Computer Geekery
My home computer drama seems to be coming to a close.  A few days ago I was convinced it had to be the video card, since after a clean reinstallation of everything, using a different hard drive than the previous system drive, everything would be fine until I started running 3dMark05 and then within a minute or so it would crash.  However, before taking it to Directron for warranty replacement, I felt the need to run one more test (my career had had some value): sticking the video card in other machine and seeing if I could reproduce.  Thankfully I have access to such a machine (PC technology moves rapidly, but machines with PCIe slots and power supplies with the extra six-pin connector aren't just lying around yet).  I did this, and couldn't reproduce the crashing.  So, I made myself a Memtest86 CD and last night, while I was cooking up a nice batch of stir-fry, ran those tests on my machine and hey! one of the two memory modules is bad.  I removed that one and have been running stably since.  I know that less than twelve hours in not a long time in the production server world but having been unable to do that much for a week, I feel like I'm on the right track.  I need to put the video board back in and set up FSX again and run the real test, but I'm now pretty much convinced I've got it figured out.  The memory is also in warranty, but I'll have to figure out how much it's worth to me to have to drive out to Directron, perhaps twice, to get 1GB of memory replaced.

Music Geekery
Looks like JoCo is coming to H-town.  Teh Duke and I will literally camp out all day in front of The Mucky Duck (or, you know, inside it - scotch eggs!) to get decent seats.  Unless it is prohibited, I'll try and get good photos.  Assuming I get to go, what will it say about me that the only two pop artists I've seen live since college were headliners at PAX this year?

Nature Geekery
I'm kind of bored at home right now, so I've been going through my tapes of old science and nature shows from the late eighties.  There's a program on one tape that I used to skip all the time because it wasn't Nova or The Ring of Truth, about the formation and natural history of various islands in the Atlantic.  One part described how at Ascension Island (so called because it was discovered on Ascension Day - cue Finzi), the breeding population of wide-awake terns (after which the airport, just about the only reason anybody lives there, is named), and others, had been almost completely wiped out by feral cats.  The cats were introduced by the British, who hoped they would wipe out the out-of-control rat population, which had been accidentally introduced by trading ships.  Apparently the cats found the terns tastier.  The only place where the cats hadn't gotten to was a tiny island just off of Ascension called Boatswain Bird Island.  Seeing as how this was twenty years ago, I wondered what had happened since, and pessimistically guessed that the terns on Boatswain Bird had been eradicated too.  What actually happened is that they got rid of the cats.  I'm usually opposed to harming cats, but in this case, no probalo. 

Update [2007-8-30 10:12:4 by riceowlguy]: I forgot to mention the fog. I have a 12th floor window office. Normally I can see things five, ten, maybe twenty miles away depending on air quality. This morning at 7am it was a solid wall of white. If I went up close to it and looked down I could see the street, barely. But the other tall building one block away? Invisible. It's back to about one mile visibility now, but for a while it was freaky.