The Grimy Bathtub

So reason for silence has mostly been that there’s really nothing to talk about.  My life is gloriously boring.

Even right now! I’m camping Jailer of Faith.  SO MUCH FUN.

Anywhoo, mostly srs bzns time.

Japan was hit by a huge earthquake recently, and as a result of the aftermath they took a severe hit to their power infrastructure. To conserve power Squeenix shut off FFXI and FFXIV for two weeks, and Metal Gear Online did the same.  So for that time I decided to get off my ass and write, or at least lay down the last of the groundwork for it.  I got pretty far!

Well, sortof.

I got everything outlined, even stuff that will happen after the Big Story (still unnamed!), fleshed out a lot of characters and whatnot.  Also found out that it’s nearly impossible to write on the weekdays thanks to work.  So, weekend warrioring it is. I still fully intend to post everything of the Big Story here, just going to be a while. It’s four books, and the first one alone is 40-50 chapters of varying lengths that mostly just puts down the foundation for the other three.  It’s still very intimidating to look at all this and realize how much story this is; it’s a lot of story and I have some stuff that I need to keep in mind.  Like for example I had severe asthma when I was a kid, to the point that PA class was nearly impossible without a pump.  As a result of this, I have a *much* lung capacity larger capacity and I tend to… not put commas where they normally should be.

I was taught to put commas where you should normally take a breath and I need to take less breaths when talking than normally thanks to the inhaled steroid treatment.  Makes sense now? :p

So the story will happen, i’ve got a bit written.  More to write starting next week (saving weekdays for editing I think) since this weekend is a write-off due to FFXI and FFXIV being back up.

But before I get to that I promised some hot computer action.

Shortly before the downtime my computer starting to act worryingly.  After returning from work I found my computer off, which is odd because I leave it on to log MSN stuff.  My phone can occasionally miss a few messages.  Boot up, no ram.

Insert scream here.

Cas lent me eight gigs of ram from her old system and this is what ended up frying.  Needless to say I felt like total shit.  I swapped them around, nothing.  I slapped in my old ram and it finally booted, went into bios and screamed again; voltages were about 10% higher than normal.  I concluded quickly that my motherboard was finally hitting the dust.

Wow good thing i’m not writing today I sound like crap.  River of bricks! (Brocks?)

Anywhoo, good news is that I was already planning a good future-proofing upgrade. Long story short here I put in the HSF wrong and the sound card in a semi-reserved slot… and didn’t put all the risers in.  I got demerits on my geek license now, and I deserve them. Luckily the good people at MemoryExpress (local comp shop) tested, remounted, and retested everything for me and now it works!

Fuckedaround is dead, long live Lazarus.

• CPU: AMD 1090T 6-core
• Mobo: Crossfire IV Forumla
• Ram: 8 gigs of G.SKILL ripjaws
• New 120gig SSD HDD for Win7/FFXI/FFXIV
• Scythe Mugen cooler

Lots of old parts too: PSU, sound card, two HDD, monitors etc all the same as before.  Now for the scary part.

I can’t get it at 100% load.  At all.

As of right now I got three FFXI clients running, Firefox 4, and Foobar2000 and it’s running at a paltry 26C with 18% load.  With FFXIV it only gets to 33C and 35-40% load.

FFXI I was able to bump to it’s limit pretty much, three clients at 1440×900 with double background resolution steady at 30fps unless i’m in port jeuno.

FFXIV is nice at 30-60fps at drawing quality 8 (80%), no AA, background quality 5 (highest), and all the pretty effects except occlusion (which is broken).

I have no games right now which pushes this beast, and with nothing pushing system temps higher than 50c, this system will last me a very long time unless I get stupid with it.