Category: life

Let’s say that one day, you receive a package in the post. It has a strange return address you’ve never corresponded with. Inside, there is a small bottle of mysterious liquid with a note attached that simply reads: “Drink me”.

Would you just shrug your shoulders, open the bottle, and guzzle down its contents?

Hell no!

Then why oh why, when people encounter mysterious emails beckoning them to run attachments of executables, they just dumbly click on?

For the average user, there is absolutely no reason to send or receive executable programs or scripts (anything with an EXE, BAT, COM, PIF, VBS, etc. extension) through email.

Executables can be viruses. Especially ones where you cannot guarantee their origins. So use some sense.

A disturbing, grinding noise started coming from my PC earlier this week.

When I opened it up, I discovered the noise was coming from the fan on my northbridge chipset. My motherboard is an Asus A7V266-E, one of the few motherboards where, in a fit of insanity, Asus used a fan instead of a simple heatsink to cool the VIA chipset. (Maybe it’s because this mobo was made in 2001 – at the twilight of the dot-com era – where insanity was never in particularily short supply.)

It’s insane because a passive heatsink provides adequate cooling for a chipset, makes no noise and suffers no mechanical wear and tear. It’s the more efficient technology by far. A fan, on other hand, eventually strips its bearings, gets bogged down with dust and gunk, and starts making with the grinding before it shortly stops working.

So I did what any decent engineer would do – I stuck my finger in it, flicked the fanblades until it stopped making that infernal racket, closed my case, and went back to my game of Natural Selection.

Sadly, the problem returned on Thursday, and it brought friends. Shortly after booting up, my computer locked up hard. When I rebooted, I got this unhappy message:

Non-System disk or disk error replace the disk and press any key.

The hard drive sounded like it was trying to spin up, wavered a bit, and then shut itself down. :O :O :O

After panicking for a few minutes, I checked the connections and rebooted. This time, the hard drive seemed to be back to its normal self. However, the chipset fan still wasn’t looking too healthy. The moral of the story is, when a northbridge chipset gets a little too hot, parts of your computer start fainting.

I decided to make another pilgrimage to the modding capital of Canada, Bigfoot Computers, to pick up a chipset cooler.

The pretty blue thing on the left is the Zalman ZM-NB47J Northbridge Heatsink I picked up. Quasimodo on the right there is the backside of the crusty old Asus chipset fan. The white gunk is thermal paste.

As you can see on the picture on the left, the chipset is the square object with the dried up thermal paste on it. I wiped that stuff off with some isospyrol alcohol, applied a thin film of Arctic Alumina on it and the heatsink and voila, mission accomplished.

That giant metal thing on the far left is the Zalman heatpipe cooler on my Radeon 9800 Pro Ultimate. Now it has another Zalman heatsink to keep it company.

In the D drive: Far Cry. Quite possibly the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen. Too bad the AI and gameplay is so mundane.

Checked out ROM’s new Eternal Egypt exhibit on Friday. It was mostly statues and ornamental slabs, but at least there wasn’t a pot shard to be seen. I still wish that the British Museum (where these pieces were loaned from) allowed guests to take pictures. Visitors aren’t even allowed to draw sketches on paper.

Speaking of information access, Silverlotus noted that while the pharaohs were regarded as living gods while they were still alive, in death their tombs were pragmatically robbed by thieves and their names strickened from public records by political rivals. This is why pharaohs had their names carved in so many places; hopefully, the thieves and politicians would miss a spot.

A visit to the ROM goes hand in hand with a stop at Greg’s Ice Cream, a small hole in the wall that serves outstanding ice cream. For me, it was a Roasted Marshmellow and Root Beer float. For the lady, a Banana Toffee ice cream and a Strawberry and Coke float.

On Saturday, we went over to the Cheese Boutique to pick up some jalepeno-studded Havarti and aged Jarlsberg Norvegian (a Baby-Swiss). Also tried two kinds of Quebec Artisan cheese, hand made from raw milk. Apparently they squeeze the rinds daily, making a creamy cheese that tastes virtually like butter.

Had to hurry and finish up most of the cheese for dinner; the Jarlsberg was starting to harden. In the modern world of perservative-added freeze-dried food, we totally didn’t realize the fresh cheese would go bad so soon.

A little gourmet never hurt anyone. On the other hand, Epicurious featured a delightful article on getting into the ritziest restaurants in New York. It’s this quote that does it for me:

“I was clearly in another league of exclusivity. Lay eaters wouldn’t dream of trying to enter a restaurant where if you order verbena tea they bring the plant to your table and a white-gloved waiter snips the leaves with silver shears.”

Now THAT’s prententious! :rambo:

I really should write more about my personal life. It’s just not very interesting, in my opinion.

Had lunch with the ol’ university gang at Duke of Westminster last Tuesday. The Duke isn’t my first choice because I just don’t feel inspired by their menu, but it happened anyway. It’s the closest restaurant to Frenchy’s work. Being in the basement of First Canadian Place, the Duke is also noted for being a giant dead zone; cellphones don’t work. On Tuesday, I met a businessman outside shivering and fiddling with his Blackberry.

The chuckle du jour: businessmen in front of us in line asking the maitre’d, “Can we have a spot that’s quiet?” Considering that the Duke’s mean sound level is probably 40dBA, they should have went to McDonald’s instead. Why, they could then even surf the Internet wirelessly on their laptops!

Over a surprisingly moist chicken pot pie, baked beans and buttered peas, BigPoppa regaled us with his recent pilgrimages to the Big Apple. His employer has been shipping him out there three weeks out of four for the past couple months. It has become an excellent opportunity to bulk up on Starwood membership points and build an impressive hotel shampoo collection. In his recent trip, he checked into an Executive Club King room at the Westin New York at Times Square. It comes with a “Heavenly Bath^SM” – a specially designed bathtub with two showerheads and an arched shower curtain rod so your right elbow and the curtain will never touch, ever again.

But travelling is not all fun, games and chocolates on your pillow. It can be lonely. It’s just you, in a big hotel room in the big city, eating by yourself. That’s why I brought Silverlotus with me on my trips to Toronto.

1) So my boss and I are driving to a meeting, and some twit cuts us off near Yorkville. My boss swore, threw his hands in the air, and exclaimed, “I wish I had a gun!”

“No you don’t,” I replied evenly.
“I wish I had a gun and diplomatic immunity!” he replied.

He will make a fine lawyer. 🙂

2) Sometimes arranging to have dinner with Juice is like directing a Broadway musical. Wish I remembered that my cellphone supported three-way calling. It was a good dinner in Chinatown though.

3) One of the most upstanding, long running April Fool’s jokes: Bungie’s Pimps at Sea.

If you’re going to be late going home, call the home and let your woman know. Especially if you and your friend (say, Juice) go on a roadtrip to Costco. If you don’t, it is advisable to bring back some treats, such as grilled chicken penne alfredo for supper and two freshly made catuccis (pastry rolls filled with ricotta cheese and chocolate chips dusted with powder sugar) for dessert.

In the D drive: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The Prince finally makes a debut to the 3D world in proper style (unlike Prince of Persia 3D). Very smooth, simplified gameplay with a great soundtrack, although combat with multiple enemies can be thorny. You see, the Prince will automatically “lock on” to the last target that struck him, and you cannot switch targets manually. This can be frustrating if you are just about to give the final blow on one monster, only to automatically switch to the one behind you that just took a swing at you. Also, only half a dozen enemy types, and you’ll have fought them all 30% into the game.

Ah, the web. You can use it to save time, or waste time, at will! So, who is Quanta, really? According to Create my Picture I look like this (actually Dare looks like this too…hmm..):

According to Cyborgname, I am this:

Windows Calculator shouldn’t take seven seconds to load. Certainly not on a ThinkPad T30 with a Pentium 4 2GHz!

I’ve TweakUI‘ed and Cachman‘ed, Ad-aware‘d and X-Setupped, plus fiddled with virtual memory. I cleaned out the system tray, Registry and Startup for pesky TSRs. No dice. What could it possibly be??

I loaded up Disk Defragmenter and hit Analyze. File Fragmentation: 47%!

How could this be? This is a brand new laptop. And then it hit me. The laptop wasn’t installed from the ground up, but given the standard disk image by corporate IT. This is the same image the smarties in IT are giving to every laptop user in the company. Great.

(There’s an extra story of waste here: all ThinkPads come with Windows XP Home plus license preinstalled. When we get them, we format them and replace them with an image containing Windows 2000 Pro, also licensed. No wonder Microsoft is so rich.)

It was a rainy Spring afternoon when I got on the streetcar downtown. Rainy and dull. Wet and dark make gloomy companions. I think that if the TTC ever buy new Red Rockets, they should get ones with glass ceilings. Wouldn’t that be a treat?

I was interrupted from my reverie on sunroofs by a female voice.

“I’m the original office b!tch.”

She was a young woman, talking to her male friend. “This guy went up to me and said, ‘We’re going to have a working lunch, can you go out and get us food for eight?’ I’ve worked five years in this industry so that I can order people fvcking lunches?”

“I didn’t realize it until now,” she added. “But it was such a cushy job.”

At that point, my mind wandered away on the subject of lunch, and I thought of a toasted cheese and herb bagel with roasted red pepper and sundried tomato creamed cheese. Mmmm.

Moral of this story: Be a moving target.

Two strips of bacon, four triangles of butter-soaked toast, two eggs over easy, a tomato slice as garnish, and a bottle of ketchup. Are you smiling yet?

Back in university, that was what we called “The ABB Big Breakfast”. You see, in the basement of the ABB Building was a hidden little cafeteria. It was replete with cozy little booths luxuriously upholstered in periwinkle vinyl and plastic wood. It also served the best breakfast on campus.

It didn’t matter that another cafeteria up north also advertised a “big breakfast”. It just wasn’t the same. At the ABB, with a wink and a smile, you could even get your eggs sunny-side up.

Alas, the ABB Big Breakfast is no more. In my final year, the cafeteria was demolished and replaced with an exam writing centre. Its replacement opened in a brand new building across the street, with an anonymous Pizza Pizza franchise and cramped McDonald’s-style formica stools welded to formica tables. The ABB Big Breakfast is now lost for all time.

So when The Guardian waxed poetic on all-day breakfasts, I was smiling from ear to ear:

“To fully appreciate an all-day breakfast, it should be eaten after midday, hideously hungover, when the sober-minded are choosing between some disgusting wrap or trays of lurid raw fish.”