'Starfield Simulation' screen saver in Windows 7 64-bit
The only screen saver in Windows 7 64-bit that I actually like is "Ribbons". All the others are terrible and require way too much horsepower just to run a frickin' screen saver.
What would be great but can't do is put the old "Mystify" screen saver in Win7, because the new one sucks, but oh well.
I was however able to get one of those old screen savers from the old Windows into the new, "Starfield Simulation". It may be really simple, but I've always liked it.
What I did is copied the file ssstars.scr out of a Windows 2000 install I have in Virtualbox on to my Win7 64 desktop, then right-clicked it, Install, and ta-da, I've got my "Starfield Simulation" back!
It's not "Mystify Your Mind," but hey, I'll take what I can get. :)
a bevy of computer parts on the way
Some assume that I, being as technically inclined as I am, think that I have the latest/greatest/bestest computer money could buy.
Wrong.
For the longest time I have been a seriously cheap-ass computer user and have no shame in admitting that. I hate spending money on computer stuff and always have.
How I got to be a cheap-o computer guy is that way back in the day I bought a Compaq Deskpro 6000 5200 (meaning Pentium 200MHz CPU) desktop - a "business" desktop PC. It came loaded with Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Cost: $2,000. Oh yes, I was the type to put seriously good money into computers back then.
I was so proud of that box - at first. Then I quickly realized that NT 4.0 is a piece of crap as a desktop OS and should have went with Windows 98.
Then I discovered the CPU wasn't MMX-enabled so I couldn't play the latest games on it the way I wanted.
Then I discovered the optical drive that came with it was absolute crap. It was a seriously weird-ass thing. If I recall correctly, it would read normal CDs fine as any other optical drive would, but to write data it needed a special disc had to be put in this cartridge which I think if I'm not mistaken was DVD-RAM. If not it was something similar to it. All I know is that I never bought those writeable discs because they were ridiculously expensive back then.
After that experience I always went cheap or at best slightly-above-cheap and never looked back because I vowed never to get screwed like that again - and never have.
The upgrade
It has now come to the point where, once again, I have to upgrade. My hard drive, a Western Digital 250GB, operates perfectly, but it's almost three-and-a-half years old and been through some seriously heavy use. Hard drives usually don't start going wonky until around the four-year mark if you've been beating the crap out of it, but I'm being better safe than sorry here.
I am currently running Windows 7 in 32-bit because the maximum RAM my motherboard will support is 2GB - and that sucks. That needs to be upgraded so I can go 64. I do have the 64-bit DVD of 7, but can't use it because of my RAM limit.
I bit the bullet and decided to buy just about everything needed for the guts of a new computer.
This is the list of stuff I bought, with a total end price of $348.06, shipping included. I hated spending the money, but my computer is how I make my living so it's not like this was something I could put off. Anyway, here's the list:
- Gigabyte GA-EP43T-USB3 motherboard
- Arctic Silver Thermal Material Remover & Surface Purifier
- Lite-On DVD Burner
- Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
- Rosewill RCX-Z775 80mm Sleeve Low Profile CPU Cooler
- Sunbeam PSU-BKS580 580W ATX Power Supply
- Mushkin Advanced Essentials 4GB (2 x 2GB) - bought twice for 8GB total
Now an explanation of each:
Motherboard
I purposely went with the 775 socket because I'm transferring my existing Core 2 Duo over to it. I also purposely chose this mobo because it has USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, so when USB 3.0 stuff starts becoming available, I'll have the ports ready-to-use.
Side note: I'm shocked at how many Intel CPUs this mobo supports; the list is huge. Intel used the LGA 775 socket for a good long time (ever since Pentium 4 505!) and still does with the Core 2 line. That's cool.
Thermal Remover
Since I'm transferring the CPU from one board to another, there's going to be old thermal gunk from when I originally installed it. That needs to be removed proper before installing in the new mobo, otherwise there could be problems. I don't like problems.
DVD Burner
Speaking of problems, my existing DVD drive is flaking out. I swear, I wear out one of these every 9 to 18 months. Doesn't matter how little or how much I spend on an optical drive because it will bust, so I go cheap on purpose since it's going to break anyway in less than two years.
500GB hard drive
I figured as long as I was going to get a new primary HDD that I might as well go for a 500 gig'er. I actually do quite well with my existing 250GB, given its "limited" space. However, it's aging and needs to be relegated to storage-only so the OS can run happier on a new HDD.
Yes, I could have gone with a 1TB. I didn't because I don't need it, and all the reasonably priced HDDs of that size are 5400 RPM and not 7200. In other words, slow. I'm not putting 8 eff'ing gigs of RAM in my box only to have it bottlenecked by a slow HDD. And if you're wondering how much more you need to spend to get a decent 7200 RPM 1TB drive, the answer is around 25 to 35 dollars over the price of a comparable 500. That may not sound like much, but if you read the reviews for a 500GB compared to 1TB drives, you'll notice people have way better luck with the 500s.
Concerning the 2TB drives, it's $180 for a decent 7200 RPM. Nope. Too much. 500 is fine for me, speedy, and priced right.
CPU Cooler
The existing CPU cooler fan I have is the one that came with the CPU originally. As most people who build PCs know, the fan provided is adequate but just barely. The replacement fan is smaller and way, way quieter. It doesn't need to be pretty as long as it works, and I believe the one I bought will fit the bill nicely in that respect.
Power Supply
Based on the reviews for this product, I'm either going to get something that works like it's supposed to with nary a complaint, or it will be total crap. No in between about it. It's either going to be wonderful or suck complete ass.
Then again, almost everybody who wrote a bad review for it was trying to do things with their computer that this PSU simply cannot power properly. This PSU absolutely cannot handle the draw of an overclocked system, nor can it handle high-power stuff like big-ass video cards. If the system is "civilized", not overclocked and doesn't have a bunch of high-draw crap in it, the PSU should work out just fine.
If it turns out the PSU is crap, I'll just return it and get something else.
8 GIGS OF EFF'ING RAM, BABY
Even though I bought a mobo that supports 16GB RAM, I went with 8 that takes up all the banks. Why? Because I have a low-end Core 2 Duo. Besides which, when the time comes that I need 16GB RAM or more, I'll just buy a whole new computer. :)
The RAM is the kingpin of my setup. This is what allows me to go 64-bit properly, and even though it bothered me somewhat to pay what I did for it (133 bucks), last year this would have easily cost well over $200. I paid $16.63 per gig of RAM. It would have been nicer if it were $10 per gig (which it will be in 3rd quarter 2011 most likely), but 16.63 is way lower than it was when at roughly 30 bucks a gig - which was truly not that long ago.
It may sound like a waste to give a Core 2 Duo 8GB RAM, but it isn't. The lack of speed in PCs these days is not the processor's fault anymore and hasn't been for some time. In fact the biggest bottleneck is at the hard drive. That will be (mostly) eliminated when SSDs become affordable for everyone, but that's not going to happen for a while yet.
My stuff arrives tomorrow or Thursday. If it all works out the way I hope it does, having a rebuilt and significantly upgraded box for just under $350 is a good deal. Not the best deal, but it's the best I could do in the current market.
logan's run
For the past few years now I've been purposely seeking out movies I saw in my teens or younger years and re-watching them. Many of these were sci-fi flicks where as a kid I had absolutely no clue what was going on in the movie, but watched it anyway. One of these flicks was Logan's Run.
Movies like this were shown back in the day where broadcast television (as in NBC, CBS and ABC) would periodically run a sci-fi movie during the summer. They were shown to fill time before the new fall season was introduced because, well, they had to kill time somehow. You have to bear in mind this was well before cable was a standard thing in most households. People back then watched broadcast TV because there was nothing else on unless you wanted to run to the video store and rent a movie on VHS.
Any feature film that was shown on broadcast television during the summer was "Edited for Television", meaning significant amounts of the movie were cut out in order to fill a standard two-hour time slot. Remember, for every 30 minutes of TV time there are 8 minutes of commercials, meaning a two-hour show had just under 90 minutes to show the whole thing. If the movie ran over that (which this movie does from its runtime of 119 minutes), huge chunks of the flick are cut out when put to television. This usually results in missing out on things important to the movie, like, y'know, plot points.
Anyway..
I watched Logan's Run as a kid on broadcast TV. Like I said above, I had absolutely no clue what was going on when watching it originally. None at all. For many years I had made a point to watch the movie again just to at least get what the hell the story was about.
Well, that time finally came. I re-watched Logan's Run.
This movie sucks.
Before I get into why it sucks, it's important to note that this sci-fi flick is pre-Star Wars era. LR was released in June 1976; Star Wars in May 1977. In other words, LR was the best you could get for sci-fi at the time.
LR is so dated it's not funny. It screams "I WAS MADE IN THE '70s" all over the place. Outfits, haircuts, super-cheesy synthesizer music and effects, crappy miniatures (it's so obvious the dome cities were models it wasn't even funny), you name it, it's total crap.
The cheesiest effect in LR are the guns that the Sandman characters use. When they shoot the gun, nothing comes out of them to hit the target. A crappy 1/2-inch butane flame comes out, then whoever is getting shot just has a small firework explosive explode. There is no ray from the gun to whoever is getting hit, nor is there any projectile. Cheeeeeeeesy.
The second cheesiest effect is that robot thing in the ice cave...
When I saw that I thought, "You have GOT to be kidding me..."
As far as the storyline is concerned, it's disjointed as hell. Yes, I could follow along with it enough to understand what was going on - but that didn't help making LR believable at all because the flow is completely off, and the flick is just plain weird.
What I mean by weird is that there is simply not enough explanation as to why people act the way they do - particularly Logan, the main character. He simply does not have a good reason to run at all.
The biggest flaws in this movie are right at the end - and I'm about to spoil the whole movie for you but I consider it spoiled anyway so nothing of value is lost:
Okay, so Logan is captured after coming back from The Outside, restrained (I think) in front of a computer and the computer interrogates him. There is no explanation who's running this computer at all or where it came from other than "it's just there".
Upon a mind interrogation by said computer, Logan doesn't give answers the computer likes, so it just, y'know, explodes for no reason.
Logan is then all of a sudden not restrained at that point, is able to defeat ALL the other Sandmen around him easily with the guns that don't shoot anything but still hit targets, and get away without a scratch.
The whole eff'ing city explodes at this point. People panicking everywhere and running around like crazy - yet in the very next scene they're just calmly walking out of the top of the city to The Outside. And guess what - none of them are hurt.
Are there any people carrying infants or smaller children which are known to exist in the dome? No. Not a one is carrying a child. Guess they all died in the fire. Bummer.
Then they all play touchy-feely with the old man's face, and...
THAT'S IT. MOVIE OVER. THE END.
This is the exact thought you'll have when you see the credits roll: "What the frig did I just watch?"
Bad movie. Bad, bad movie.
No Internet Exploder!
I think it's safe to say that Internet Explorer 8 is the last "bad" IE that will ever exist, because IE9 is pretty darned good. I've been using it off and on and it's definitely a good browser.
With that said, here's a good ol' late-90s web page still in its original state: No Internet Exploder!
The date at the bottom of the page states it was last updated April 24, 1998. That's just over 12 years ago as of this writing. It was a time a few months before Windows 98 was released, meaning everyone was using Windows 95.
If you think there's enough Apple hate going around right now, it was nothing compared to the mudslinging people threw at Microsoft left and right back in the day. You see all the standard childish "words", like M$, Microshaft, Windoze, etc. Funny stuff. Mac and Linux zealots still use these childish "words" to this day (and look unbelievably stupid every time they do). I guess some things never change.
The primary font used on the web page is Verdana, which is, of course, a standard Windows font. Oh, the irony.
There's also the standard boycott-everything-this-company-makes message there as well. Whenever anything becomes popular on the Internet, someone will throw out "boycott [insert popular thing here]". Happens every time.
Oh, and let's not forget the "International Anti-Microsoft Webring". That's linked there too. Clicking on it brings you to the original webring or force-redirects you to some dopey Nintendo fanboy website. Don't ask me why that happens because I have no idea. Webring is just totally screwed up and has been for years.
When you read that web page now, sure, it looks stupid as hell. But the original author was REALLY REALLY SERIOUS about getting people to stop using "MSIE". Did he? Of course not, because nobody cares.
headbangers ball
In the '80s and '90s I was all about metal, although I never really dressed nor acted the part. Unofficially, it's par for the course that if you work in IT, you're a metalhead. I have no idea why this is, but it's pretty much guaranteed that in any IT dept. there's at least one guy who is.
Headbangers Ball was an MTV show that ran from 1987 to 1995. It was brought back in 2003 on MTV2, and to the best of my knowledge is still running, but I've never seen the MTV2 version. The one I'm going to concentrate on here is the first run of the show.
The only reason to watch HBB was because of the music, obviously. It was only on that show where you could see stuff that was never played in regular MTV video rotation.
All this show had going for it were music videos and crappy interviews. When I say crappy, I mean crappy. They were bad. Most rock musicians simply didn't know how to conduct interviews correctly.
The show operated using the lowest possible budget because MTV absolutely didn't care about it at all. And why would they? They shoved the show into a late Saturday night time slot where no business would want to advertise, so the show didn't make any money at all. HBB was the definition of "cheap cable program" during its entire run.
Only the truly dedicated tuned into HBB. The core audience were metal fans. This got skewed in the '90s by the fact MTV tried (and failed) to say "alternative rock" and "hard rock" were the same thing and put them on the same show. That obviously didn't work.
The end of HBB was one that didn't surprise me. It just simply vanished. No warning. No farewell show. Nothing. Just gone. MTV didn't even notify the host of the show it was going to happen. They just called the guy up and said he didn't have to come to work anymore.
Nobody has ever received a straight answer as to why HBB was canceled the way it did, but I can take a really good guess. The show wasn't making any money and at that point was costing the network just to run it. Being the budget was so low to begin with, there was absolutely no cash to spare to even put together a farewell show because they were probably already too deep in the hole at that point. The only choice was to give it the axe and do it unapologetically. No decent advertisers were interested, no money was coming in, the show was costing too much to keep running, so... that was that. Buh-bye.
Dropping HBB was one of many things MTV did in order to reinvent itself to be profitable. Remember, MTV invented the reality show format with The Real World that first came about in 1992. That show is to the best of my knowledge the first MTV-original program that was actually successful, wildly popular and wildly profitable. After seeing what original programming could do, dropping HBB was an easy decision as far as the suits at MTV were concerned.
HBB was awful and weird. The fact of the matter is that anybody today could recreate HBB on the Internet if they wanted to. All it takes is a crew of two people (host and camera guy), interview a bunch of local unsigned bands and go from there. It's not rocket science. The "set" could simply be some dude's living room, Wayne's World style, because the HBB set truly wasn't that much better.
I'm sure there will be another HBB, although it won't be called that. It's sure to exist only on the Internet because no network would touch it, and MTV obviously doesn't go anywhere near rock music these days. Maybe a metal fan will be able to bring back HBB in a new Internet flavor.
Hey, it could happen.
Until then, just relive the glory days and get a shirt.