I hate trying to diagnose hardware issues
Mar 1st
Since I bought the new hardware I spoke about earlier I’ve had constant issues with the pc randomly rebooting, crashes within World of Warcraft (and that sucks when you have one instance out of five randomly crashing, especially if it’s the main), services and other parts of Vista halting or crashing and the reboots in one instance trashed my boot drive to force a reinstall. The only inidication of what it could be were the issues noticed and Prime95 having threads stop (almost instantly from starting with rounding turned on) due to hardware faults but with no help in diagnosing, but it at least helped me narrow things down to memory or the motherboard memory channels since the voltages for the psu were always fine and the cpu was fine as well.
Today I woke up a little later than I had hoped so decided rather than hopping into World of Warcraft I’d see if I could track it down. Started off by removing two sticks or ram and leaving two in channels 0,2 and testing in Prime95. Testing this way still showed a fault so I dropped down to one stick in channel 0 since I was still concerned that it could be the motherboard with issues, and that went fine so I put the other stick to the side and placed one of the other two sticks into channel 2. Testing in Prime95 with this set-up also went fine so I placed a third stick into the system in channel 1 and tested to again find no issues.
By now the system had been running stable under Prime95 with 3Gb for about an hour so I placed the fourth stick back into the system in channel 3, which it had never been in, and within 2 minutes of Prime95 running I had threads stopped due to hardware errors and about a minute later the machine rebooted itself….game, set, match, we have found the hardware fault so now it’s just a matter doing an RMA for the stick and get back up to full spec before I start trying to overclock, but at least now I shouldn’t have to worry about any crashes while playing.
Update on issues at work
Feb 28th
Went in to work today for a unit meeting in the morning, felt like crap due to trying to fight off the flu so didn’t want to go in, but felt after yesterday it may send the wrong signal if I didn’t. Meeting went ok but got interesting afterwards…the dba from yesterday pulled the senior manager aside and told him she’d been trying to get the connection for the web service working and couldn’t so she was getting one of her underlings to work on getting the interim solution I wanted working so everything that happened yesterday was totally meaningless and no-one gets why she decided to fight it so much but looks like the right decision was come to and so the best interests of the clients are being served as best as they can so I can’t complain.
Managers and I also had another conversation and a few things were sorted and talked out so I’m feeling not as frustrated with things as I was yesterday so perhaps my post shoudl be edited but can’t be bothered….will let it stand as a reminder to myself int he future.
Maybe time to move on
Feb 27th
Well, had an interesting day at work today and it lead to me thinking it’s time to move on. I’m currently working on a project and there has been discussion regarding the way to go in regards to an interim data solution while we intergrate a C# application to a java web service and it seemed there was general agreement on how we’d do it so all was good.
Fast forward to today and the dba for the oracle box running the web service came back on holidays and vetoed the interim solution (basically doing a truncate/insert on a table on the SQL2005 box from the Oracle box until we can get integrated) because we were so close to getting the web service….now take into account I’ve spent 4 days on the web service side and still can’t get my app to talk to the service due to the wsdl not adhereing to standards and we already have a template for the dts she’d need to use for doing things my way, along with the SQL query needed to pull the data out already since they give it to me as a csv on cd.
I decided I had had enough of her stonewalling and so went to my manager and upper manager, who had both previously agreed with my solution (along with telling me to get it done while she was on leave as she’d stonewall me when she got back), to find my upper manager blindside me with a complete 180 to say that getting the cd was fine. I expressed my displeasure over this but since I knew he’d already now made his decision I just left in frustration, rather than waste more time, and started work back on the web service integration.
I was then called into a meeting, some things were sorted (along with oracle dba claiming initially it would take her a week to do what I asked before admiting under my queries that it would actually only be half a day of work, which is still ridiculous, and the rest of the time would be for testing) and I kept quite about their comments regarding her when she’s not around. After she left I was kept behind and chastised for the way I acted but they still couldn’t see what my issues were or how they did anything wrong so I immeadiately left when that had finished, came back to my office and looked at Seek which opened my eyes to the options out there.
I found a couple of interesting looking jobs and called up the HR agencies about them in way of interest…the first one was up front and honest about the position and my chances at it but did have a couple of others that suited, few others were not bad either and the last one is already setting up an interview with a Sydney based firm that’s a fulltime position for about 20% more p.a. than I currently make so it seems there are some good opportunities out there and so it’s time to seriously consider a move and get my resume out there to see what happens.
Guess this is just my way of thinking and reminding myself that the bond between management and workers is often very tenuous but once there is a lack of trust or feeling you have the support of management when you push for something they wont then it becomes almost impossible to get it back or feel confident about taking a stand or pushing to acheive what they have asked for.
Sunwell Trilogy
Feb 26th
So I was out looking to buy a friend a present for her birthday last week and was just going through the local Dymocks fantasy section when I spotted they had two copies of the Ultimate Sunwell Trilogy graphic novels for $48 each. I had an initial look through one and it looked ok, and since I had also found a book on H.R.Giger for a present, I decided to grab it given patch 2.4 is related to it.
I got it home and damn is that think actually bigger than it looks, even for a graphic novel I had to do it in two sessions to finish it. The artwork is great, though I would have loved it if the entire thing was coloured as the first 8 pages are, and the story had some interesting twists to it. The thing that really got me into it though was the Kalecgos and Aveena storyline and the way the encounters for Kalegcos has been reported from the ptr…it seems like there could be a really good story-arc possible from here if the Kalecgos fight is really to do with him battling an internal demon to keep his sanity and not turn against Aveena and the Blue Dragonflight in future patches/expansion.
It’s going to be interesting to see how things play out, but in the mean time I can highly recommend picking up the Ultimate trilogy if you spot it as it’s good “manga” as well as a good bridge between current WoW and the 2.4 storyline if you aren’t up to speed with the lore behind it.
Poker Update
Feb 23rd
After a really bad run during november and december, where I had essentially one winning day (for a whole $15 at that), I had taken a little time off to go back to do some reading and play things like World of Warcraft and my Xbox360 just to clear my head out of poker so when I come back to it I’ll have removed doubt over my previous plays even if it was just some short term variance.
Anyway, I was checking my email today and it seems that Party Poker decided to give me $80 in restricted cash to play and use without having to make a deposit so I figured I’d go over, have some fun and see what happened. What happened was I noticed something really interesting when I started to play some sit’n'go’s…the entry fee for them comes out of the restricted bonus, even if you have money in your unrestricted balance (though I’m not sure if this happens when you already have cash deposited, I just noticed it after I had done ok in a few and had $80 back in restricted and $17 in unrestricted…when I entered the next $11 even it came form the restricted balance).
This little feature means that if you do pretty good in the S’n'G’s then you can effectively make money without ever risking your own for as long as the bonus offer period goes for…for instance just screwing around in 4 events tonight I got two firsts and a second and withdrew $75 while still having the $80 there to use for entry fee’s. I don’t know if this is intended, or if they will get round to changing it so it takes from unrestricted balance first, or if it works the same way for cash games, but for now it’s quite a nice way to get some confidence back by working on plays and tricks knowing you’re not risking y0our own cash…and that is somethign I have needed.
Quick multi-boxing video test
Feb 8th
Hopefully this video will show up. It’s just a quick 1 minute test of me multi-boxing my paladin, mage, mage and priest on bears and bucks in Ashenvale to make sure my recording and encoding was ok. I’m noticing interleaving problems on the text though so I guess I’ll have to work on that.
[stage6 2204592]
My opinion on some of the ads appearing here
Feb 7th
I have noticed that quite a few of the google ads so far appearing on the site have been for gold-sellers and power-leveling services. I’d like to state for the record that I don’t endorse these activities or companies and I don’t know of any true multi-boxer that would.
That being said though, running a site needs money and if I can use google ads to offset some of the cost then I will and while I will try to see if I can stop those ads from being displayed, if I can’t then that is just something I will have to live with and hope people don’t use them.
Enter the 5 Fingers
Feb 2nd
So anyway, as I was saying in my first post I have now started multiboxing in World of Warcraft so I thought I’d give an explaination of how and why in case other people find themselves interested in such a thing.
The path to multiboxing for me started back in the days of Everquest where most people would dual-box either for raids or purely to powerlevel new characters up for raiding, but once I started playing WoW I didn’t really see the point to it as even from release it was painfully easy to solo to 60/70 quickly. Fast forward to about two months ago and I somehow came across Dual-Boxing.com and was intrigued at the ideas being shown of multi-boxing 4 or 5 characters for running your own arena team or instances. The more I read on the forum and blogs of others doing this, the more it seemed like a fun way to spend time when not raiding and as a way to gear up characters for other roles if needed on raids without relying on others or having to cajole friends to run SLab for the umpteenth time just so I might get [Cloak of the Inciter] for a dps character.
As I kept reading I kept looking at my current pc, along with my bank balance and tax time approaching in a few months and decided I needed some new equipment as a write-off so worked out what I would need and what I could make do without and set down the markets on impulse. I ended up back home with a Q6600 quad-core, 4Gb of Ram, a 500Gb hard drive, a BenQ 22″ lcd and a gigabyte P35 motherboard, fast forward about 6 hours and components have been swapped around and the new pc is up and running (as a side-note, there is definately a problem with the system as it keeps crashing with memory errors during wow, or randomly rebooting at other times, and Prime95 tells me there is a rounding error but I can’t track down which component is the problem).
At this stage I went and sent myself 3 trial invites to go with the 2 accounts I already had and bought the keyclone software that seemed so popular on dual-boxing, and this would have to be the best investment in multi-boxing one can make. After setting up the accounts and playing around with window sizes to have my main on one screen and the 4 others on the other screen I finally got to try multi-boxing and found it to be fun but still limited due to the add-ons I was using and lack of mapping options (next post I’ll likely go into add-ons and such that are helpful) so I did more research and found people raving about a product called X-Keys and some about the G15 Logitech keyboard.
After reading some reviews I decided that the X-Keys would be too expensive to buy in australia and the G15 with the 18 G-Keys was being phased out so I started scouring threads for other options, and found some people posting about the Belkin n52 Nostromo. I decided to start hitting up ebay for these and after managint to lose about 4 auctions and the supplies drying up I took a gamble and started phoning up electrical chain stores around the place that stock computer equipment…to my surprise the one I least expected had an n52 in stock and one of the EB’s around had a G15 Gaming keyboard still in stock so I quickly snatched them both up before they were sold, along with a Razer Lacitech mouse just to keep the blue lighting of peripheral theme going (and my MS mouse was just about dead).
With these now in hand I found multi-boxing to be much easier and a lot more fun so I eventually buckled and brought 3 final battlechests, at a good saving, and started up my first official 5 man team for PvE playing…but more of that later 
What I’m up to
Jan 31st
Been a while as I have been trying to work out what to do with this domain but think I now have everything set in my mind and figured I’d add a blog as the first thing to try and keep my thoughts in order and press on with what I want to do.
As some may know, the domain name came about from my development company name of Generation XXX but that was taken so I had to go with just GenXXX which I actually think suits better. The thing to note though is that the name has nothing to do with porn or porn development but was more a play on the ideas of Generation X, Generation Y and my favourite wrestling stable of Degeneration X…so go and put all those thoughts out of your mind and we can move on.
There will likely be two sides to this blogging area, one regarding any coding projects I am working on either for my day job or my company and the other will be just general things going on in my personal life (eg expect to see a few posts over time regarding my striving for fitness) and gaming (specificially in the realm of online/live poker, xbox360 and World of Warcraft where I have now taken a keen interest in the idea of multiboxing but more on that in a bit).
My next few posts will be about WoW and the idea, concept and implementation of multi-boxing in it with 5 characters and then we’ll see how much time that takes up and if I get anything else done in terms of gaming on other platforms or if releases such as Burnout Paradise and DMC4 will have to wait for me to free up some time.
On the personal side of things, I had a fairly decent christmas though the highlight of it would have had to come on the 20th of December when I finally graduated with my second degree from the Australian National University…this time with a Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) to go with my Bachelor of Science (Computer/Maths). The toll of studying fulltime while also working fulltime was pushing me to breaking edge over the last two years and I was actually about to quit the degree in 2006 but I passed just enough units to leave me with one unit left to graduate so I stuck it out with the decision I’d quit no matter what if I didn’t graduate in 2007 because 13 years of study was just not fun any more.
I left the exam room in November pretty unhappy and knowing with 100% certainty I had failed the exam and would not be graduating (which I think was made worse because my parents had been unable to see my first graduation and had already organized travelplans to come down to see this one) so I had resigned myself to fate and left it at that until the day results were to be posted on the web. I checked the results in the morning (about 6 hours before they were supposed to be up) and there they were, quickly scanned for my name and then sat stunned for about 5 minutes as I saw a P for my mark….I was so surprised and shocked I actually screenshotted it and then kept checking both it and the graduation invitation post a few times a day for the next week just to make sure they didn’t change.
There have been a few things I have done so far that have made me happy or proud, but I can honestly say that seeing that pass and then going up to accept my degree knowing my parents were in the crowd watching has been the most special and proudest moment of my life, and think it will only be passed when/if I get married and have children so I’d just like to take this time to say thank you to them for the support over the years and I love you both, and never say anything about it again.
Other than that last year was fairly run of the mill and this year already has goals set so I’ll stop boring you with details and just get on with the fun…..hope you enjoy your time here but please bare in mind that this site is still under construction while I get it finished off the way I’d like and any suggestions will be most appreciated.
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