Now is not the time I wanted to upgrade my computer, but since its not that easy to find quality parts for the older processor I have it seemed best to upgrade. I ended up getting a new motherboard, processor and RAM.

The motherboard I purchased from Newegg (the Foxconn brand) ended up being DOA out of the box. I installed everything correctly but there was no LED, no beeps, nothing. I knew it was a risk buying some weird brand. Thought I did read that Foxconn makes parts for lots of well known brands. Oh well, I will never buy one of their products again.

I did some research and bought the following at Micro Center:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775
Memory: OCZ 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel

It seems fast and stable so far. Yay. Hooray.

My computer crashed the other day. It has happened to me before, so I wasnt worried. Reboot - windows starts - but the onboard network connection cant be found. The add on sound card cant be found. Whats the deal?

Reinstalled win xp pro SP2 - onboard network still cannot be found. Onboard sound card cant be found… how weird. I have a feeling its a bunk motherboard. It has killed a couple sticks of RAM in the past.

The processor I have (AMD 64 dual core 3800) is only like 2 or 3 years old max, but its really hard to find socket 939 motherboards anymore. I ended up ordering from some off brand Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6150B(PV) GPU Micro ATX AMD Motherboard for about $50. Lets hope this replacement works… I dont really want to have to pay to upgrade right now.

Though if I did upgrade - Intel is the processor to buy right now - the 775 socket e6550 or better probably. This upgrade would have to include the processor, motherboard and ram ( and possibly a heatsink for the processor).

More to come later

I found a photo gallery of the Museum of Creation. I was hoping to get some insight into this whole theory. I am pretty open minded and hoping to get some interesting information to get a better understanding of both sides of the debate… only to realize that there are no interesting ideas here - only lack of logic.

Blind Faith with the emphasis on Blind. Doesnt this image suggest that apes evolve?

This image states that God gave animals special tools to change rapidly. Could this special tool also be called evolution?

———————

Alternatively, here is a clip from a Penn & Teller video of a guy explaining the Bible. These are my thoughts exactly. He basically explains that the Bible is a social collection of books from different authors and combined over several centuries to be used as a tool to give people examples to help live their lives based on their own interpretation. Not to use the Bible as a word for word exact literal interpretation.

What do you think?

How many times per day does the hands on a clock overlap? (assuming the clock is not digital)

(Answer)

Three guys came to a motel and asked for a room with 3 beds. The manager said that the room rent was $30. They said they will check the room and pay for it. So the boy took them to the room, they liked it and each paid with a $10 note and the net amount came to $30. The boy went back to the manager and gave him $30. Then the manager realized that they had discounts at that time and that the room rent was actually $25 for the day. Since he was honest, he gave $5 (5 1 dollar notes) to the boy and asked him to return that money to those guys in the room. While going to the room, the boy thought that they cannot share the amount of $5 equally and since they didn’t pay him the tip last time, he thought that he will take $2 and give them back $3 so that each gets $1 back. He silently slipped $2 into his pocket and went to their room and gave each guy $1. Everyone was happy.

But here is the question about it.. Initially the three visitor guys gave $30. Each paid $10 and got $1 back. This means each paid $9 and so the total they paid is $27. $2 were stolen by the hotel boy. We have the count for $27 + $2 = $29. What happened to the remaining $1 ???

Jeff, where are you? Your email is not working and you dont answer texts. Speak up now.

I had to share this article about soldiers in Iraq seeing the futility in driving around constantly getting shot at or targeted with IEDs. They are basically slacking off or using the ‘look busy’ technique. Thats all we did while on base. It was a constant game of avoid ‘work’ and appear busy.

One soldier said “We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralised, so we decided the only way we wouldn’t be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.

“So we would go find an open field and park. Then we would call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine.

“All our enlisted people became very ­disenchanted with our chain of command.”

Another soldier said, “We’d go to the end of our patrol route and set up on top of a bridge and use it as an over-watch position. We would just sit with our binoculars and observe rather than sweep. We’d call in radio checks every hour and say we were doing sweeps.”

Why would troops want to drive around and potentially get blown up when they could drive off to a field and avoid conflict?

CNN host John King asked White House counselor Ed Gillespie, “Is waterboarding legal?”

Gillespie responded with “The fact is that those who have been briefed on the program in the US Senate, those on the Intelligence Committee, and others who are familiar with the program have said that it is legal, and those are the ones who have a basis to know. But the fact is the government doesn’t confirm techniques regardless of whether they’re used or not used.”

Whats the big deal? Dont think of it as torture, think of it as a workout program. What doesnt kill you only makes you stronger (and more angry).