2005 August archive at Puck’s Blog

Archive for August, 2005

Aug

As those who’ve golfed with me will attest, I’m not that great a golfer. This year signals only my second year of playing, so I’ve got an excuse. My usual score at Cheam Golf (a par 56 “not-quite-executive course”) is around 88. My best-ever score there was an 80, and last week I shot an 81.

Yesterday I was on fire. I parred the first three holes. On the fourth I hit the green and choked to a four-putt. But on 9 I got a birdie (my first in a long time) with a 35 foot putt and finished the front 9 with a personal-record-shattering 32 strokes. My second 9 wasn’t as good but still a “good day for me” score of 40 for a total of 72.

I even won a skin of $15 for the birdie on hole 9! Man, it sure felt good after dealing with days of computer hardware frustrations!

Aug

Motherboard update

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: Hardware

My (second) new motherboard arrived today (NCIX’s next-day delivery is really quite good) and I installed it and it booted up right away. The only difference it seemed to notice was the Gigabit LAN that it had that my old mobo didn’t, and everything seems to be running perfectly.

Now I’ve got a bunch of work to catch up on! On Friday! Bah!

Aug

Motherfuckerboard

By Puck 0 Comments

Categories: Hardware

My computer’s motherboard died on me yesterday. The computer could power up, but wouldn’t post or give me any error beeps. I removed everything and tried to at least see if it’d try to post alone and give me errors but got nothing.

It’s covered under Asus’ 3 year warranty, but getting a replacement now that it’s past the one year that NCIX will handle means shipping the broken board to Asus in the states, waiting for them to try to fix it, and then waiting for it to be shipped back via FedEx Ground. As it’s my work machine I simply can’t be without it that long.

So I ordered a new one from NCIX. They didn’t have my exact model any more, so I got the Asus A7N8X-X (mine was an A7N8X) which you’d think would be slightly better what with all the USB ports being 2.0 where mine had a mix of 1.1 and 2.0. Except once it got here (next day deliver! Nice!) and I was ready to install I realized that it wasn’t only lacking the 5.1 sound (not a huge deal) but it also didn’t have SATA connections for my two SATA drives. That means that my work data is *still* inaccessible even if I were to hook this up with a new hard drive. Bah!

So I’ve ordered the proper new mobo (A7N8X-E Deluxe) which should be here tomorrow and has the bells and whistles I need (and the ones I just want) and should also work fine without me having to do a full Windows reinstall (hope, hope, hope) and I can get back to work.

Now, I can probably return the totally-unused A7N8X-X motherboard, but that’d involve me driving in to Burnaby and losing at least 15% restocking fee on it. Instead, I’ll offer it here to anyone local that I know that would like a good, new, cheap motherboard. It’s Socket A, so you can buy yourself an AMD chip of some type (2800+ is about $133) and some memory and you’ve got a nice cheap upgrade for an aging system. Anyone? Anyone?

Aug

Foozer

By Puck 3 Comments

Categories: Cool

I’ve pretty much sworn off big arena concerts lately. It’s just a huge hassle and unless you get excellent seats I’d much rather be watching a DVD of the performance.

But holy crap I just noticed that Foo Fighters are touring with Weezer and if they make it to Vancouver (or did I miss them?) I would be sorely tempted to go.

Aug

40 Year Old Virgin

By Puck 2 Comments

Categories: Movies

Mel & I managed to leave Loki and World of Warcraft (which we’ve started playing recently due to the dastardly Josh buying us two copies) behind and catch a movie.

I’m a huge Daily Show fan and Steve Carell has been excellent in everything he’s done since leaving the show. I wished there was more of him in the quite-good Anchorman movie.

I went in expecting to see a good SNL(Saturday Night Live)-skit type comedy — you know the type. Goofy character that’s not really grounded in reality experiences all sorts of wacky situations that play off of their goofy attributes. Instead, I got a very real-feeling yet incredibly funny movie. Yes, he’s 40 and has never had sex. Yes, he’s a bit weird because of it. Yes, there are situations (several of them) where this is played out for humorous effect, not the least of which are flashbacks to his “almost” times.

But the characterization is very real. And his non-virgin new-found buddies aren’t just shallow women-chasing jerks, they’re also real people. For the sake of both the comedy and drama, each is pushed to the edge of reality a few times, but it’s so far above what I expected that I left not only laughing, but really entertained by all of their stories.

Two big thumbs up, 4.5 stars out of 5.

Aug

Medifast Update

By Puck 1 Comment

Categories: Body For Life

I’ve done seven weeks of Medifast now and I’m very happy to announce that I’ve lost over 30lbs.

Start Weight: 248.5 lbs
Today’s Weight: 217.8 lbs

I’m continuing to keep track in Excel and it predicts that when I’m done (in five weeks) I’ll be down to 199.4 lbs. I haven’t been under 200 since junior high!

As noted, the plan is to take 2-4 weeks afterwards getting used to eating real food all day (and honestly, enjoy myself just a little) and then I’m going to do Body For Life’s 12 week program and exercise off the remaining fat and build back muscle.

Aug

I thought I’d be more about the SCIENCE.

By Puck 4 Comments

Categories: Survey

More Emotional
You have:
62% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and
85% EMOTIONAL INTUITION
The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored well above average on emotional intuition and above average on scientific intuition.Your emotional intuition is stronger than your scientific intuition.

Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you’re good at Quake.

Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: