Day 3: A song that makes you dance

Neo-Disco band, the Scissor Sisters, make me want to dance like a drag queen.

Day 2: A song that makes you cry

A little background on the character this song is themed for:

Solid Snake, the main character of most Metal Gear games, is an ex-Army badass who finds out that he is a clone of a near super-human man called Big Boss because he is just that. He's the biggest boss. So, Solid Snake, upon finding out that he is the inferior clone to this guy that he actually killed several years previously, goes on to save the world from a nuclear weapon.

Ten years later, at around 50 years old, he looks like he's 80 and feels much older.

Turns out that the scientists that participated in the cloning actually altered his DNA to make him rapidly age and die an early death to minimize a secondary cloning. He would die a miserable early death in the name of government secrecy.

So he saves the world again, and quits smoking.

This song embodies the crushing misery of living a life devoid of hope outside what you create for yourself.

Day 1: Favorite Song

I'm doing this song a day bullshit thing that is trendy right now, but not really because I'm trying to be trendy (when have I ever been trendy?) but because I really have to rack my brain for some of these.

Excessive adverbs aside, I plan to keep this up to the best of my ability. Here is day 1, my favorite song.

AFI changed my life, and I'm not shy to explain it. In 2001, shortly after their album, "The Art of Drowning" was released, I was on a bus to a music festival in Wyoming. Freshman year of high school. Good times.

Anyway, the most attractive girl in the tri-state area asked me if I knew this group, and I may have wet myself a little. Wet myself with copious amounts of charisma, I imagine. She let me listen to her CD, and I realized that there were musicians in the world that never made the top 40 charts.

Ever since then, I've been interested in things left out of the public eye, and it's led me to some great media, great philosophies, and great friends. Things that I may never have found if not for the sound of a thrashing guitar and nonsense lyrics blowing my mind at such a critical age.

This isn't the greatest song of all time, and if I think too long about it, it isn't even my favorite, but it's always the first to hit my mind when asked, "what's your favorite song?"

PS3 Shenanigans pt 3

This is it. Frankenstation MK. 3.




It runs quite well for about two hours. Since there is no cooling mechanism, it overheats eventually and shuts down. I have to wait for the oil to cool and it runs again, so at this point I just need a pump and radiator and I'll be in full working business.

PS3 Shenanigans Pt2

Nope, this project has NOT died a slow and painful death. It has survived!

So, that's the motherboard.

And that's the old heatsink that was super-faulty.

And that's the super-big hole I cut to make room for the new--

super-better metal heatsink. Don't mind the little marks, that's just thermal grease that I cleaned off later.

I hit a pretty big snag here though. See, I drilled two holes in the heatsink to use some screws to connect the heatsink to the processor.

Then one of them sheared off. Inside the heatsink.

One screw held though, so I didn't give up hope. I set it up, put a fan on it, and turned it on for just a second to eject my brand new copy of Final Fantasy 13.

Voila! Success!

Right now I'm in the process of waiting for the local farm store to resupply it's stock of mineral oil (I bought them out last night) and then I'll post the exciting conclusion!

PS3 Shenanigans Pt. 1

So, the Playstation 3, bane of my time spent best elsewhere, and home theater champion, has crapped out on me, again. This is actually the third time THIS system has died on me (I got a replacement about six months ago when my first one died.).

Since Sony refuses to replace it for free, I am left with little choice but to fix it on me own. And I have done so twice now. The yellow light of death is a symptom of a cracked solder on the Cell processor. It's a microscopic crack due to either over heating, or uneven heating. To fix it, you heat up the processor to about 700 degrees F and it melts and reforms, then solidifies as it cools, allowing the proper connections to be made and maintained.

That is, unless your heatsink has two gouges in it from faulty manufacturing. Like mine.

The original heatsink will repeatedly cause this problem for me no matter how much thermal grease I put on there, and no matter how cool I keep the system. It's going to heat unevenly and cause differing rates of expansion along the surface. The constant uneven (oxymoron?) shrinkage and expansion will only serve to ruin my goodies.

Solution? New heatsink. Added awesomeness? Playstation 3 submerged in a bath of mineral oil.

Heck. Yes.

Check out this video for an idea of what I'm doing:


Except with a Playstation instead. I have most of the materials assembled: Fish tank, heatsink, fan, plan... Once I decide how to mount the generic PC heatsink to the proprietary Cell processor, and then buy five gallons of mineral oil, I'll get started for realzies.

Pics included.

I have a lot of thanks for Rachel, who has been absolutely fantastic in supporting this ridiculous endeavor. She drove me to Wichita twice now to get parts, and also gave me a pep talk when I felt like it wasn't going to work.

Dvorak anyone?

Been trying to learn this Dvorak keyboard for a few days now. I'm probably up to twenty words per minute now, if I'm concentrating hard. It's killer, slowing myself down like this, but hopefully it'll pay off with a boosted typing speed eventually. Now i'm bored, having spent my time resisting the urge to look at the keys...