Just wanted to say Happy Birthday to Xyon. Coincidentally, I just received my free birthday meal postcard at The Keg. Yummmm….

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Random Crap:

Not going to be a traditional random crap post as I have way to much queued up for tonight. I finally got around to uploading my Monterey Bay Aquarium pictures. This is my 2nd visit and I quote what Cari told me another kid said, “I see the white shark, but where’s the great white shark?” I guess I was a little disappointed at the size of the shark, but it was still rather neat. I didn’t get to see the giant sea turtle though. You can see all the pictures in the Monterey Bay Aquarium – Visit 2 gallery album. Here’s a select few I thought were cool:

I also took a picture and video of the waterfall thingy:

About 20 seconds into the video, Cari seems to very afraid of the little kid that comes close to here.

Also, I promised you pictures of the cool present my sister got me. I forget what it was called exactly. 3D Art? 3D Jigsaw? 3D Puzzle? Anyway, it’s like a 3D jigsaw puzzle where you piece together well pieces to make a cool model. Mine was a dragon, but she had a fish and a plane also. The fish she was making was neat. Too bad I had to build it myself, though it was time well spent. I was somewhat bored at home anyway. Some pieces were loose and required glue to hold together. Most were pretty tight fitting:

I guess if I ever find time, I’ll paint it. Find time… haha. Anyway, it looks like I’ll be getting a new digicam soon. The one I have (Canon PowerShot S400) is giving me “memory card error” and sometimes showing the E50 error code. According to Smart Computing: This message will appear on the LCD (liquid-crystal display) of a Canon digital camera when there is an error formatting the memory card. The E50 error may appear as a result of camera failure, card failure, environmental problems, or misuse. It’s not my memory card as it works fine in any USB adapter. The original card is already dead, which I think the digicam is the culprit. Both are 1GB Compact Flash cards. I finally ended up pounding on the digicam with my fist and suddenly it starts reading my card again. I don’t know which one I’m going to get, but most likely back in the Canon family as they’ve treated me well. Probably and PowerShot SD600 or SD700. Depends what deals pop up I guess.

I’ll end this post with a comic strip that Cari showed me: (from s2kshift9k)

I’ve generally disliked the AIM client that AOL has been creating. I mean when it came out, it was decent, but sort of like IE, they just sort of let it sit there because they were everyone was using it. I’ve been using version 5.5 in conjunction with DeadAIM for who knows how long. It’s not because there hasn’t been new versions. AIM Triton came out awhile back and so did AIM Pro. AIM Pro was actually decent, but it was lacking features that I wanted. The feature I needed was logging, but AOL decided that feature wasn’t necessary version after version. Even AIM Pro just kept logs for 30 days or so before flushing them. Version 5.5’s UI was also pretty ugly. Honestly, the little ad doesn’t really bother me that much, especially when I’m running my screen resolution at 1920×1280. I also disable adblock on websites that I like and don’t have intrusive ads that take up half the screen. Adblock Plus has this feature you can disable the blocking on particular sites.

So RayAlome tells me about this new AIM 6.0 that was released a month or 2 back, and initially I just dismissed it as another AIM failure, probably worse than Triton (then again, nothing could really be worse than Triton). When I went back home this break, I removed Triton from my system and was going to install AIM Pro, but decided to give 6.0 a try. Honestly, I’ve found this newer version nothing short from amazing.

Remember back in the days of ICQ, where you can send offline messages and the person would get it immediately when they signed on. Well, that’s back! No longer needing to set alerts to see when people come on now (though the alert function is still good for stalking).

They also have their internal logging system. The file structure’s somewhat weird. DeadAIM broke the saved logs into directories by screennames. AIM 6.0 just puts all logs into one directory. But with indexers like Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, or even Lookout, you can have all these indexed and no real need to perform a long search.

Other features this new version provides include IM Grouping (which is really tabs, but on the side), ability to have 1,000 buddies (instead of the previous cap of 200), and some other neat stuff. They’ve also integrated it pretty well with their website (email, AIM Today, AIM profile, etc). AIM Today actually tells you how many IMs you’ve sent/received (actually somewhat scary) and other information you might be interested. I personally have that disabled from launching when I start AIM. You can also check out all your buddies’ info in one location without having to open a buddy info window for each one. Then there’s the AIM profile where you provide info about yourself and even add your Flickr, Digg, Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, YouTube, and even personal RSS feeds (which you can add at Buddy Network Settings).

So after I got back to Seattle, I did hit a really weird problem installing AIM 6.0 on my main box:

The problem appears that it’s unable to load the images for the buttons and skin, leaving a very ugly window. Interestingly enough, some icons do get loaded, but who knows what is going on. At first I thought it may have been a bad installation, but the UI (user interface) loaded fine on my other Windows accounts (not to confuse with AIM accounts). I thought maybe there was a setting, theme, or expression that wasn’t being correctly loaded, so I deleted my AIM user data and registry keys, but that didn’t fix it either. I had tried making myself an Administrator (thinking this program may be picky), but that didn’t fix it. I even tried uninstalling/reinstalling as an Administrator, but that didn’t do anything either. My computer back in LA is basically the same set up where I’m running as a user and not an admin and it worked fine. RayAlome suggested that it might be because of some UI tweak. I changed everything back into Fisher Price mode, but the AIM window didn’t change at all. I do tweak my settings a lot, but I have no idea what could be the problem here.

I ended up logging off and logging into my Admin account, renamed my “Documents and Settings” directory and logged back in to create a new profile as my default account, and guess what, AIM know has the correct skin. So it appears to be something in my registry since I’ve already uninstalled DeadAIM, the previous AIM client, deleted all AIM settings in my user profile and delete all the AIM registry keys in HKCU that I could fine. At first I thought I could deal with an ugly looking AIM, but today when I got home, I decided to just create a new profile and import the my data over. It actually wasn’t that bad. The most difficult part of creating this new profile was Outlook. Apparently there isn’t an easy way to export account settings. The data inside Application Data and Local Settings\Application Data are just your emails and calendar. Searching online resulted in this thread: Outlook 2003 Accounts File. Apparently Outlook account information since Outlook 2003 are stored in your registry. Therefore, I just exported: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook (thread tells you to use HK_USERS\{USER_SID}\, but if CURRENT_USER is just a shortcut to the current user’s SID. I then copied a bunch of other Application Data crap from my old profile to my new profile. Desktop and My Documents were a pretty easy move. Quick Start icons were somewhat hidden, but didn’t take me too long to figure out where they were stored.

So the things I did immediately was disabled Fisher Price mode and set it back to classic mode. Rearrange my icons and folder views. One thing that it did disable was my input languages (language bar), so I had to re-enabled all the ones that I used.

All this work to get AIM to look like this:

For those that want to disable the ads, Aim Ad Hack for AIM 6.0 is available.

So my computer has been rebooting automatically for quite some time. Usually it occurred when it’s playing a video, so I thought either the graphics card or the drivers for it were problematic, but even after upgrading the drivers and switching in a working nVidia GeForce MX420, the system still rebooted by itself.

I then slowly unplugged one thing after another, finally literally leaving just the RAM, CPU and motherboard and the boot drive. I had ran memtest for over 6 hours with no problems found. I even did a full scan disk and no bad sectors were found. I started to think I have a faulty motherboard or cpu. Although the symptoms I’ve been seeing looked really familiar to what happens when the motherboard detects a system is overheating. However, looking at the temperatures in the BIOS showed that everything was pretty normal, even immediately after a reboot.

The motherboard manual had recommended a 300W power supply and it seemed fine with mye 350W PSU, but I even installed a new SuperFlower 450W PSU and the problem was still there.

So the new motherboard I got was a ECS P4M800PRO-M V2.0 which had a power connector I have never seen before. Instead of 20 pins, it had 24 pins. I thought that was odd and started reading through the manual and it turns out that although there’s a 24 pin power connector port, it said can support either 20 or 24pin power connectors. According to my research, ATX refers to the 20 pin power connector and ATX 12V refers to the 24 pin power connector. Many power supplies has what is known as the 20+4 pin power connector which supports both ATX and ATX 12V, which basically means it has a detachable 4 pin on the power connector.

When I had tried to search online in regards to problems with this motherboard, there were many threads saying this motherboard was problematic with 20 pin power connectors. So I decided to get a 24 pin power supply to see if that’ll help. I dropped by Fry’s and started looking at their power supplies. The parking lot was quite a mess. It was the day after Christmas sale and I had to wait 4x at the traffic light before I even got into their parking lot. You know it’s crazy when they have Fry’s people at the entrance directing traffic and forcing you to loop around the back. Still wasn’t as bad as the Black Friday sale I went to a few years back.

However, it appears that most people were there to return stuff. The checkout line was actually only half filled. The other day when I went there to pick up my cpu/motherboard combo, the parking lot was half filled, but the checkout line was completely packed.

I was going to drop $75 on this Antec SmartPower 2.0 450W Power Supply, but ended up picking up a Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply for $60 instead. To my surprise, there was a $40 rebate on top of it, making it only $20 after rebate. However, it appears that their online website has it for FREE after rebate, but I don’t really have much time left around here so, $20 for the convenience was worth it.

After installing this new power supply, my computer hasn’t rebooted by itself yet, and things seem to be normal. Let’s hope I didn’t jinx it and it continues to run w/o any problems.

Merry Christmas to all!

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and hopefully got all the presents they had wished for.

Speaking of which, I just got this link from Digg: Lenovo – ThinkPad X60 Tablet and this new tablet has some pretty neat features over the previous X41 tablet:

• MultiView/MultiTouch indoor/outdoor viewable touch screen
• High resolution SXGA+ screen
• 802.11n MIMO WiFi
• Embedded WWAN
• Mobile docking solution

*DROOLS* The SXGA+ screen (1400×1050) is awesome! It’s an optional feature, but if I got the X60 Tablet, I would definitely get this screen. The default is XGA (1024×768) which has been what all the X series (12.1″ screen) has always touted, however 1024×768 is a bit lacking. Everything else on my X31 rocks. I just wish the screen had a better resolution. I’ve even sent in customer feedback asking for a better screen. Bill actually told me a month back that the new Thinkpad tablet was getting a better screen, but when I searched, i wasn’t able to find any information on their website, so I thought it was just a fluke he saw.

The additional wireless networking features seem nifty, but I’m not really that interested until it becomes more standardized.

The multi-touch screen is also nifty. Most tablets require you use a metallic stylus pen to work where the screen has a magnet system behind it to detect where the stylus pen is. It’s not a true touch screen. With this multi-touch functionality, it allows you to use you fingers or whatever other funky object you prefer to use to interact with the screen:

I do have to say I was a bit disappointed. When I first read multi-touch, I had thought it was referring to something like the Multi-Touch Interaction Research by Jeff Han. But I guess it’s still neat that you can now interact with your fingers.

I had tried to customize the X60 Tablet, but unfortunately the SXGA+ screen doesn’t seem to be an available option at this moment. I wonder how much that’ll add to the price given the fact that with a regular XGA screen, it’s already over $1,800.

I really wish they’d put this better screen into the regular X-series as I don’t really care for a tablet much.

Random Crap:

I was searching for images of 王晶 (Jing Wong) in movies he produced to show my sister who he was, and I happened to fall upon this cute porcupine image:

(from 杂文选刊)

Things a Man Should Know: About Fatherhood (from Digg) – a rather funny list of things dad’s should know about parenthood. Here’s a couple I thought were insightful or funny:

• Your child, at birth, already has a deeply complicated relationship with his mother, and, for the first year, you are only a curiosity. For a couple of years after that, an amusement-park ride. Then, a referee. And finally, a bank.
• Reason boys are better: They cannot get pregnant.
• The first time you change your son’s diaper and he pees all over you is not an accident. It’s foreshadowing.
• Let them take reasonable risks: A few scrapes in the long run are nothing compared with the scars left by hovering parents. Or tics. In preparation for risks: a Red Cross first-aid course.
• It never hurts to videotape the baby-sitter. Especially if she’s hot.
• Overalls are not only cute, they provide a convenient handle.
• Dropping food on the floor is a new and delightful skill to a one-year-old, not a deliberate attempt to annoy you. However, as small he or she might be, never underestimate an infant’s ability to project chewed food over great distances.
• Beware your child’s uncles, who will teach your kid dirty words, introduce him to liquor, and give him gifts of drums, archery sets, and possibly matches.
• It is, of course, your natural right to exert the above negative influences on your siblings’ offspring.
• Lock or no, please knock before entering, as the disruption of a youth who is spanking his monkey will be twice as traumatic for you as it is for him.
• Unfortunately, those books that say motherhood makes women desire more sex are referring to women who are not your wife.
• If the real response to his question is no, try this instead: “Go ask your mom.”

Carved Watermelon Head (from Neatorama)