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There I was minding my own business at work and I get a phone call from the good folks at Acer. They called to let me know that I won an Acer Predator gaming system complete with 24" LCD, and Logitech gaming keyboard and mouse. I was floored about this. I figure my odds of winning were about 1 in 500 so I am feeling pretty lucky about it. They are also running a contest again now that ends in September that I have a whole lot better chance of winning so that would be really great.
I have been using the predator for about 2 weeks now and I really like it. It is a different experience for me to have a personal computer that just works (see my post below). I did have one issue though. When I went to turn it on, I was getting a beep codes right out of the box. My friend took a video of it and posted it to you tube.
 

All I had to do was reseat the video card though. I figure it was knocked a bit loose in shipping. I have heard a lot about the overheating and recall problems with these but mine seems to be running great. My only complaints are that the door on the hard drive cage seems a little awkward to open and close, and the case is hard to lug around to LAN parties.

I was installing a new web server today and I came across an odd issue. I was unable to install mod_ssl, the apache interface to OpenSSL. I had already installed the newest versions of apache and openSSL through yum but what I did a "yum install mod_ssl" I was missing the ssl.conf file in/etc/httpd/conf.d . I google around and found the command "yum install mod_ssl openssl" with the openssl on the tail of it.  So, I ran "yum remove mod_ssl" and the ran "yum install mod_ssl openssl" and sure enough, my config file appeared.

Since the dawn of time, I have never been satisfied with a single computer I have ever owned. I am not sure if this can be attributed to my own incompetence or just bad karma. To be specific, gaming is always the main thing I have problems with. I always have one or two games that just simply refuse to run on my machine.

Every computer I have owned personally has been built by me, and after 7 years of wallowing in my own shit I think I may just have to bite the bullet and buy an actually brand name PC. That way, I can at least blame a company rather than wanting the light myself on fire and jam a wire coat hanger up my pee hole.

In the end, my only suggestion to someone wanting to buy a computer would be... DON'T. Not a PC, not a MAC, not a Linux box. You would be better of just moving to New Zealand and living in Hobbiton.  There, you can drink yourself happy and at least look forward to scoring on some sweet hobbit ass.

I just saw this movie and I am very surprised that this is so obscure in the US. It is a film by French director Luc Besson.  Shot in black and white in Paris, this movie has many of the elements I have come to enjoy in a Luc Besson story. An Arab frenchman is about to jump off a bridge when he meets a tall blond woman doing the same.  He saves her and she decides to stay with him and help him where she can. Angel-A captures some great moments between these two and deserves a lot more attention than it has recieved.

I have been testing out a new content management system called Joomla.  I am used to using website baker and Joomla is vastly different.  It seems that Joomla uses articles as the basis for the actual content on a page. In the admin interface, when you go to a page, instead of seeing the content of the page there is nothing.  Instead, you must create an article and link it back to the page somehow(have not figured that out yet).

Oh course, I stumbled upon this 9 days after a major release so none of the templates I have work at all.  That and the fact the every site I have seen in production looks way too busy with 3 columns of garbage.  I will keep looking at it but as of now I am thinking it is not going to cut the mustard.

I have posted some pics of my rig in its water cooling days. The PC was a P4 2.8Ghz with a gig of RAM.  The CPU would run at about 28 degrees Celsius and was overclocked to 3.3 Ghz.  One very cold winter day I opened the window to my room, bundled up, cranked my CPU.  I got it to run at 3.7 Ghz with a temp of 18 degrees. At 3.8 it was not able to stay up to run a PCMark bench.  One day my pump died and that was the end of my water cooling days.  Now the guts from this are in my media center PC and I am still using that case with my new Core 2 Duo PC with stock air cooling.