but I don't really understand how. It's just like a piece of gelatin that gets held on by an Ace bandage. This picture shows how much better it looks. I've add three new ones to the gallery to give a full view.

I'm getting very close to having the GeekTao project finished.   As part of that project, I'm going to be posting more detailed notes on the whole process on GeekTao.net.  Should all be done within a couple of days.