Game night is on this week. We will have sandwiches.

Big meeting Monday night. Wish us luck.

Anyone have a PCI video card I could borrow? I think my new motherboard defaulted to PCI video input, but all I have is PCI 2.0 x16 card (I have a geforce 8800 GT) and AGP cards. Unfortunately my motherboard only has slots for PCI and PCIe (those tiny little slots), but none for AGP.

I guess it could also be that my video card is dead, so it may be helpful to test a second PCIe 2.0 x16 video card too. Anyone have one of those lying around too?

Either my problem is a video card/video card setting, or my motherboard is DOA. Fun times!

I sold Duckie in 5 hours on craigslist. May he be successfully repaired and find a new forever home.

As a reminder, board game night is on Thursday this week. I've gotten a request to play Battlestar Galactica again, so it looks like we will play that again. It's a great game, and should go much faster now that we know what the heck we are doing...

Throughout grad school, it was a running joke with Natalie and me that while we owned three or four computers, only two were ever working at a given time. During our four years in Boston, the following events occured (in roughly chronological order):

- My laptop broke (one of my Best Buy "repair" stories. After a couple months trying to "repair" it, they gave me a new laptop.)
- Natalie's desktop broke (fatal, unfixable).
- My MythTV box broke (fatal)
- New Shuttle MythTV box broke (turned into a desktop... I think the TV tuner died)
- Shuttle dies (fatal... used hard drive as part of a new desktop build)
- Big laptop (the Best Buy replacement) dies (had to put in a new inverter)
- Little laptop dies (hard drive death... rebuilt with new hard drive)

Since moving to Portland last year:In the last month:
- Little laptop dies again (can't power anymore, AC input dead)
- Big laptop dies last week (fatal software failure? No more internet, had to re-install windows)

And then, this morning, I wake up to discover that my DESKTOP is now dead. I push power and NOTHING comes up on the screen. After debugging, it looks like the motherboard is fried. So now I get to build a new computer (again)!

Also, I own two cars (one with 228k miles, the other with 145k). Last month I had to spend $400 to repair my (228k) minivan, which had a broken radiator fan. And then last week, our commuter car completely dies. So in the last month, I've had two major car failures, and two three major computer failures!

I'm not trying to be a drama queen or anything, it's just odd how these things are all happening at the same time. It is partly explainable, as in order to save money Nat and I use things until they are absolutely dead. This results in our stuff being much older and generally more likely to break down. Why buy a new car when the duct tapped one still runs? Why buy a new computer when you can use scavenged parts to make one? This philosophy has generally worked out for us, as while I've had the many computer failures listed above, when the problems have been fixable I've often been able to do it rather cheaply (e.g. the inverter was like $25, a new hard drive was $100, etc, which is much cheaper than buying two new laptops).

But tonight I'll be buying parts on New Egg to build a new computer which will use a scavenged hard drive, video card and DVD player from my now dead computer. I guess it's time for me to enter the multi-core era of desktop computing.

Game night is on this week. However, as an FYI we aren't doing food this week. If someone is interested in coordinating food, they are more than welcome to, but I think we'll be taking a few weeks off from food. We've had to absorb the cost of food for a few weeks now, due to a lower number of people showing up than we had expected (e.g. two weeks ago: one person; last week: zero). We totally understand that people can't come every week due to prior commitments and last minute changes of plans. But the logistics of guessing how many people will show up in a given week, and planning food around that, is dragging on us, so we're taking a break while we figure out a better way to manage food.

I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty for not coming on any given week, so please don't be upset or sad if you haven't been able to make it recently. We truly understand that people can't come every week, and I enjoy board game night regardless of how many people show up. The issue isn't that we can't get the same number of people each week, it's that I'm not good at managing food for a dynamic number of people. We just need to figure out how to make food work in a manner that makes sense. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Our commuter car, Duckie, which is so lovingly named because two separate areas of the car are held together by duct tape, is near death. He had started to idle really rough, and then we noticed that he is spewing MASSIVE amounts of white smoke from the exhaust pipe.

White smoke is a *really* bad sign. That means that antifreeze is mixing into places that it shouldn't be mixing, which 9 times out of 10 means you've blown your head gasket.

Technically, near death may be an exaggerated statement. I could fix him up myself for $200-400 in parts. For a mechanic to do it would probably cost $600-1000. But if you've ever seen my car, you probably know that it would be a bad idea to put $1,000 into it. While the engine is still strong, it is fugly and has rather low re-sale value thanks to east coast rust (not to mention the duct tape). Doing the repairs myself is definitely an option I've considered. I had to do this exact same repair to Bolo (my old car from high school and college), so it is certainly in my automotive repair skill set. The problem is I don't have access to the same tools that I had back then. So I'd need to spend at least $200 in tools, plus all the extra expenses that crop up in these projects, the so-called "While it's off, I may as well..." repair creep. E.g. "... I may as well..." replace the water pump, belts, distributor, hoses, etc. The list grows and grows.

I'm not 100% convinced that this is a blown head gasket. It has the white smoke symptom, which is very telling, but it didn't have one of the other common symptoms (frothy looking oil). I'm having a real mechanic check him out later in the week, at which point I will make a final decision.

But right now, I'm strongly leaning towards not putting any money into repairing Duckie, and instead putting that money towards a newer car that we'll buy sometime in the near future (probably 4-6 months). The good news is that we have a second car to use while Duckie is out of commission. The bad news is that our backup car is an old minivan that gets rather poor gas mileage. But it's better to have that than no car at all.

I should be writing a couple papers, but I'm having trouble focusing. So here are some procrastination videos!

Auto-tune the news. I think the second one is probably better, but I like them both.

#1

#2 (the Katie Couric part is the best)

From the same guy, it's a singing Churchhill!

Game night is on tomorrow. We'll have crockpot soup for everyone.

Game night is on this week. Hope you got your taxes done!

This video is really interesting. They look at apparent "tracing" (or copied choreography, rather) between different disney movies. Most of it is nearly identical! I'm surprised I haven't noticed this before.

I lost my wallet on Saturday at some point. I was pretty sure it wasn't at a store, though we had been to FM and Target that day. I looked a bunch on Sunday, and then today spent like four hours going over my house, organizing everything and looking for it. Couldn't find it.

Tore my office and bedroom apart. Literally took apart my couch (not just cushions, but removed the couch backing to get inside), thinking maybe it had fallen inside. Nope, not there either. Wasn't in any of our laundry, bedding, etc.

I finally found it behind the washer and dryer. How does that even happen?

Sorry guys, but board game night will be canceled this week. Nat and I have an important meeting on Wednesday that we will need to prepare for. See everyone next week!

Game night is on this week. Normal board games this week, as poker was last week. Please let me know ASAP if you'll be coming so I can plan food. I have a ham in my freezer (thanks Goldie) that I've been meaning to cook, but I wanted to wait for a high turnout week to cook it so that I don't bury myself in leftovers.