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A Series of Unexpected Events

The past 6 blog entries was originally 1 really long blog entry, initially titled “A Series of Unexpected Events.” However, it even got too long for me to read, so I decided to split it up. I mean, all entries were inputed on Sunday night and basically lasted the entire week be editing the post timestamp.

Anyway, given that these entries were written almost a week ago, I do have some updates.

I finally got all my computer hardware that I need to build a new file server. I ended up picking up a new ATI Radeon X600 for $27 shipped (Ungsunghero found it on AnandTech For Sale/Trade). I’ve also ordered some extra RAM as it turns out they were some high quality RAM and at $20 after rebate, it was a really good deal. Since 2 of my hard drives were OEMs, I needed some SATA cables and SATA power adapters which I picked up from Monoprice.

My final configuration will look like this:

  • BIOSTAR TForce TF570SLI motherboard
  • AMD Sempron 64 3000+ CPU
  • HP 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 DDR2-667 RAM
  • ATI Radeon X600 128MB video card
  • 4x Seagate 500GB 7200.10 SATA hard drives
  • 1x Western Digital 100GB hard drive
  • Sony NEC Optiarc DVD burner
  • Ultra Case
  • Ultra 500W PSU

It’ll probably share the LCD, keyboard and mouse with my existing file server. I might pick up a USB/DVI KVM, but those guys aren’t cheap.

The motherboard already comes with dual gigabit ethernet adapters, so that’ll work out great as a file server. It also has 5.1 surround sound card, though I highly doubt that’ll be utilized at all by the file server.

Ungsunghero and I spoke about laundry after he saw my post a few days ago. One of the topics we hit was bleach. He was saying how bleach makes all his white clothes nice and white. I’m actually afraid to use bleach now. The last time I did, I ended up with 3 or 4 dark colored t-shirts with a bunch of red dots. It’s not because I used bleach on my dark colored clothing, but it had splattered a bit when I was doing the light colored laundry and somehow got onto my other clothes. Plus the fact I have no idea how much bleach I’m suppose to use, I just keep pouring into that little hole in my washing machine until I think it’s about right.

We also reached the topic of laundry detergent. I’ve been a big fan of liquid Tide before, but decided it didn’t really matter much for me. I’ve been using powder Tide for the past few years, the main reason being it lasts more loads than a big jug of liquid detergent. I still haven’t finished the first box I bought from Costco since I moved up here. With liquid detergent, I use up one of those big Costco jugs in less than a year. However, I noticed that Costco has these new super concentrated Tide detergent that I’ve meaning to try. Unfortunately, I bought a new box of Tide from Costco (when it was on sale with coupon) which will probably last me another 2 years. I’m also pretty sure at least 10-15% of my laundry detergent was used up by my mom when she visited in those few short weeks.

One thing I’m very strict about with all my laundry is fabric softener. I MUST use it on every load, because I really like how soft my clothes come out. I actually prefer Snuggles, but since Costco only carries Downy, I’ve been using Downy for the past few years. I’m not sure if Snuggles actually makes my clothes softer, but the cute little soft bear makes it seem so much softer. I guess if I had a kid and felt how soft he/she was, then I might like Downy more.

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New File Server

So during this Paypal/Newegg promotion, I decided to pick up some hardware. I’ve been meaning to build a new file server for some time, but didn’t really have the resource (money and time) to do it. I did have 3 Seagate 500GB 7200.10 Hard Drives sitting around just collecting dust. With the $20 off $100 discount, I saw it as a prime opportunity to pick some stuff out. Newegg not having tax for us Washingtonians was an added bonus.

I ended getting another Seagate 500GB 7200.10 for $80, making it the 4th. That means in my RAID5 array, I’ll have a total of 1.5TB.

I also picked up a mobo+cpu. The main criteria for my new motherboard was that it needed to have 6 SATA ports since I plan on adding additional hdds as I need more. But the 6 SATA ports conflicted with the fact that none of those motherboards came with on-board video, forcing me to now look for a cheap PCI-E video card. I wouldn’t have mind on-board video since a file server doesn’t really need that great of a graphics card. The motherboard I ended picking up was BIOSTAR TForce TF570SLI with a cheap AMD Sempron 64 3000+ Manila 1.6GHz. After the $15 motherboard rebate, this combo would have cost me $85.

I also picked up a stick of HP 1GB PC5300 DDR2 RAM from TechOnWeb for $20AR.

The final thing I need is a cheap PCI-E video card and Ungsunghero’s made a good suggestion of pickup one up from FS/T (for sale/trade) forums. Since I don’t need something need or great, getting a used and cheap PCI-E video card would be the best option.

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World Satellite TV Scam

So my dad called me in the middle last week, and he tells me he thinks he got scammed. I was like, my dad, scammed? How is that possible. He’s more careful about these things than I am. I mean he even modifies the patient-doctor contract that says if they’re unable to get money from their insurance companies, that the patient is liable for the fee to that the clinic is liable for the fees and can not come after the patient.

Anyway, my dad signed up for satellite TV that came with a series of Chinese channels and the company that he signed up with is a subsidiary of DirecTV called World Satellite TV (located in Rosemead, CA), which promised $5/month subscription. However, the contract states $30/month, but World Satellite TV promised the $25 difference will be paid by them every month. At first everything worked fine, but after a couple months, they started paying less and less, not enough to cover the full bill. I told him to send me what he has and I’ll investigate to see if anything similar is reported.

The company in question is:

World Satellite TV, Inc.
3337 Del Mar Ave
Rosemead, CA 91770
626-307-1888

My dad gave them call, but only seemed to get an answering machine/voice mail box. After his persistence, he finally gets through, but it was a weekend and they won’t be able to look into the issue until Monday. It feels like a scam and it smells like a scam. Then it’s probably a scam.

Anyway, it’s currently only 6 months, and they signed up my dad for an 18-month contract, and there’s a $250 ETF (early termination fee). I tried searching online for more information about World Satellite TV, but wasn’t able to find anything. I told him to call DirecTV and see if he can argue his way out of this since it was one of their subsidiary that was lying to customers.

I got a voice mail from my dad the next day telling me, that World Satellite TV apparently has credited the remaining balance on his account. However, he doubts that their company can last much longer and he’ll still be happy if he comes out of this just paying $15/month.

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Laundry Magic

Turns out that if I use hot water to wash my clothing instead of just warm water, my cotton t-shirts become REALLY SOFT!!! I had some stains I wanted to get cleaned off a couple articles of clothing, so I decided to use hot water for my batch of white/light-colored clothes instead of the regular warm. I know hot water shrinks your clothes, but given that these clothes have already gone through the washer many times, I don’t really see them shrinking much anymore. Every other step of the laundry was normal, but after the dryer, these shirts were so soft!!!

Speaking of laundry, for some reason, many of my t-shirts during this wash, turned inside out. I don’t think it had to do with hot water, since my dark colored clothing pile also had a few. I don’t think it was when I took it off as I’m usually careful about remember to flip them correctly before dumping them into the laundry basket (since I hate have to extend my laundry chore by having to flip all my clothes back to their regular position).

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Pantene Pro V – Full & Thick

So I opened a new bottle of shampoo this weekend. I ran out my existing regular Pantene Pro V. I had picked up some new Pantene Pro V at Costco awhile back when they were on sale. They had the regular kind (Smooth & Sleek), but I decided to try out their Full & Thick (Fuerte Y Abundante) in this new stylish bottle. Boy was I wrong to choose that. It made my hair really rough and hard to comb (my tail). I usually like my hair soft, but that’s the opposite of what Full & Thick does.

Oh well, looks like I’m going to find some new shampoo.

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Lost Bank of America Check Card

So on Saturday, after my haircut, I went to deposit some money into my Bank of America checking account. Everything went through fine, until I got back to the car. I was still enjoying my mocha frappuccino when I thought to myself… did I remember to take my ATM card. Let me back track a bit. The barbershop that I’ve been going to has a Starbucks next to it. Across the street is a Bank of America. So I start searching through my pockets and my wallet, but my ATM card was no where in sight. It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes and there was no one around or anyone I noticed when I was leaving the ATM. So I run back to the ATM, but the card was no longer there. I started searching the around the area and the trash bin and so on, but didn’t find anything. I tried to remember back to the time when I was leaving, cause usually if you don’t remember to take your card, it starts beeping like crazy. However, I don’t recall it beeping at all. The only explanation I could come up with was that I had taken the receipt and left and it was on the screen asking me if I wanted to make another transaction. Receiving no response, it reset and ate the card. However, I couldn’t eliminate the possibility of someone taking the card after I left.

Anyway, I take out the BofA receipt and call the customer service phone number listed on it. Unfortunately, going through the automated answering machine, it informs me that they are currently close and I should call back on Monday. I was like F*CK! F*CK! F*CK! There was really nothing I could do at this point, so I drove home contemplating what my next move was. Since this ATM card could also act as a debit card, I needed to report it stolen asap. Thank god that this account only has about $300 in it, so I wasn’t too worried. Worse case scenario would be to lose all that $300. Anyway, when I got home and checked Bank of America’s website. The latest transaction was still just my deposit. I clicked on their Contact Us link and apparently they have a 24/7 hot line to report stolen/missing credit and check cards. Awesome!

I give the number a call and was quickly assisted is blocking the card. The rep gave me 2 options: To issue me a new card (takes 7-10 business days) or temporarily block the card and allow me to search for it and call back when I find it. I opted for issuing a new card and if I really needed to access my BofA checking account in the meantime, I can always go in and see a teller.

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Soccer

So last Thursday, a bunch of my co-workers and I decided to play some soccer. I suck horribly at the game, but like to think myself as a null-op, someone who’s contribution and damage to the team balances out to 0. The game has always been tiring the last few times we played, but this one being the first time this year was extremely hard on my legs. My legs were so sore the next day, I could barely walk (even after a 12hr sleep). I had actually gone to bed at 12am that night and slept till 12am the next day, and still didn’t want to get up.

My legs remain sore for many days and was still feeling it a bit this morning. Walking was not a easy task and I’m pretty sure people thought I must’ve walked like a penguin. It was especially hard in the morning, because even the slightest touch of the bottom of my foot was somewhat painful. I guess running back and forth for 2 hours trying to kick a ball (or block it) wasn’t really something my legs have been trained to do yet.

I decided to take a few days break from the exercise bike, but today was able to almost fully recover up to my 9 miles in 30 minute exercise regiment.

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Death Note (Anime)

I just finished watching the Death Note anime series. Although the series finished airing a month or 2 back, I wasn’t in a rush to finish watching it since I’ve already read the entire manga 2 years back. The reason I actually started reading this manga was I heard it was done by the same artist as Hikaru no Go, one of my favorite animes/mangas so far. I think it probably ranks 2nd after Rurouni Kenshin. I was walking through a bookstore the other day and noticed that Death Note mangas have already been licensed and is sold in bookstores.

Anyway, there weren’t that many differences when comparing the anime to the manga that I noticed, though I didn’t think the story was able to be told in 37 episodes. I was expecting at least 50+ like Monster, though I guess that’s a good thing considering long anime series tend to drag on with fillers and recaps.

I still haven’t watched the Death Note movie and after watching the anime series, I’m not sure I want to anymore. Like most suspense and puzzle animes, once you’ve watched it once and learnt the trick, there really isn’t that much fun in rewatching it, even if it’s in a different form. I definitely felt bored through many parts of the anime series. However, if you’ve never read the manga, I would HIGHLY recommend this series or the manga. The storyline was excellent and the logical thinking animes have always been fun for me.

The only difference I’ve really noticed (or maybe remember) is the ending. Spoilers (Show)

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Trailer Spoofs

I was watching some trailer spoofs and thought, how awesome would it be that if the official trailer of a particular movie was nothing like the actual movie. Of course it has to be done well, but imagine the viral marketing! It’s like completely throwing a curve ball at the audience. These days, movie trailers reveal too much of a movie and you basically know the story and can pretty much guess the ending. It’s quite seldom a good trailer gets released that’s enough to entice me, but not ruin the story.

I mean just look at these trailers:

They’re just awesome and completely screws with your mind. Of course they’d might have to be a bit more tactful since if I saw that Mary Poppins trailer, I probably wouldn’t take my children to go watch it. Would you choose the family movie (The Shining) over the scary movie (Mary Poppins).

Speaking of trailers, you ever go into a Costco or Sears or Best Buy and think to yourself, they could definitely put much higher quality content on the screen to display the awesomeness of their HDTVs instead of some DVD or those stupid TV guides that tell you why an HDTV is better than a standard TV. It probably is easier to control the multitude of TVs from a central location if they all use the same inputs, probably regular composite video, since all TVs have that input. I mean if you play really good HD content, the image quality speaks for itself! If I were to ever have a store that sold TV, I’d just be looping all the free HD movie trailers over and over. Of course, only those rated for everyone.

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No Audio When Streaming Video Through Windows Media Player

So for the longest time, I’ve been having problem with the audio when I streamed videos from particular sites. At first I thought it was just Firefox, but IE7 had had the same problem. CNN, MSNBC, and Yahoo! (just to name a few) all had problems with the audio. However, when playing videos off my gallery that used WMP (e.g. Detective Conan – Childhood Ending), WMP would play the audio fine, so I had initially eliminated WMP from the list of possible culprits for the problem. It was starting to get annoying as whenever I wanted to listen to a news report on CNN or MSNBC, I would have to find it on YouTube.

Anyway today, when I was trying to watch a trailer on Yahoo!: Facing Windows (Finestra di fronte, La), I was pissed that there was once again no sound coming from the video. The reason I was watching this trailer in the first place was that the foreign title La Finestra di fronte is actually the name of one of my favorite songs that I’ve listened to repeatedly and without the audio, I was definitely not enjoying it one bit. The song’s actually called Gocce di memoria by Giorgia, but the they also have a version with no lyrics and played by the National Symphonia Orchestra just titled Finestra di fronte (wasn’t able to find it on YouTube). If you’re interested, Amazon.com has the soundtrack available: La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Soundtrack. Anyway, it turns out this was the movie the song was used in and actually the the soundtrack that I have.

La finestra di fronte - Facing Windows - SOUNDTRACK - album cover
(enlarge image)

So I started searching online to find out what could possibly be causing this problem. I quickly found this thread: Multimedia: No audio when streaming video

This was exactly the problem I was having and turns out the solution was as simple as changing a 1 to a 0.

Here are the instructions provided by xray88:

Make this registry change and I’m pretty sure it will fix your problem. If it doesn’t work, you can always change it back. It’ll work. 🙂

Go to the following registry folder:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\
    NodeCLSIDs\{95037DA1-6ED9-4B27-8CFF-9AD3DFB0B2F2}]

Double click on “Auto Insert” on the right side of the box.

Change the Value from “1” to “0” and click OK.

You should be set.

I didn’t even have to restart either of my browsers and audio immediately started playing. It turns out that when “Auto Insert” is enabled, WMP has problems streaming content with mono audio. I have no idea what the “Auto Insert” thing does, but disabling it definitely got my streaming audio to start working again.

According to cwwl, there is another way to fix this without messing with your registry (for those who are scared to screw something up):

First Thanks to xray88 for the registry change it works.

If you do not want to change the registry do this. The registry fix is the best solution but the fix below will work for the faint at heart.

  1. Open Windows Media Player
  2. Click on the “Now Playing Tab” and select “More Options”
  3. Select the “DVD Tab”
  4. Click on the “Advanced Box”
  5. Under the Out Put Box “click the down arrow” beside (AS is (no change)
  6. Select “1/0 mono”
  7. Click “Apply & OK” and “OK” again
  8. Exit Media Player

I tried following these instructions, but they started to differ after clicking the Advanced button. A ffdshow video decoder configuration appeared and it did have the Output tab, but nothing similar to any of the instructions that follow. I wonder if the bug is actually an ffdshow bug then.