Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Today I went to the gas station to fill up. I swiped my card (does anyone buy gas with Cash anymore?), selected the cheapest gas they had, dropped the pump in my gas tank, pulled up the level, and then squeezed the handle and pushed down the kickstand. And as soon as I let go, *thump* it stops.

I’ve noticed alot of gas stations lately have been removing the kickstand plates from the pump handles. Any idea why? It’s so convenient, especially with a kid, to just squeeze the handle and let it go. They already have automatic cutoff so it won’t overflow. Why they would remove them, on stations that previously had them, I can’t figure out.

So my idea: Made a portable one that would fit on a Keychain that you could slide into the pump handle. Then you could use the kickstand to pump gas, and take it out when you’re done. The pump handles seem to be the same at every gas station I’ve ever been to, so it should be a very easy one-size-fits-all situation. And if it’s on your keychain, you won’t leave it behind, since you’ll need your keys to start the car.

A few weeks ago (story here) Rhianna came down with a wicked ear infection that had her vomiting from the nausea. We rushed to the Emergency room and they patched her up in short order. We wound up with an Antibiotic Amoxicillin and a decongestant called Cardec. We ran the course of the Amoxicillin and things seemed to be better, until a few days ago.

About Tuesday last week, Rhianna started coughing. We starting giving her the Decongestant a little more often (Bottle read 1tsp every 4 hours, as needed), hoping to clear it up. Well, it wasn’t working. Then Saturday she started saying her Ear was hurting again, but where ya gonna go for a doctor on Christmas weekend? Sunday she seemed to get better, so we came on down to Meridian to visit the grandparents and exchange gifts. Today, Laura got ahold of a doctor Rhianna had seen previously working at a local Pediatric clinic and took her in. When we got there, we found out her Ear infection was back, now in both ears.

Well, we told her about the medication she had been taking, and were shocked to hear what she said next. The amoxicillin she had been taking was a dose so low that it might as well have been kool-aid. And to make it even worse, the 1tsp every 4 hours Cardec should have been half a tsp every 6 hours, so we were giving her 3x the recommended dose. After talking to her a bit, she basically said that you shouldn’t take a young sick kid to the ER for stuff like this, just call your regular physician.

How does this happen? If both drugs had been dosed low, then I would assume the doctor overestimated her age or weight, and prescribed stuff for an infant. If both had been high, then perhaps the doctor prescribed as an adult. But with one on each side, what happened? Did the doctor simply have no idea what they were doing? That’s what this doctor seemed to be saying. Hopefully having this straightened out will fix alot of the cranky behavior we’ve had in the last week. Now I know why she woke up every night at 1am looking for us, she probably felt like crap having overdosed on decongestant with a dual-ear infection. Now we also get to enjoy the upcoming Urinary tract infection since the amoxil has probably killed all the good bacteria in her system.

One thing I’ve learned from this is a lesson my parents learned long ago and shared with me after this ordeal: Go buy a Physicians Desk Reference (or use the Internet) and double-check the dosing of all prescriptions.

That’s right, today is Christmas. We woke up this morning to finish off opening presents, and Rhianna seems to have had a pretty good time of it all. But first, let me tell you this year’s Christmas story.

Friday Rhianna wakes up to find that Laura’s Mom (Nanny) was there, and as Laura & I leave for a short day at work, Rhianna settles in to spend a day playing with Nanny. Everything goes great. Rhianna has learned how to open doors (turn doorknobs) now, so she sneaked into the room where we were hiding presents and found one. Not a big deal, the “Big” present was under a sheet and she didn’t notice it.

Well, as has become the ritual at about 1am lately, Rhianna wakes up and wanders into the hall looking for someone, of course this time being Nanny. The first time she goes back to sleep without much trouble, but she quickly gets out of bed again and in fiddling with the doorknob.. Locks the door. So then I spend 10 minutes wandering around the house looking for my tiny flathead screwdriver to open the door, all the while Rhianna is screaming wanting out.

With that crisis averted, I went back to bed. Only to wake up about 9 to find out that apparently the toilet overflowed and flooded a fairly large area, including the Christmas Tree. Thankfully it was clean water & not sewage, so it was easy to clean, but alot of presents had to be rewrapped. As the day goes on, we find out that the neighbor’s stupid poodles have dug a hole under our fence and are terrorizing our dog. While we’re out moving bricks in place to plug the hole, Rhianna relives the night and locks the back door, locking us out of the house. Luckily, one well-barricaded door was unlocked, so we were able to get back in with some elbow work & contortionism.

And last night Rhianna decided to throw an absolute tantrum. Starting about midnight, she started crying and wanting to go play, and about 2am we gave up and just let her go. She wound up sleepy with Nanny on the couch, I think, and this morning it shows as she barely got a giggle out opening her last few presents.

But it was still a good Christmas. I got some great power tools that will come in useful, and Laura loves her new ring (shown Right). Rhianna loves her new dolls, Play-doh, and Kitchen set. I guess the only bad part is that everyone is sick. Rhianna is still very congested, and just generally doesn’t seem to feel very good. As I type this I hear Laura coughing so loud that it nearly shakes the monitor. Seems like we’ll be spending the Day After Christmas at the Doctor, if we’re lucky enough to find one open.

As many of you know, I live in Mississippi. Widely regarded as one of the most backwoods redneck states in the union (it’s debatable which is the most, Mississippi or Alabama), it’s hard to be taken seriously sometimes when people hear you’re from Mississippi. Afterall, what does Mississippi ever do besides pull down the National IQ & Academic Test Scores, or beg for more welfare money?

My dad sent me an email a few weeks ago, and I just managed to get enough details to deem it worthy of repeating. As reported in The Mississippi Press, an advertising agency known as The Cirlot Agency, Inc has taken it upon themselves to boost the image of Mississippi by launching the Mississippi… Believe it! campaign. It’s a series of 11 posters showing how Mississippi is not only a national but global force in Technology, the arts, and sports. Highlighting such things as our Ballet companies, the new Nissan plant, our numerous Athletes, musicians, and writers, and even our world-changing medical procedures, even veteran Mississippians can probably learn a thing or two about our state from these. They claim they’ll be published in several newspapers and circulated country-wide, although I’ve not seen any yet.

Go check it out, all the posters are on their website in nice high-resolution PDF format. Spread the word

I’ve been a big fan of anime for the last few years, but when my former “Anime Consultant” (that’s you Rob) took off for a job up in the NorthEast, I was kinda left to the whims of Adult Swim’s anime decisions. Some of what they come up with is just too weird for me, (Bobobo-bo bo-bobo comes to mine), but they’ve recently started pulling some really great stuff like Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Full Metal Alchemist falls into that latter bin. Placed in a world where Alchemy has replaced both Technology & Magic, those who practice it range from the Military to the criminal . Following the stories of Ed & Alphonse Elric as they strive to find the secrets behind the Philosopher’s stone, the one item capable of ignoring the first law of Alchemy: The Law of Equivalent Exchange. With it they hope to restore their bodies that were lost while attempting the forbidden transmutation: Human Resurrection. The journey leads them into discoveries about their father, another great Alchemist, and discoveries about the limitations of Alchemy itself, and from what I’ve seen there’s even a fairly religious angle in the tone that “Some transmutations are reserved for god”. The animation is excellent quality, although nothing revolutionary. The greatness of this is in the story.

I went ahead and added all the available DVD’s to my Amazon Wishlist, but they only have the first season. I’ve been watching some of the Second season (I think) on Adult Swim and it doesn’t disappoint. I’m looking forward to seeing how this shapes up

Originally posted October 12, 2005 9:23am

Some of you have probably read my earlier story on the CIE1931 and Monitor Evaluation which was about this monitor. We got this in a week or two ago thanks to a contact my boss made at SigGraph 2005. It’s an engineering prototype, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I don’t have a picture, but it’s almost identical in appearance to the LCD2180UX, with one important difference.

Most LCD’s use Fluorescent backlighting, meaning there are small fluorescent bulbs to light the display. You can find more about this on a great HowStuffWorks.com article on LCD Backlight vs. Reflective Technology. Basically, liquid crystals generate no light of their own, only allow or prevent light from passing through, so an external source is required. Calculators & small electronics use mirrors to just reflect light back at you, while monitors and camcorder displays use backlights to project the image at you. Fluorescent has problems, tho, in that the light from a fluorescent bulb doesn’t encompass the entire visible light spectrum, as would be required for full “true color” resolution. I’m sure you learned in school that if you combine all the colors of light, you get white. The same works in reverse, if you shine a white light through a set of filters you can construct any individual color. In the case of a LCD monitor, the filters are the liquid crystals. Unfortunately, we didn’t start with pure white light, so some colors just don’t come out quite right. That why the CIE 1391 Chromatograph comes out with certain areas incorrect, those colors simply can’t be seen.

This is what makes the LCD2180QX so special, and unfortunately so expensive. It uses new white LED technology for the backlight. That gives you a much closer to true-white light that’s capable of emitting those few colors that the fluorescents can’t hit. The result: The colors are truer, brighter, and more crisp than any LCD on the market today. It’s hard to believe until you see it in action, right next to a classic LCD monitor. Even properly calibrated and such, the difference is plainly visible in comparison.

This particular model also sports a whopping 2048×1536 resolution, which takes a little getting used to. Using it requires you use Dual-link DVI (Requires support in the Video Card, and a proper Cable) or an analog VGA connector. We didn’t have a dual-link cable handy, so I’m using the VGA cable right now. The image is unfortunatley a bit fuzzy, but I’m attributing that to signal loss in the cable. I’m hoping we can get a dual-link cable soon and I can try that as well, If we do, I’ll bump this article with information.

The downsides of this monitor: Price.. We were told that the “lower grade” of this monitor, only capable of 1600×1200, was $6,500. So, that means I won’t have one at home anytime soon, and I probably won’t have one at work anytime soon either.

Update Dec 19, 2005: Here’s a picture of the monitor sitting on my desk at work. It’s running Windows XP64 (2-line taskbar), and I’ve got ACDSee 8 up fullscreen. Maybe I can get a desktop image tomorrow.

Update Feb 7, 2006: Finally got the Dual-Link DVI Cable we had been waiting for. Read the story in Part 2.

Well, I got FEAR last weekend and I’ve been playing it for a week. I know most of the reviews give it “Two thumbs up” and “5 stars”, but I’m just not seeing it. Let me break it down for ya…

First: The graphics aren’t all that impressive. Now, my machine is a little bit older than most (2.2Ghz AMD “Athlon 3000″, 1 Gig Ram, Nvidia 5900FX), but Doom3, Quake4, and Half-Life2 all ran just fine on it. But for some reason FEAR feels the desperate need to plunge me back into the days of Quake2: Blocky graphics, dismal lighting effects (eg: Constant high ambient), and no shader effects. And even worse: To plunge me into Quake2 640×480 land. Of course, I can change these options manually, but just turning the lighting from “Minimal” to “Medium” drops me (in the test) to 0% of sequence over 25fps. It’s ridiculous, and shows that the programmers didn’t spend enough time optimizing their code.

Second: The storyline stinks. If you played the demo then you saw the strange psychic vampire guy who’s killing people, and you’ve been sent to eliminate. Same storyline here, but stretched out much longer. Problem is after that first sequence, you really don’t get any more direction. You pick up radio chatter occasionally talking about stuff you’re about to walk into (Ambush, retreating squads, gunship, etc), but no more story. I’m into the 5th or 6th level, and I’m still in the same building chasing the same guy.. Oh way, sorry.. I did get in a helicopter where I was whisked away to the rooftop of another building full of people who want to shoot me, no clue why. At this point, the game has basically just devolved into “if it moves, kill it”.

But the game does have it’s good aspects, and one in particular. The enemy AI is amazing. As a seasoned FPS’er I was happy to see the “Lean” buttons active, so my first tactic was to creep up to a corner and lean around it, shooting guys from safety. Nope, they can lean around corners too. In fact, they can do one better: They can blindly stick their gun out around a corner or over a box and shoot in your general direction. You thought headshots were tough? Try wrist-shots. They know how to use cover, they know how to set traps, they know how to use supression fire, they know everything you do and more. The new standard that FEAR sets for Enemy AI, that alone is enough to make this game worth checking out. That alone also makes this games a serious pain in the butt even on the easier difficulty settings. Bad guys almost never step out into the open, so almost every 1-on-1 fight winds up being you and him running circles around a box chasing each other. But in larger fights, the AI truly shines.

The other thing that keeps things interesting: The interactive environment. All around you are boxes, trash cans, fire extinguishers, etc. Get into a firefight with a few guys and can’t get a clear shot? Draw them to the nearest fire extenguisher, then open fire. Not only are they wounded from the blast, but they’ll be blinded from all the gas and smoke, leaving you just enough time to run in and use the Melee combat abilities to take them out. Yes, I said “abilities” (plural): There’s a whole assortment of Melee combat moves from the classic pistol whip to footsweeps and “windmill kicks”. But the whole environment is interactive, and most fights can be won through careful use of environmental features to your advantage.

Aside from those, it’s in the same vein as almost every FPS game. As has become the standard, they have a “bullet-time” feature that slowly builds up over time until you use it to kick butt. It’s a necessity in any large battle, as the enemies are simply too accurate and fast for anyone but the most caffiene-boosted 12 year olds to kill without it. Of course, you operate solo pretty much the entire time. Also, similar to Max Payne there’s these strange dreamy sequences that look like a bad acid trip: Full of blood, screaming, and babies. Babies? Yes, Babies.

For some unknown reason, (I think due to the graphics issues mentioned earlier), the game makes me motion sick. Not just a little sick, but full blown 60-minutes of playtime means 10-minutes of laying on the cold tile in the bathroom. I haven’t been this sick since I tried to go back and play Wolfenstein (the original) last year: Super 100+fps games can really make you loopy..

So, I have to give this game a 2 of 5. Not great, but better than drying paint. I haven’t finished it yet, and hold out hope that eventually the storyline will come back and things will start to become interesting again. In the meantime, buy at your own risk.

Update Another 3 hours or so, it’s getting better. The story is starting to come back together, although it looks like the entire game is just going to be chasing Faettel. But, honestly? Can any game with a Red Swingline & TPS Reports be all that bad?

Update Dec 22nd Ok, a few more days in and I’m starting to figure things out. It seems they don’t actively do anything much to advance the story until later in the game. Until then, you’re left to figure it out for yourself using Voice-mail messages left on phones around the building. Not sure if I just missed alot of these in the beginning, or they just weren’t there. Either way, the game is alot of fun, although even at Moderate it’s pretty friggin’ tough. I’m gonna have to up my rating to a 3 of 5 now tho

Update: Dec 23rd Game complete, almost 2 weeks, but mostly because I got off to a slow start with all the Graphics problems. I’m still disappointed with the quality of the graphics on my system, given how well Half Life 2 & Doom 3 ran, but I managed to get through it with the slower framerate. I am going to have to bump my rating up to a 4 of 5 for the final product tho. The storyline finally starts to come together about halfway through the game, and ties up quite nicely at the end. In fact, the blast at the game is the single most impressive real-time effect I’ve ever seen in any FPS game to date. So there ya go, I’m a convert. FEAR is Great

I spent yesterday helping Tom out, like I had meant to last weekend before Rhi got sick. Wound up being alot harder work than I expected, but I got it done and made some good cash for the effort. Probably gonna do it again sometime soon. Not too soon, tho, as my back and legs are still stiff.

But the real surprise was Saturday Night after I was finished, Laura & her dad showed up with her parent’s Christmas present to us: A New Dining Room Table & Chairs! It’s from a guy down in Mobile, AL who does this for a living, and you would not believe the prices on this stuff. Most places would sell a set like this for well over $2000, but this guy sells it for around $400.


Jeremy flew into town for Christmas today, and I picked him up from the Airport. It was alot of fun to catch up and reminesce about our ZKat time again. I got caught up on some of the old crew and the goings-on at EBI, sounds like they’ve got some good stuff goin there. Got a chance to show off the new house, so all you folks in Jersey can quiz him on it when you see him next. Eventually his brother came and picked him up.

All in all, a good weekend.

Those of you who read my blog regularly might recall my mention of the Graphstream Renderwall that we have in the office. Not having posted a Hardware article in a while, I thought it was time to talk about this marvelous piece of kit.

As listed on the ERDC MSRC SciViz Hardware webpage, the Graphstream is a rack of 13 Dual-proc 3Ghz Xeon machines with an NVidia 7800GTX in each. Now, the video cards we are using are dual-head capable. The first (primary) head of each node is hooked to a nice digital KVM switch, along with the 13th “Head” node. The second head of each system is hooked to a nice 1600×1200 native LCD monitor. Each node has both an Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet interconnect. The motherboards are some very nice ones with Dual 16x PCI Express lanes. We originally did this to play with SLI, but decided to forgo that in favor of the improved performance of Infiniband. More on that in a bit..

So what does one do with a setup like this? Read on to find out.

I read this a few weeks ago, and was fascinated. Something as simple as a colored bubble, becomes an entirely new branch of chemistry. It’s a great read, both for the science and for the hilarity of it all. One particularly entertaining part is one of his early “field tests”. 5 minutes of utter wonder and fascination, replaced with screaming parents as they realize the colors don’t fade when the bubbles pop and the room looks takes on the appearance of a Jackson Pollock painting.

The 11-year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles, care of Popular Science magazine.

Yeah.. it’s a slow day at work today…