Vacation Ends

I was on vacation.

Actually I am on vacation, though I don’t feel like that. I mean I live across the street from the place I work at and that kinda sucks. It is pretty cool in matters of fuel consumption (boots don’t need much gas) and in time spent traveling to and from work. On the other hand, if something needs your attention at work, or you need something from work, then it is also close. In modern times, with laptops, instant messaging, e-mail and mobile phones the workplace is technically where YOU are. Even while on vacation. So I am on vacation. That means I was at work only three times in the last 7 workdays. That is I was there in person. I don’t count the phone calls and ICQ is pretty much an inseparable part of my life. Not that I would mind the contact that much, but after these 7 days I just don’t feel like I was on vacation. I took the vacation because I needed to shut down a bit, step back and relax. That is a goal that got met, but I just don’t feel like that.

I slept well(and a lot), watched a lot of movies, tried to Betatest the nice and new Windows Vista Beta2, reinstalled my old XP installation as the nice and new Vista managed to kill it before dying. I still can’t figure out how data can get corrupted by being read, but I guess I will never find out.

I managed to solve the problem with the noisy chipset cooler by replacing it with a new one (same type, just new) and while at it I went and did some general computer silencing. New CPU cooler, new GPU cooler (I am running SLI, so I had to silence two cards, but one was done some time ago), new exhaust vent on the case and voila …. silence.

I did some shopping, managed a couple of things that needed to be done.

And that was it.

Vacation Ends

Valleyschwag - feelings and realizations

It seems that I finally got some nice people to read my blog. I cant say it comes as a surprise, but it is a nice felling. It also showed me that I might have gone a bit overboard with my last post, so maybe there is still time to do some fencemending and some corrections.

I titled my last post "Valleyschwag 0, Disappointment 1" though the proper label should have been more something like Postal services 0, Disappointment 1. The point is, I don't think anyone would have read had any idea from the title itself, what am I writing about. It still does not make this title right, though it made the post read. Even by the nice people at Valleyschwag. I think I am trying to apologize to them, here, as the title of the post might suggest that I am blaming them for the failures of the postal services (probably the failure of the p-o-s local service) and for the geographical fact represented in the distance between their offices and Slovakia's capital.

But it still does not change the fact that I am disappointed, although it does help a lot to know that the crew at Valleyschwag feels the same way, I mean they hand delivered my package to the post office (now that's service, boys and girls, that is service). And it still does not change the realistic/pessimistic coolheaded realization that I might cancel my subscription. Although the blame there falls again on the the postal services, should this really happen. It shows once more that though everybody here talks about ONE Europe, there is still a long way to a time when quality of services will be the same in the U.K./Germany/France kind of Europe as in the Slovakia/Czech republic/Hungary/Poland kind.

As I read Jonathans (Valleyschwag crew) comment to my previous post and realized, I should write the lines above, I thought that I should name the post "Realizations". During the creation of those very lines I came to the conclusion that the title should once again be something where you, my dear readers (I am not gonna name the three of you, it seems so lame to me, I might forget to name someone and then there I am, hurting someone's feelings again) can see straight out what the post is gonna be about. I guess I did not do as good a job as last time, but this was the best I could come up with.

Thank you Jonathan for your comment and let me say, I once again shield myself in patience and hope that next week, the package arrives.

Valleyschwag 0, Disappointment 1

As the second week of June took its ending (well, the work week) and no carepackage arrived, the level of my disappointment hit historical marks. My sister is leaving tomorrow morning and there was nothing to pimp her laptop PC out. No EFF sticker, no Goatse hands, nil. Very sad. To tell the truth I am quite hard to disappoint as being a realist(with a pessimistic streak) by nature, I rarely get negatively surprised or really disappointed. But this time, I guess, all those little traces of optimism, that might be in me, had to cooperate, think positive thoughts and generally do everything in their might to keep my usual realism/pessimism at bay.

I guess next time they will know better than that.

So know with the usual amount of realism/pessimism and some coolheaded reflection, I think, I can state that with a high level of probability I will not see my June package in June. And with an even higher level of probability it is safe to assume that in the case that my May package wont arrive by June 29th, my subscription will disappear.

Valleyschwag, 2nd week of June. (Well the beginning of it)

Still no sign of my carepackage, I am starting to panic slightly. My sis is leaving for overseas in a couple of days and I really, really, really, really (and once more, for good measure), really wanted to pimp out her/my (shared ownership ;-) ) laptop with some nice stickers.

The good news is that in the future the international packages get shipped first so maybe I will have the June issue at the same time as everybody else (oh optimism, oh optimism). Another piece of good news is that the "valleyschwag deputy" system gets a beating and gets rethinked/re-engineered, so maybe there is a chance of getting some nice rare schwag "pour moi". The not so good news is that the last of the May shippments was sent on June 2nd and knowing my luck (and the special lobbing that was for sure executed by a certain person known as Mr. Murphy) my package was 100% among those.

And once again I have to state: Patience ppl, Patience.

Extra Noise in my Rig.

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Originally uploaded by adamszki.

I have added a second graphics card to my gaming rig, pics available at flickr and though I expected some extra noise it became a nasty surprise that this extra noise did not come from the extra graphics card, but from the chipset cooler instead. So right now I am running a 2x6600GT SLI rig and when I fire up the big rig the noise from that tiny little fan just kills all the fun. For a pretty new fan of less than 4 months it became quite loud. When I installed it and first turned the machine on, I was surprised that it was not to hear, even as it is spinning at over 5000 rpm. Now just gets louder and louder.

If there is someone with a good suggestion on a silent NF4-SLI cooler, drop me a mail, please.

"Dumbass Activity"

While doing my regular daily check of my favorite blogs I found a nice little piece of evidence on the fact that this world is in fact going down the drain.

So, law offices and lawyers are now preemptively warning people/websites that they will be monitoring them as they are anticipating the possible unauthorized streaming and downloading of copyrighted content their clients hold the copyrights to. In this particular case the matter is the 2006 FIFA WORLD CUP, the law office of Baker & McKenzie LLP in London and the pre-warned website is BoingBoing. Anyone who does spend time on, or “closely monitors” BoingBoing knows or should know that there is no way that the fine people of BoingBoing would be interested in something like pro soccer (or any other pro sport) and would infringe on someone else’s copyright for the matter. I guess that the fear of copyright infringement is somewhat clouding the minds of lawyers of the above mentioned law office.

Well guess what? The internet will be full of that copyrighted content once your client customers stream their feeds across the TV’s of private people throughout the entire World. You should know by know, that any signal set free (yes, even TV signal) remains free in the sense, that there is no way for you to stop the people from sharing their recordings among each other. Well you could try to buy all VHS tapes, all digitizers, all CD-R/RWs and all DVD+-R/RWs or ,even better, not set the signal free and let only PayTVs broadcast the World cup. But if they want to be really sure that absolutely no content of theirs gets to the net they should probably stop all TV stations from broadcasting the games, remove all the cameras from the stadiums, ban all recordable devices from those few people that will have a ticket to a game and frisk them to check if they are compliant with the ban. Would be nice what that would do to their revenues from advertisement, product placement, etc. and of course their income from selling the licenses to broadcast to TV stations. There is still another way, they can sue every website that will allegedly host some of their content or sue every manufacturer of recording equipment that might be used to infringe on THEIR copyrights.

So I suggest you(Infront Sports & Media group of companies) do your regular business and get rich on the income you usually make and leave the people who are not interested in your *shit*, in peace.

Freaky Friday

So here it is again ...... Freaky Friday. If there is a better description of a day when Mr. Murphy really kicks ass, then somebody will have to let me in on that particular secret. This is a day when really nothing goes right, although I should probably describe this one as a "Freaky 48 hours before the weekend" as all the freaky troubling things started out already on Thursday.

The first really maddening thing that made my day was that the Windows Vista Beta2 I have successfully downloaded (with an painfully slow average speed of 18kB/s and a total size of 4100,9 MB) got left at home. To be true I just wanted to save some time and effort on the part of a colleague who brought me in on the betatesting and burn him a copy, so that he does not have to download it again. Well the slight little problem with that is that one needs juice and equipment to execute the actual copy. Well I guess I am one of those who are on the better side of it all when it comes to equipment, but this particular morning the nice and very friendly Power distribution company (a monopoly of course) has decided that I obviously don't need any juice and turned it off. I will not go into speculating what the reason for this might have been, the result was, that my went down the hard way, about a minute after I booted it up, and remained so. As it was time to leave for work anyway, I just cursed a bit and went to brush my teeth in the dark. Once I was dressed and about to leave the flat, the juice came back, so I see this as just another injustice on the trackrecord of the universe.

The day itself was not exactly a mess, but the usual "situations" at work and similar stuff had me on the edge for most of the day. Of course, the only real problem that occurred this fine Thursday had to be while I was at lunch (although I have to admit that the lunchbreak was a bit longer than usual).

I can't say that the situation developed very positively, as once I brought the nice little 4GB image of Windows Vista Beta2 to the office and burned it, I had to find out that the version is only for 64-bit systems and will not work on 32bit ones. I guess I really should start reading the fineprint more carefully. Although at this point it seems to be a real problem (not really, huh?), it is not. It is just sad, that I hoped to save some time and effort for someone and then botch it up like this. Well at least it is the correct version for my PC.

The next nice thing that got me going was again work related and sorry folks, I just can't go into details on that one, all I can say, that once again I will be looking like a fool in the end. What a surprise!

And now for the nice little thing that got me going for real, that really made my day sparkling, shining and highlighted in the calendar for eternity, was Valleyschwag.

It isn't just that they changed the form of the blog section of their page, it was mostly the content of the blog, especially the one about the May Issue of the carepackage. It seems that I am not the only one to feel betrayed by the content of the package, as it seems that all those fine "deputy's" and active bloggers get their packages significantly fuller than the rest. To be honest, I am not really in the position to judge, as my package has not yet arrived, but as I am a pessimist and I am neither a deputy nor a very active blogger, I presume the content of my package will be on the rather slim side. The funny part of the whole thing is that, that it seems that all the people with the full packages got theirs before all the others and to depict my feeling truthfully, I have the bad feeling that the packages for those of us, who are from farther away, have been sent out last (or at least later). I am not the only one to observe, that this kinda brings around a feeling of false advertising. I have to say that it has been stated in the Valleyschwags blog, that the deputies and active bloggers will get the rare stuff, but for someone that does not browse the blog, nor does anything other than sign up, pay and wait for his/hers package, with the occasional glance at the blogs depicting the content of the current issue the actual content may come as a nasty shock.

I guess I am just reflecting the feelings others have about the schwag that they already got, but I have to say that, as good/great/excited feelings I had once I found out that the schwag is already shipping and as great the feelings became once I have seen some of the contents on some other blogs, so bad/disappointed/down I am feeling right now after reading some of the blogs and some of the reactions on the Valleyschwag blog. And mine has not even arrived yet. Well I guess I will see for myself once it arrives and that the June package will really be "kick-ass" as promised.

I hope I that all the "good news" and "good deeds" had enough for today and I will have a nice and peaceful weekend. Hope never dies, huh?

This is me, btw.

Valleyschwag@blog

Curiosity and impatience are natural and so of-course once I posted my previous post, I had to check if there is a way to find it without directly knowing the url. So I checked technorati, and I guess I am just too fast (probably just too impatient) to be already there. But guess what I saw! It seems I am not the only person that got jumpstarted into blogging by Valleyschwag. There are obviously people like me (e.g. http://foredoomed.blogspot.com), who finally got to publish their own blogs.

Way to go! Keep it up!

And I guess that means me too :-)

Valleyschwag2Slovakia

Hi there! Smee again :-D I guess I am one of those people that like getting things for free, even in those cases when there is no need/use for the things or it is not really for free. A month ago, while checking out one of my favorite sites (http://www.boingboing.net/) I came across an entry about valleyschwag (http://www.valleyschwag.com/) and it really hit me. I mean the idea behind it was something so out of the ordinary for me that I decided to sign up. It sounds easy but for someone from the other side of the globe, without prior ties to any other direct subscription/order from the U.S. it was something. Probably this was also a reason why I signed up. To see if the world actually works like it is being advertised. So I created me a paypal account, signed up for the valleyschwag care package, found out how the paypal to credit card stuff works and was done with. I signed up on April 29th and therefore missed the April package which was awesome. And then the waiting started. The on-site blog was not changing very much, but enough to keep the feeling that something is at work there. Mid-May was coming up and still nothing was really happening, but then things changed. An information appeared on the site that the packages will be shipping a week later, as the number of members jumped from 60 to 1500. Wow. Again, WOW. I said that’s some jump. So I went back into the patience mode, although I was really really starting to feel worked up about it. When is the package gonna be shipped, when is it going to be here? I could not just sit as usually and do nothing, I had to ask. I decided that it wouldn't do to ask when the schwag is going to be shipped, as I guess the team had enough pressure on them anyway, but at least the second question whirling about my mind could get answered. So I asked if anybody had an idea how long the shipping to my little home country of Slovakia would take. The answer tuned me optimistic (usually not a good sign with me, but I was so excited and up from it all, that I haven't even noticed). I mean 4-7 days to get a package from the West coast to Central Europe! Cool. I am not known to be very patient, but I have to say, in a situation where being impatient does not change a single thing, I can be patient or at least try to ;-) The days went by and finally the day came when a new blog entry announced that the schwag is on its way. Yipeeee, Hoooraaaaah, Great. I was really excited. A couple more days and it is here. I started to check out the blog more often, to search the blogosphere (via the friendly service of http://www.technorati.com/) for blogs about the package. As the first packages started to arrive and the friendly people who got them started to put the pictures of their take up on their blogs I was growing more and more impatient on one side and happy on the other, as the time for my package to arrive was getting shorter. Even though the team behind it all (Rubyred labs) was really working hard to ship all the packages out, they found the time to do a short video introducing the people behind the curtains, to give us a peek at what is going on there. It really was a nice touch, kinda bringing the audience into the show. Great Idea. Made me want my package even more. That was the status of today's evening. I came home from work, checked the blog on valleyschwag, to see how many more people got their package, how many blogged about it, what the variation in content is. I read through the posts and bang a bunch of shockers right there. The first shock-post that got my attention for full was by Thor (one of the cool people behind it all), stating that the June package will be even better (doozy was the word he used). Now I was really having trouble keeping my excitement at bay, but when there is nothing one can do about it, then there is nothing one can do. An often used phrase tells us that Patience brings roses, so I wrapped myself in patience again. The next shock-post made a crack into the armor of my patience and resolve, when the same Thor stated (citing): "Our job is to make schwag a bit less useless. Jonathan will be posting on this subject soon, but most packages will have one shirt. We give extras to you fine folks who participate!" Hmm, one t-shirt only? Now, when I saw so many blogs from people in the U.S. who all had two! How is that? Can’t be that all these people were seen as participants, when I guess most of them where fresh sign-ups (no on for the first package, exactly like me). Hmm, well, no need to jump to conclusions, optimism is the rule here, and even a pessimistic soul like me, has to sport some occasionally. I can’t say that the next shock-post made me feel better. It was by Jonathan and let us know that the packages are being sent out a few hundred at a time. Up to this point - Great! But it also said that the U.S. packages will arrive at their destination till the end of the week, but the International will take longer. Hmm, longer. Longer? I somehow hoped that those will be the first to ship, but I guess I was wrong. But it is never as dark as it seems, as the same post stated:“ We’ve figured out a lot of the logistical stuff now and future packages will be much more efficient." So there is always something positive to find out. Well, what does all this writing want to say? Hell if I know. It is just a snapshot of my feelings. What do I want to say? Patience my friends, patience. The packages will come, when they come. And a lot of patience and strength for the crew@valleyschwag, so that they can go on sending the packages to us, the impatient schwagless crowd. Good Job people, keep it up!