More drive space?
Well, CompUSA is having a sale on Maxtor drives. They have a 250GB ATA/133 drive for $129 or a 250GB SATA-150 for $169. Dang, I really like these SATA drives, but for $129, I may just have to get two of the ATA/133 drives and run them in RAID-0 mode. I've already filled up a LOT of my new 400GB of striped SATA RAID drives with old video.

Man, I need to find a good server box that can just host drive space over a gigabit ethernet service.
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- posted by Jeff @ 10:26 PM | 0 comments

 
New main computer
I got all my stuff in for the new computer. Ordered it from New Egg. They have been pretty good to me before, and while their prices were about 5% higher than MWave, they offered free 3-day shipping, and MWave was $45 for 5-day. And the stuff got here FAST!

Anyway, I bought an Enermax case with a 350W PS, acrylic window (with two blue neon lit glow fans), and it has a front display temp sensor as well as a variable fan control. I went with the Abit IC7-G Max2 i875 based motherboard with dual SATA-150 RAID chips, dual channel DDR400 support, built in AC'97 5.1 surround sound, gigabit ethernet, 8 USB 2.0 ports, and 3 firewire ports. The Intel P4 2.8E (2.8GHz) with 1MB of L2 cache was a great price point, but it sure runs hot. I also sprung for a newer video card and got an ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB card. Also sprung for twin Maxtor 200GB SATA-150 drives (so I now have 600GB of storage in my main system). Finally, to top it all off, I picked up a Linksys EG008W 8-port 10/100/1000Mb/s autosensing switch to improve file transfers.

Benchmarked Data Bandwidth Comparisons

Drive	Size (GB)	Interface	Cache (MB)	Speed (RPM)	Access Time (ms)	Sustained Read (MB/s)	Sustained Write (MB/s)
1000Mb/sec Adapter	-	TCP/IP	-	-	0.3	54	54
100Mb/sec Adapter	-	TCP/IP	-	-	0.3	10	10
Maxtor 6Y200M0	200	SATA-150 RAID-0	8	7200	7	110	107
Maxtor 6Y160M0	160	SATA-150	8	7200	7	39	42
Maxtor 6Y200P0	200	ATA133	8	7200	7	41	38

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- posted by Jeff @ 6:58 AM | 0 comments

 
New MySQL phpBB setup on my site
Just created a bulletin board system with my one database on my webhosting. WOW, was it simple. IX Webhosting has a great setup.
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- posted by Jeff @ 9:17 PM | 0 comments

 
Band of Brothers
Just finished the 10th episode of Band of Brothers. Let me just say that I hope I never have to see the horrors of war, and I pray that my sons won't either. It never ceases to amaze me how much suffering the world NORMALLY has in it, and how obtusely immune to it most American's are because we have such a wonderful life here. I will always be thankful for the ultimate price so many people paid for me to be saying that. Veteran's: Thank you and God Bless and keep you.
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- posted by Jeff @ 10:19 PM | 0 comments

 
New main system computer
I'm running SERIOUSLY low on disk space, and now that I have my HTPC up and running, I REALLY like the Intel P4 with hyper threading. It makes your computer seem like it has two processors and divides up the responsibilities, and I rarely get times where my desktop slows to a crawl. In most cases, one "thread" of the CPU will be railed, and the other one is still responsive and taking care of ME. I really like that. Anyway, I also like the idea of running GIGABIT ethernet transfers. So, rather than take time to reinstall my OS and swap out the old twin 40GB RAID IBM drives for new 200GB IDE ATA133 ones, I figured I'd get another Abit board with on of the new Prescott 1MB L2 cache P4 2.8GHz 2.8E processors on the 90nm process technology. Might as well go with RAID SATA-150 drives too. All running over the cool 1Gbps speed of an 8-port Linksys gigaswitch. The more I looked at what I should upgrade, the more I decided to just sell my old Abit KD7-Raid, AMD Athlon XP 2500+, ATI Radeon 9500 128MB DDR, twin 40GB IBM ATA133 hard drives, and throw in my old Sony CD/RW drive with the cyber mirror 350W power supply case for $450. Taking a pretty good loss on the deal, but should be able to get back in business for around $900.
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- posted by Jeff @ 10:08 PM | 0 comments

 
ARRRGGG!!! Spam/Virus email is slowly killing me...
I'm so sick of the amount of SPAM and VIRUS email I get. Now, with a fresh domain and new email box, I thought I would be safe, but it appears there are web bots out there combing the HTML pages for email addresses, because I no sooner got my new domain name and got my email address all updated on the contact pages and ported over, and I'm getting a SLEW of new virus and spam mailings. I haven't even registered with this email address anywhere yet, so I KNOW it has to be coming from web bots. Less than 10% of my email is personal anymore. In just under 2 weeks, I've received over 550 emails and 72% is SPAM, 18% is VIRUS, and 10% is personal. I'm so sick of it. I wish I had just 1 hour in a dark room with the F!$#KS that send this crap out.

Here is a log from my POPFile email filter software (at least it is 99.01% accurate on dispositioning my email):


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- posted by Jeff @ 9:55 PM | 0 comments

 
Qwest...Love / Hate
Well, I finally got my DSL upgraded to the new 1.2Mbps download by 800kbps upload speed. They sent me a new modem and killed my old service (and I seem to have lost static IP address) and the idiots were going to take a week to get the paper work all through just to get my qwest.net account setup and linked to the new circuits. Meanwhile, I have no internet access and I'm piling up SPAM in my email account like crazy (counted, and I had over 250 emails, of which 90% was SPAM/VIRUS).

Anyway, the new service on the DSL is sweet. I am going to try to pay for a permanant IP address and then host one of my sub-domains on my main computer at home. Right now, I own themcclains.net and velociworks.com. The later is hosted at IX Webhosting and comes with full pop email, domain name, CGI support and 10GB of bandwidth/month.
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- posted by Jeff @ 10:30 PM | 0 comments

 
New Hosting site
Well, just got this new hosting site up. Finally paying for a full domain name and some real server bandwidth. Actually, this new site at IX Webhosting is only $6.95/month including the domain name, 5 sub domains, 1500MB of server space, 5GB/month bandwidth, unlimited email, full CGI/PHP and some MySQL support for BBS. Plus, it is ending up cheaper than paying the $26/month to my old ISP, and the $28/month for Qwest 640k/256k DSL. So I'm upgrading my DSL speeds, cutting the ISP and getting this main web hosting, all for about $15/month less than what I was paying before.

Nice.
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- posted by Jeff @ 8:48 PM | 0 comments