Latest Blog Entries by lucky760 at VideoSift.com

A Math-Oriented T-Shirt Design and a Request for Sifter Input

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:57:32 -0800

(3 comments - 160 views)
I submitted this to the Tee Virus workshop and thought I'd share it here. It's a math-centric design and hopefully humorous to one or two of you Sifters.

Here's a follow-up inspired by demon_ix's comment below:

If you haven't or don't on a regular basis, please help us by at leaving your comments and casting your votes in the Tee Virus Workshop. There are a few designers there who often get very little to zero feedback on their creations and it'd be enormously appreciated if you'd just lend us 2 minutes of your day. Thanks for your help Sifters!

(And if you were a Sift member before TeeVirus launched, you already have an account there. Just login with your usual username/password.)

- lucky760

We're Number One! - Just Added: We're Number Two!

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:00:58 -0700

(8 comments - 244 views)
Just had to share this. I think it might be my funniest t-shirt design ever (though I could be wrong and they may all equally be crap):

And thanks to some suggestive members who thought my original idea was worth a shot, here's the follow up titled "We're Number Two!":

(If you like it, please click on over to Tee Virus and vote for it. If you don't like it, please stay away.)

- lucky760

Try Blocker! My First DirectX Game.

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:34:23 -0700

(8 comments - 368 views)
I just got an email from Yahoo saying Geocities is shutting down. I took a look at what I have on there and one of the things I found was the first (and only) DirectX game I have ever written from scratch. I created it a few years ago mainly as a learning experience as I also built a nice code library to make my (non-existent) future games even simpler to create.

If you're up to it, download it and give it a go. It's a rather simple game, but does offer a little bit of fun. Please let me know what you think! Oh, and the objective is to match as many pairs as possible as quickly as possible. The more pairs you get in the shortest amount of time, the more points you get. It gets progressively harder as the timer goes faster and faster. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify origin of the game music.

Get it here: http://www.geocities.com/lucky760/blocker

Thanks!

- lucky760

Billie Tweets: Interesting YouTube and Twitter Mashup

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:40:29 -0700

(0 comments - 279 views)
Check out http://billietweets.com. It plays the Billie Jean music video from YouTube on the left and on the right it's *sort of* closed captioned. It displays each word from the song as it's sung but it displays each word from a different new Tweet just posted.

You can do a lot of neat stuff with Twitter.

- lucky760

Building a New PC

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:45:25 -0700

(21 comments - 689 views)
Last week the power apparently went off in my home while I was out because my clocks were all flashing the wrong time. No biggie. That kind of thing happens all the time, and the only consequence is that you have to reset all your clocks.

The next day I realized my PC wouldn't boot. After a whole lot of fiddling and faddling, I decided my motherboard must have gotten fried from a power surge even though it was under the watchful eye of a surge protector.

Since it's a few years old now, I went ahead and decided to upgrade to a new box, so I did a bit of research and bought all the equipment that was cheap, but should also keep me running at good speeds for years to come. This is the story of that computer. I'll probably tell it in a piecemeal fashion, starting with a simple list of all the pieces of my puzzle.

I'm keeping my old hard drives, optical drives, and floppy drive (just carrying it along because it's there), but everything else will be new equipment. I considered keeping the same case, but it was a Dell and custom built for just the hardware that was already in it.

So here's a rundown of all the new stuff:

CPU - Intel BX80580Q9400 Core 2 Quad Q9400 Central Processing Unit

After comparing specs and prices, I decided to snatch up the Intel Q9400. It is a quad core for super fast execution, 45nm form factor for energy savings and heat reduction, and can be overclocked from its stock 2.66ghz speed up to at least 3.6ghz with air cooling.

CPU Heat Sink - ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler

Since I plan on doing some moderate overclocking, I figured I'd need a better heat sink than the one that comes with the CPU. After a lot of reading, I settled on the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler, which comes with a small price tag and excellent cooling.

Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

This wasn't as easy a choice for me because there are so many options to choose from. The most important things I was considering were price, stability, and ability to overclock. I settled on a rather excellent board called the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P. They've been making better and better boards in the past few years and this beauty really takes the cake when compared to anything else in its price range. I also found several great videos at YouTube illustrating its features and a detailed step-by-step on how to overclock with it, so that's nice.

Power Supply - OCZ OCZ600SXS StealthXStream 600W Power Supply with Four +12V rails, ATX, and 120mm Fan

I could've stuck with my old PSU, but I figured since it was probably a power surge that killed my motherboard, I couldn't trust the power supply any more. There are a lot of very cheap options, but after reading about a lot of people having PSU death after a short time, I decided to spend just a little bit more for a unit that will be very reliable and beefy enough to support any hardware I might decide to throw at it some day. Plus, it has a big 120mm fan that's supposed to be very quiet.

RAM - OCZ OCZ2N10662GK 2GB 240-Pin DIMM PC2-8500 DDR2 1066 SDRAM

My old beast had only 1GB of slow, old memory, and it could have been damaged by the power surge, so I got a couple of sticks for 2GB running at 1066 mhz. The mobo actually supports faster speeds, but RAM at those speeds cost too much more than I was willing to spend.

Computer Case - Rosewill R220-P-BK Black 0.5mm SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

I didn't care anything about the case except that it needed to have sufficient space for any added hard/optical drives I might need in the future. I got lucky with a simple $25 case that also included a 120mm fan with room enough for 4 optical drives and 5 hard drives. It is even solid black, so that's a nice bonus.

Case Fan - APEVIA CF12SL-4C 120mm Multi-Color LED Case Fan

I'm not too worried about temperatures inside the case, but I figured I'd be slightly more safe than very sorry later and snatched up an additional 120mm fan to stick inside the case. The one that came in the case will be used for exhaust in the back (the heat sink fan will be blowing straight out of it) and I'll use this other one in the front of the case to suck in fresh, cold air. It has flashing colored lights or whatever, but I don't care about that; I just wanted something inexpensive that pushes a lot of air without too much noise.

IDE to SATA Adapters - Rosewill RC-204 IDE to SATA Mini Vertical Bridge (for IDE device)

Luckily, I realized an imminent problem with my upgrade: My old hard and optical drives are all IDE and the new mobo only has one IDE channel supporting 2 of my 4 devices. Everything else is now SATA. I found some IDE to SATA adapters that will hopefully work. You plug them into the back of your device then plug the SATA cable into them. I've read lots of reports of people having problems burning with DVD-RW drives and some large capacity hard drives becoming inaccessible. I have one of each, so I figure I'll stick my DVD-RW and large capacity HDD on the IDE channel and use the SATA adapters for the other two. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Oh, and of course, to help prevent any future stupid power surges, I picked up a second UPS from Costco and I'll use that to power everything that I hold sacred.

As far as the actual build goes, though, I should receive my last component in the mail tomorrow, then I'll start putting this crap thing together and hope everything works swell. If I'm not too lazy I'll take photos or video and share them in a later blog post.

[update]

I was in the middle of gutting the old box and putting together the parts I've received thus far when I realized I can't use my old video card because my mobo doesn't have any AGP slots. Whoops! So I headed on over to Best Buy and got a great deal on this (got it for $99, but at New Egg it's $145):

Video Card - PNY VCG981024GXEB GeForce 9800 GT 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

This bad boy is SLI ready (as is my PSU, RAM, and mobo in case I ever decide to take advantage of it) with 1GB of GDDR3 and a 600 mhz core clock, so it should definitely be able to take anything I throw at it.

- lucky760

FM Talk is Dead

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:26:30 -0800

(0 comments - 603 views)
I've been listening to my local FM Talk station for many years... probably about 10 of them. After my decade of listenership, tomorrow will be the last day for all the staff of the entire station.

The shows I've grown to know and love listening to five days a week are going bye bye in order to flip the station's format (and all their FM Talk affiliates) to playing Top 40 music and compete with KIIS FM, which is Ryan Seacrest's flagship station for his morning show. They figured it'd be more profitable to just play music and cut into the Top 40 market than sustaining the huge paychecks for all their talk talent. C'est la vie.

Goodbye 97.1 KLSX. It was fun.

- lucky760

Neatorama's User Submission Queue

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:18:25 -0800

(2 comments - 635 views)
Just thought I'd announce a pretty interesting project that has just gone live.

Neatorama.com has a brand new, powerful feature called the Upcoming Queue. Neatorama does now and has always run on the WordPress blogging platform. Until now, only a handful of trusted authors/editors have been able to add neat blog posts to the Neatorama front page.

But in recent months, Alex, the site's creator and proprietor, had an itch to allow all of the site's members contribute their own blog posts to the site. So he approached Sift Partners about scratching that itch with Varo CMS, the software platform that powers VideoSift.

Over the course of a couple of months, a special version of Varo CMS has been painstakingly customized to work hand-in-hand with the existing WordPress blog. After all our efforts, the Upcoming Queue is now live for everyone to enjoy.

It will be of particular interest to any bloggers who want to garner a little attention for themselves because you are allowed to add posts that link back to your own blog. So if you have any neat blog posts you'd like to share at Neatorama, or if you just want to check out Varo CMS powering the new system, head on over to http://www.neatorama.com/upcoming and give it the old once over.

If you do give it a looksee, please let us know what you think.

[edit]
This just in: I just saw the announcement post and apparently the top submitter of February will win a free iPod Touch. Nice.

- lucky760

Survey: How Often Do You Use VideoSift?

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:35:50 -0800

(36 comments - 858 views)
I was just thinking about all of our very long time members and that got me wondering... Is VideoSift part of your daily routine? I mean there are lots of sites out there that people check out from time to time and others you only go to when you're looking for something specific.

What is VideoSift to you? Is it your daily "I need to check out all the new videos" fix? How often do you visit on average? And when you do visit, how long do you stay?

Finally, how long have you been a member? More importantly how long do you foresee yourself continuing to be a member? There are a few oldies who, for various reasons, have up and quit in the past, but I can't imagine that I would ever have any reason to ever stop visiting VideoSift.

For me it's not just a fad or a phase, but a part of life. Even if I wasn't part of the administration, I imagine I'd always visit on a daily basis at the very least to watch great videos and at the most to partake in some random commentary. (No matter how busy I am with work and other things, I always have the itch to stop everything and take time out just so I can see what I've missed in the top 15.)

- lucky760

Various Statistics for 2008

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:26:21 -0800

(10 comments - 877 views)
On the subject of statistics... Looking at Dag's "Visualizing 2000 Visitors an Hour" blog post I thought it would be interesting to throw together some graphs for various stats for the entire year of 2008. They are presented below in separate graphs keeping categories with similar values together for scale.

Included are: videos published, video down votes, video up votes, comments posted, comment up votes, comment down votes, comment spam votes, new users, banned users, Sift Talks posts, and blogs posted.

Note the spike in April for new users is due to a spammer who created a few hundred sock puppet accounts

- lucky760

Porn Bumper: Public Beta Test

lucky760 (http://lucky760.videosift.com) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:39:42 -0800

(32 comments - 5422 views)

If anyone is interested (and a legal adult) Porn Bumper could use a bit of help with some opinions and beta testing. Your insight and instincts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[edit]
To clarify, this project is not affiliated in any way with Sift Partners Inc., VideoSift, or The Great Dagicus. This is an independent project that happens to be affiliated with me, myself, and I alone, so the only mention you'll see of it on VideoSift is here in my personal blog.

- lucky760