I've been noticing a lot of problems with Wraith lately. First, it was a bad stick of RAM, then it started turning off by itself at random. The best I could figure out was that it was a bad power supply. All the signs were there. Luckily, I had a spare power supply lying around, or so I though.

I installed the spare power supply and when I went to connect the 4-pin connector to the motherboard, it wouldn't go in. I pulled it out and looked into the connector on the motherboard, and it looked like something was stuck in there. So I looked at the connector on the old power supply. I was suprised by what I found. I've never seen anything like that before.

The best I can figure out is that it shorted out at some point in time, but it looks like it had been that way for awhile. But after thinking about it some more, the only way I could imagine it shorting where it would do that is when it was installed. I hadn't installed the power supply in that case or motherboard. I blame Duck.

So here I was, left with a dilemma. I have my old P4 2.4 GHz processor and motherboard I could install, but it has problems too. It wouldn't support the 3.2 GHz P4 from Wraith either. So I went out and spent $300 I shouldn't have. But it was either that, or work from my laptop for a long time. That's just not acceptable.

So now, I have Spectre. On the bright side, Spectre has a dual core AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. It's a nice speed bump.

The downside of all of it was that I had to do a fresh install of Windows Vista. I'm posting from it now, but I've still got a lot of software to reinstall today.

I've been busy lately, and I think it's starting to get to me. At the end of December, I picked up a new project, a big project.

It all started when one of my existing clients from HolosTek called me up and had an idea. He wanted to get involved in starting a dating website, but he didn't know where to start. Of course, I agreed because I'm poor and could always use some extra money.

What I didn't realize, was how big the project was actually going to be. For the last month and a half to two months, I feel like I've done nothing but work, sleep, and spend a little time with Kortnee.

I have to admit the project has been a lot more interesting than I expected. I've learned a new framework for PHP development (CakePHP) and I've learned quite a bit about using AJAX for fast page loads and clever effects. I always enjoy expanding my skill set.

The project still has a little ways to go before it's open to the public, but you can see what's available. It's called The CandiShoppe. Also, if you're interested, you can signup to be notified when the site is open. The current plans include offering totally free access to everyone on the site for the first few months. After that time, certain features will require paying a subscription fee.

Earlier today, I was finally catching up on reading Coding Horror. I've been behind on a lot of things, but that's another story. I came across an interesting artcile on BitTorrent.

The part that really made me "oooh" and "aaaah" was the link to some source code for a visualization of how BitTorrent works. There's an animated gif in the article that shows part of it, but it really doesn't do the visualization justice. To remedy that, I've uploaded the java applet with the visualization so it can be seen in all it's glory.

This is getting ridiculous. Tuesday, when I came to work, my left monitor was dead. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I had to replace it with an older monitor (which had been mine at one time) off a desk that is seldom used. It’s dark and can’t be adjusted to make it bright enough to use regularly. But it’s just usable enough to do something on.

Today, while I was talking to one of the salesmen, the right monitor died. It went fuzzy for a few seconds, then flickered, then finally went out completely. All this time, it was making odd popping sounds.

Now I have the problem of trying to steal someone else’s monitor so I can work. The LCD monitor I stole was from a not quite seldom used desk, but I can get away with it for the moment. But then I had to spend about 15 minutes getting the colors adjusted so it looked like it was supposed to. I ended up having to adjust the white point on the monitor funny to get it to be dark enough. It was just too bright.

All together, that makes three monitors that have died on me in the last 45 days. I haven’t been able to replace any of them. I’ve just had to keep stealing from where I could. This should finally force the issue so I can get replacements.

I wrote a quick program today to filter a list of email addresses out of an old email that had been forwarded a couple times. The program itself is very simple, but it took me about 15 minutes. Most of that time was digging up the proper commands for reading in the input.

I think it's mostly because I haven't written any new Perl code in about 2 years. I need to find an excuse to write more Perl so I'm not so rusty when I need.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Handle;

open (INPUT, ")
{
        chomp $email;
        $email =~ s/^ *?>> +?(.+?),.*$/$1/;
        print "$email; ";       
}

close (INPUT);

I came across this the other day and couldn't resist the urge to pass it along. The advice given won't work for long, but for short encounters, I see a high probability of success.

From Penguin Pete's Blog:

From BusinessPundit.com's How to Network: For Introverts.

The article has some good advice for those of us that have trouble in social situations. Definitely worth a read if you, like me, are indeed an introvert.

I was playing with The Funniest, which is a great way to waste some time, and I came across this image from XKCD. It gives me bad ideas.

While it's not much to look at on it's own, today's Irregular, and most especially the long annotation that accompanies it, offers an interesting look at art. The discussion on the piece of "music" title 4' 33" almost killed me, but it was much too long to repost here. I strongly suggest giving it all a read, espescially if you enjoy modern art jokes.