Author Archives: InV4d3r

Blurring lines

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The dog gets a dry nose when he’s not doing well. Common people get fever or feel odd when they’re not doing well, too. Me, I stop playing video games and almost every other activity that basically used to entertain me. Something is currently terribly wrong and I can’t exactly tell what it actually is.

It starts with the alarm clock in the morning and ends with the toothbrush in the evening. I feel totally uncomfortable with everything. Everything bothers me. Everything gets on my nerves. Everything bores me. Everything gives me enough arguments to hate it. I’m always tired, which is one of the reasons for everything previously mentioned. And I feel exhausted as well.

The thing that bothers me the most is the fact that I can’t locate the origin of this disease. It’s easy to say, “I’m don’t feel right because of, …”

That is the crux. If you ask me what is wrong, I wouldn’t be able to answer. One thing I could guess, the traveling each and every day. A couple of month ago I felt happy about the fact that there’s a period in my schedule that allows me to relax and come down and turn the switch. That’s a problem I suffer from for many years. When you’re into a job that includes activities that are also a part of your spare time activities, you barely have the chance to completely get rid of such things. The lines between job and hobby blur and finally lead to a stress factor that in reverse cause this kind of burn out.

I first noticed this issue almost a decade ago, where I agreed to make a long term test with a psychologist we had in my company back in the days. I ran through different written tests that were set on specific dates over a period of something like two month. I’m not certain how long the tests actually went.

After running through these tests and several conversations with our psychologists I received the result. Conclusion of all this was, I’ve got a serious problem with making a straight cut between work and spare time. The reasonable fact that my hobby does not really differ from the things I had to do at work increased the degree of my problem. I always suffered from burn out like symptoms in almost every job that stood in any relationship with IT.

To be honest, I considered changing my occupational field for years. The wish for a change repeats in time intervals tending to be quite shorter than the one before. In other words, I feel like I’ve reached a dead end street not sure for how long I can push myself to do what I currently do. On the other hand, this is the only thing I’ve learned. And my own comic book store or video game store, for instance, would lead to the same problem. A hobby turned into a job.

I’m so jealous about those people doing something for living that has nothing in common with things they use to do in their spare time. Meanwhile, I always feel terribly annoyed when someone asks me about computer related things or wants some help. Years ago, I was starving for opportunities like these. Nowadays I just feel bored to death. It’s only a handful of people receiving help. Seriously, my “talent” disgusts me and in the meantime a lot of people noticed this and my generic aversion. Without a doubt, my entity’s changed and my sodding work has a lot of proportion on that.

The Commuter

Another theory of mine what it could be, that bothers and puts me down. My current location. It’s not a problem with the location where I live, I feel depressed by the village I work at. When you’re a person who lives in bigger cities for quite major part of your life, you’re used to several conveniences the “big city” brings with. I literally work at the edge of an abandoned field, a duck pond in sight and utility poles on the horizon. No infrastructure around. And that’s the point.

It’s not that I’m the kind of a guy permanently being off office and enjoying an extended lunch break, but I’m the kind of guy who seems to get terribly disturbed by the fact, that his infrastructure he was used to is gone. Seriously, I hate the fact that even my way home wastes like one hour and a half and that I can no longer do some private business whenever I want, because I simply don’t have the opportunities right here. Meanwhile, I doubt that I’m a commuter. It sickens me. It’s fun for several weeks, but I can barely imagine doing this for years.

That kind of luxury I once had and which is currently lost seems to be part of my desolate condition I’m currently in. In these very few moments that I have to wander around in my hometown, I walk around with eyes wide open and my chops fall down. Like one of these village people that have a great experience to get when they “visit the city”. For f#$k’s sake. I bloody miss this, and it chokes my throat every morning where I leave my city by train. I’m a Sissy in this special case, but I seriously feel like handcuffed at the moment.

To get the facts straight, I got myself into this and sooner or later I’ll get rid of this. Currently I’m saying to myself that I have to get through this and take this as an experience. Maybe, just maybe, my mind and my attitude will change on this whole suspect. Maybe I should take a long vacation somewhere far away to recharge. Maybe I should ignore all this and live kind of sad into each new day, wearing a mask with a grin. Actually, a lot of people will get confused seeing me with a grin on my face. Most of this emotional baggage is a result of years living a luxurious way of live which does not depend on money.

Now, more than ever, I’m aware of the preciousness to have time. One or two hours can make such a big difference these days.

Draft N odyssey

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A while ago, four month to be exact, I had the fine idea to upgrade my network. I wanted to switch my WiFi to Draft N and my LAN should be 1000 MBps. That was the plan. My old setup was a Netgear FVS338 in combination with two Linksys WRT-54G. This was a dream setup and actually no good reason to upgrade, despite the WiFi bandwidth was at its limits. I sync music and videos via wireless LAN connection and a copy progress that lasts for like 10 hours is not acceptable.

On last year’s Black Friday I bought two Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N. I wanted to replace all my devices I had in use with these two. One should work as router, switch and access point. Tasks that were shared by the Netgear router and the Linksys access point. So far so good, this setup worked. The second Buffalo router should work as a client bridge. Bummer!

It’s almost impossible to get this router into a working or at least stable client bridge mode. Sometimes the router wasn’t able to connect to the current WiFi. Sometimes I had a WiFi connection but no access to anything else. After a long time of research, I finally found one firmware version that offered a stable client bridge mode. But after all I’ve experienced, it seem to depend on the weather and the current moon phase. In good times I was able to have stable connections for days and in bad times it crashed after almost five minutes. I replaced this stupid devices with my old Linksys access point and everything was fine.

Another problem left, I couldn’t get a stable connection for my HTC smart phone. I connected, had WAN access for like 10 minutes and then it dropped for good. I had to reboot the phone to get back on the track. I replaced the Buffalo router with a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND. It was a good device, though. But finally, it was based on WRT firmware and had the same Draft N issues like the Buffalo router. Retoure.

Last but not least, I got back to the roots and bought a D-Link router. D-Link has been a good companion in the good old days, when I had my first broadband connection and it was one of the most stable devices I can remember, beside the Netgear FVS338, which is an absolute killer device.

So, I got this D-Link DIR-655 and set up my net again and after a long period of pure despair, WiFi was running perfectly fine. For one reason did my broadband modem start to play some tricks on me by crashing and reconnecting randomly. I was near to return the D-Link router, but I gladly noticed those weird blinking LEDs on my modem. Culprit found.

I’m still trying to get the Buffalo working in client bridge mode when I find the time to set this stupid thing up and can do some research on this particular problem, but no real solution so far. The devices uses to crash whenever possible.

A taste of ice cream sandwich

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According to the fact that there are no impressive game releases these days and I have a small amount of time left in my spare time, I was digging a little the Android scene. My main intention was to get some hands on on the latest Android – Codename “Ice Cream Sandwich” – and see how it works in my phones. The HTC Desire S and the Motorola Defy.

I tried the Virtuous Quattro RC3 and the CyanogenMod 9 Alpha builds for the HTC Desire. The Defy got stuffed with the experimental builds of CyanogenMod 9 as  well.

At first glance, for all devices, ICS looks amazing and the overall redesign looks very homogenic and a lot of obstacles in the menu structure has been ridden. When you’re used to Android and use it for quite a long time, you’ll find yourself in a re-orientation situation. But ICS is very user friendly and now, in my opinion, on the same level with Apple’s iOS.

Virtuous Quattro RC3 was one of the first ROMs I installed and my impression was, ‘Yeah, looking gooood.’ But in the end, the speed and smoothness of this ROM was terrible. And even though it was an RC it felt more like a fast pushed alpha version. It had several bugs like the clock crashing and syncs that did not sync. All in all, it looked cool, but it felt awful.

CyanogenMod 9 for the Defy was, because it was alpha, the same buggy experience, but it felt usable, except for the camera, but that’s a problem on lot of devices. I was expecting that this ROM would not work completely fine and that it would be another first look thing. Anyhow, despite the slow performance can I say, that the CM team is definitely on the right way and without a doubt, the old Defy is capable running ICS.

Last but not least, I installed the alpha build of CyanogenMod 9 on my Desire S. I tried the builds from January 27 and 30. The first one had almost the same low performance like the Quattro ROM, but the nightly build of January 30 runs almost smoothly and came pretty close to what you are used to with CyanogenMod 7.x

Only one camera is currently working on the Desire S. With the latest release I got some issue with syncing Facebook to my contact list. This ROM still’s got the issue that WiFi is not running fine with certain router/access points and various encryptions. The issue is well known in many bug reports, even for stock ROMs and I was hoping for a final fix. Bummer!

As a summarization can I say, the AOSP ICS developers have done a great job so far and I’m so dead certain that CyanogenMod 9 will be a giant hit. On the other hand, there’s still a long road to walk till it’s time to announce the first beta releases and it’s even further more away to announce a real release candidate. Lots of RCs that you can find these days for many devices are quick born, badly supported ROMs that you should only use when you like to do some bug fixing or if you’re just interested in Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

I personally switched back to CyanogenMod 7.2 on my Defy and will also switch back to Reaper (CM7 derivate) on my Desire S.

Of bats, boobs and speech ballons

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Vampirella, Batman and Scott Pilgrim – these are, if you want to call it that way, my main inspirational and influencing adultwise comic characters in my life. Vampirella mainly because of her bloodlust and her giant hooters. She’s also the character I follow for the longest time period. As far as I remember did it start back in 1995, the year I’ve discovered this new comic book store in my town.

Batman followed years later in an act of piracy I’ve to admit. I read the Batman comics in a pirated PDF version that I’ve got from a friend of mine. I also have to mention that I tried to read Batman comics back in the days, like 1992 or so, but I was more into Disney, Spanish/Belgian comics and the Marvell stuff, like Spiderman and Fantastic Four. DC Comics weren’t that popular these days. Well, in my environment.

The young upcoming new talent is Scott Pilgrim. Since the release of the movie I’m such a big fan of the movie and also the comic books (the movie mainly because of this ultra hot actress that plays Ramona Flowers). The whole merge of arcade style, nerdism, rock’n’roll and semi-super-hero attitudes make the Scott Pilgrim comic books very, very special. Whoever thinks the movie was ingenious, go read the comic books!

Comics Girl - Karola .4.

You might want to ask, ‘Why the hell is he writing all these things?

Well, mainly because I just don’t wanted to bore you again with another upgrade story about my media centre and secondly, because I’m back into comics. Actually, nothing else that is very special and worth mentioning happened these days, so I write about this. I’ve recently revisited a lot of Batman comics from the ‘piracy days’ (but now in real, bought book form) and it captured me more than ever.

Back in the days I got dead bored by Marvell comics with all their super fancy heroes and villains. The stories had not enough logical input and made a lot of use of the deus ex machina. DC Comics are different because DC keeps an eye on the main plot and sticks more to the investigation driven stories rather than stupid beatings and fightings. Without a doubt, X-Men and Wolverine are cool, Spiderman is great and even the Fantastic Four, but at one certain point, they started to cause a lot of boredom. Whenever the main hero is in a situation with no way out, he inflicts to a new special ability that finally rescues him/her, the story and the happy end. No longer my cup of tea.

Vampirella is completely different. The only thing that counts here is ‘Sex sells!’ and that’s it. The early Vampirella stories were bad, without a doubt, but after a while the whole series turns out to be something special. A lot of phantasm is included in the tales of Vampirella, but due to it’s connection to this Dracula and Transylvania myth it gets logical (in some kind of way). It’s hard to describe here. The Vampirella fan base is a small one, but very dedicated and the stories and the whole setting is definitely a matter of taste. You should give it a try if you don’t feel offended by erotic in combination with morbidity.

I’ve tried to read some Japanese comic franchises, but they weren’t very satisfying and I prefer Japanese comic artwork in form of a TV show or a movie and not in a book. While reading I set up the dialogues in a very stereotype Japanese style that simply does not work out so good though.

Another plan of mine, one – ONE day I’ll go down to my cellar and retrieve my old MAD magazines. Those were the ones I liked the most when I was young and still wearing eggshells behind my ears. Until then I stick with Mr Bruce Wayne and sidekicks, Vampirella and her ultra sex appeal and the nerdy Scott Pilgrim. Besides these I also got those classics like ‘The Watchmen’ and ‘From Hell’ in queue. I seriously need a 36 hours day.

The lust to kill

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It’s been in my mind since I was around twelve years old, that one particular question came to my mind again, again and again. How would it be to murder a human being?

A lot of people might come up here and yell, that this is pervert thinking or that I my mind is freaked out. But I personally believe that everyone feels the lust or at least an interest to murder someone. There’s no doubt that man always enjoys the feeling to have the ability to control another one or is able to influence one to satisfy ones personal needs. Even the ubersocial crowd tends to be completely non-sociable when they get the possibility to gain the lead and as an result of this the control of someone else.

Humans in groups always tend to create some kind of an hierarchy and nevertheless they are not far from abusing their abilities depending on their role in the group. Or their capabilities in thinking. It’s nature’s law that the stronger one kills the weak one. With evolution, the development of the human brain and ethical values man lost the awareness of this particular law. Which is good, otherwise mankind would have been already erased from this planet and some other species would have taken place.

The recently mentioned ethical values are one of the main reasons why most of today’s common people even deny to think about murdering someone else. Most of them don’t waste a single moment to even try to imagine, how it would be. When you try to talk with someone about this topic, you’ll get a view with eyes of spotting on you fulfilled with many question marks.

For instance, a lot of people, especially those who raise children have a weird and strange tendency to become murderers or see murder as something to correct failure behaviour in this world. I’m talking about pedophilia. A lot of parents or other people with straight and fixed “correct” ethical values defend death sentence and want it back when it comes to judge pedophiles. This is, for me, like burying the trash as deep as you could under ground just to keep it out of sight.

...Murder in the Dark...

Man denies to watch the beast right into the eyes. Man prefers to stab it from the back and shovels it somewhere not to be found. Those who face the beast keeping their ethical values are the ones who can get a neutral point of view and measure murder with all its consequences in a correct matter. The small group of people who gets overwhelmed by the beast are the ones who finally tend to truly murder.

With this said in a exaggerated metaphorical way I personally come to the conclusion, that everyone can be a murderer. Without a doubt, murder is caused due to a chain of different events and circumstances that finally channels. You can’t measure murder by putting one tag of a reason on it. You always have to count and seek every single part of the puzzle to understand why it has come to this item.

According to this, the complexity preexistence, I also tend to say that everyone can be a murderer. Maybe it’s also a lack of intelligence that some people cannot even image how it would to kill somebody else. This intelligence barrier is quite good, because stupidity always leads to disease.

For a very long time did I think that this aversion against the imagination of the act of murder is something instinctive. This would come in contradiction to nature’s law and its methods to keep balance within a species and between several species. It’s more a result of the way we grew up and the values our  parents gave us we’d to live by every day. Also a thing of society and nowadays the media. Mass media has such a giant influence on people’s view on certain thing. Just compare people’s ethical values in Europe and the USA as to violence, murder, usage of weapons and torture.

The USA teaches their people that dismemberment and such things are normal, even war. On the other hand, they pretend that a nude body, women’s breasts are worst thing. You should not even speak about it. It’s the complete opposite in Europe. We take the human body as naturally given and have to shame to show it or to watch it. We consider violence, dismemberment, murder as wrong and that is what it totally is – wrong. From an ethical point of view and when it has nothing in common with the balance keep of one particular species.

Man has developed too much to follow these animalistic values anymore. Man prefers not to kill the weak ones. Man prefers to kill the different ones. But these are things you have to argue with on a much larger scale, when it comes to things like genocide. And still, what about the single human being?

The bar’s set much higher to murder someone in a “small environment” than it is to kill thousands of people. Is it, because swarm intelligence only works out on the lowest level? Like “good” mass media does? Keeping the standards low that everyone can understand and take part of the big discussion? Being part of the game?

Man likes to see masses get killed but denies to imagine to kill a single human being. Even when man has the ability to stab it from the back.

Current changes

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A few weeks ago I started upgrading and changing several things on my media centre PC. Most importantly, I’ve exchanged the mainboard and the RAM. Another component that’s changed was the graphics card. I switched from a common GeForce GTX 560ti to a GeForce GTX 560ti 448.

The “old” graphics card was a SuperClocked version by EVGA, which had a lot of power but the EVGA Classified Edition of the GeForce 560ti 448 was too intriguing to be resisted to. The EVGA CE uses six power phases and is more a 570 than a 560. The big issue with the 570 is the lack power phases – four instead of five. One of my previous 570 cards died due to this fact during an overclocking session and a slight voltage increase.

I also exchanged the chassis, which looks much more elegant than the old chassis I’ve used and is a little quieter. The only noisy thing that is currently inside is the graphics card, but the cooling components will be exchanged in the very nearby future.

The CPU that was once working in my work PC wandered into the media centre giving me much more core horse power. The CPU is now overclocked but does not cause too much heat, thanks to a stock voltage.

After setting up the system and installing all the things I actually need (tons of games and XBMC) I’m very satisfied with the final result. Everything feels much smoother and the overall gamin performance has increased a lot. The only thing that bothers me currently is the noise level of the system during gaming sessions. But like I said, this is going to be solved.

The reason why I actually did those changes to the system was mainly the new Batman video game. And my plan worked perfectly well. The game’s now finished and I did not notice any weird performance issues, except the rumble with the Joker and his henchmen and the Catwoman fight in the strong room. Those were more PhysX related and my dedicated 9800GT had a little struggle with these fights.

Whatever the case, I’ve finally got a “debugged” system where everything finally works, which was not the case on the old system. For instance, ‘L.A. Noire’ did not even start. XBMC is working smoothly and I had no issues with exporting and importing the media library data.

The haunted night

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Things are getting weirder and weirder these days. First this depression thingy, now I found myself surrounded by ghosts and mysterious visions. My last night was a pure nightmare. I barely closed my eyes and grabbed some sleep. It almost felt like I was soaked into the plot of Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’

Right after going to bed and resting my head on my pillow I heard a silent, gently knocking from somewhere inside the room. It wasn’t actually a knocking, it sounded more like the rhythm of a marching drum in a far distance. Worst thing about it, I couldn’t locate where it actually came from.

I wasn’t really caring that much about the drum or the knocking or whatever it was and fell asleep – finally.

It was around 3:00am when I heard that knocking again. A little more intense and the rhythm changed from marching drum to constantly knocking. Even the noise itself became much louder than the one I heard before closing my eyes. I tried to cover myself in the most comfortable way possible and tried to get back to sleep. Without success —-

The knocking disturbed me and I also have to admit that I got little frightened. Another thing that bothered me as hell, I’d to pee so badly. I tried to ignore my strangury and kept lying quiet under my cover.

 

There weren’t many options, I had to go off to the toilet and got rid of my liquid baggage. I gathered all my courage and did what I had to do. Success —

It was almost 4:30am and not even an hour until I have to stand up and get on my way to work. What I did was tossing around till the alarm clock rang and got finally up. Everything was fine, I was a little tired, but that’s no surprise due to the fact that I barely grabbed some sleep in the night hours before.

I was sitting in front of the TV watching some stupid, classic videos on VH1 and eating my breaking. Until, out of nowhere, that knocking appeared again. Loud and clear and closer than ever before —

Driven by an unknown source

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It’s been weeks now that I suffer from these weird depressions I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts. I actually do not understand where they come from and most importantly, why I’ve got them. The depression period is much longer than the previously mentioned weeks, a couple of month to be more exact. But it’s a couple of weeks now that I recognize them with more awareness.

Curiously, this is a condition that I’ve never experienced before and additionally did I never believe, that I could probably notice a depression without even knowing the cause. I’m a very cynical person and I also don’t give that much about mind related illnesses. According to this I find this current state even more hilarious. Also very frightening. It’s like standing right beside yourself without the possibility to actually reach yourself.

Basically it comes out of nowhere. A phase of deep sadness and loss of self-confidence. Like I said before, I don’t give much about those things and I also find people using therapy for mental illnesses simply waste money of our health care system. This loss of control about my emotional circumstances confuse me.

I’ve got several presumptions about this whole thing. One’s a job-wise one and the other one is a location-wise one. I also presume that the massive loss of spare time could be one reason, too. Another thing, I’m always tired and exhausted each and every time. I’ve got this weird lack of concentration and attention and I personally think that I failed on almost everything during the last few month.

My overall condition is far from good at the moment, but I’m aware of that and I personally do not think that this the reason for this melancholy driven sadness that affects me here and then. To be honest, I don’t have one sodding, important reason to be sad or depressed, but it affects me everyday and mostly in the worsts moments one can imagine.

Mind the gap

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It’s a new bloody year and the old one, system wise, ended terribly. I wanted to use the weekend to do some changes on my media centre and I got stuck right at that point, where I wanted to put the motherboard inside the chassis.

The motherboard itself fit, but I wasn’t able to connect all the SATA plugs because there’s simply not enough room for them. One slope and the lack of holes where you actually need them refused to let me rebuild my media centre. We’re talking about an issue with the size of almost a quarter inch.

Without a doubt, replacement for the chassis was needed. To be honest, I wasn’t very satisfied with the chassis since buying it. The fan system was rubbish and too noisy. Too much plastic and not enough room inside. Which is now again to be proven as correct.

I ordered an anidées AI-6 chassis, which looks very plain and elegant. It’s a solid build with more metal elements and less plastic. I’ve also got a USB3.0 connector includes and the cable management looks even more logical. The fans aren’t to be seen at first glance. Mainly hidden but air can get in and outside through well designed vents.

Whatever the case (!), I’m looking forward to get this chassis as soon as possible to rebuild my media centre. I also go by and do a complete new setup of the Windows system, which hopefully will not waste too much time.

Of RipJaws and Eden

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Previously, I’ve told you guys about my GeForce upgrade on my media centre. The performance boost was, well, kind of okay, but at last I felt it was time for an overall upgrade on the system. I’ ve got this AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition in my PC that I usually use for some work on photos and on the other hand it’s simply a machine I use to manage my mails, websites and these kind of things.

It finally turns out that the processor plugged into this machine gets a little bored so I’ll do an exchange and my AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition moves from my media centre to this working machine. Both system still run on the AMD 7xx chipset and the media centre will now get the upgrade to the AMD 990FX chipset in form of an Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 board.

I’ll put 16GB DDR3 12800 G.Skill RipJaw modules on this system, so that I finally do not have to suffer on a memory bottleneck. I personally think that this is a good foundation for my EVGA GeForce GTX 560ti 448 Cores Classified. I was able to get a performance increase on games like “Batman Arkham City” but the overall system performance became pretty bad during the last year and a half so it’s time to make an upgrade and most importantly get a fresh and new installment of Windows 7.

 ...

I’ve exchanged graphics and sound card drivers a lot in the past and I also had to struggle with several hardware and software issues that also caused new bugs, if you know what I’m saying.

Anyhow, I don’t expect a performance boost of 200 per cent but I’m certain that the overall system performance and feel of smoothness will increase and a lot of crashes and bugs will get fixed with this new setup.

In preparation for this did I also give the new XBMC version (called “Eden”) a try, which is currently out as a beta release. I was a little disappointed. I did a fresh installment and imported my old library to get everything as clean as I could. The movie library did not work as expected. I was missing movie posters. I wasn’t able to get movie information. The new skin itself is not a thing I’m going to be friend with because all the items are drawn much smaller and it looks like as if there’s something missing on the GUI.

I also tried several video add-ons and most of them did not work properly as well. To summarize, this is still a beta version and it does not represent the final product, but I will wait for a long time until I’ll finally do the update from “Dharma” to “Eden”. I’m fine and comfortable with my current media centre software. So why changing a good and running system?

I hope I can get everything done within the next 5-7 days and I’ll keep you informed.