Hi there, long time no write. :)

Sometimes, as they say, crap happens. It's been more than a few years since the last blog here, I guess blogging requires an innate ability to "talk as if someone was actually listening." After the few blog attempts previous and the underwhelming response, it felt like posts were doing more to waste my time than anything else. (Isn't the nature of a "blog" rather obtuse if one thinks about it -- a podium for one to stand up on and profess, blindly?) Call me modest, but isn't that kin to ego? I mean, why does one blog? What purpose does it serve?

I found myself asking this very question after giving in to the recent Twitter rage. Everyone seems to be "on Twitter" these days, and so I did the exploratory thing and checked it out. Created an "account," and even made two purpose-less tweets. I found the whole experience to be... completely useless. Nobody cares one iota what I am doing at any particular instant. The whole concept is rediculous in my opinion. Still, to each their own.

In any case, things have both changed little and changed lots in these past years, both personally and globally. (Isn't that true for all realities, lol.) I've been attending college for several years now -- 4.0 honors GPA in a dual-major, EE and CS degrees. It has been occupying all my time -- not because I'm really any smarter than anyone else (I'm not), but because I have to make up for the negative and self-destructive things I did early in my education. Being a rebellious teen, for whatever reason, can further permutate one's future in ways not possibly foreseeable. I'd rather not think about the details, and just focus on the end result.

In 7.5 hours, I have a final in Engineering Graphics, so have to cut this short. Maybe I will make a new entry soon, maybe not. It would be nice if I could assemble something helpful or at least interesting out of my wide array of interests and activities, but history is not on my side in that area. :)

In closing, thanks to everyone whom has taken a look here and perused my humble ramblings.

What do you think?

Click on these photos for bigger versions then rate me on HotOrNot.com. :)

HOT or NOT 7.6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 89 votes Rate me!

RNAi - Cure for Cancer, AIDS here now

Okay this is really big news. Scientists have just discovered a way to "turn off" specific genes in plants, animals and humans. What does that mean? Well many of the major diseases we face today - cancer, AIDS, syphillus, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's, macular degeneration, nearly anything you can think of - all have the potential to be repressed or even cured by RNAi therapy.

What is RNAi? Please watch the streaming video by PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/02.html

If anyone is interested in helping out with this type of research, there is something you can do and it doesn't cost a thing. Just donate your unused CPU cycles to United Devices' "Human Proteome Folding" project. That's a small application that runs on your computer and folds genomes. It connects to the net every few days and grabs a new genome packet and sends the previous results. It is safe, unobtrusive, and runs in a background priority thread so you never even know it is there. Yes this is legit. It does use 90MB of RAM though, so 512MB is the system minimum. (Don't try to run it on an old computer.) Check it out: http://www.grid.org/projects/hpf/
You'll feel really good about yourself for signing up and joining the millions of others already decoding the human genome... go ahead, sign up right now! The faster we get the genome decoded, the faster we can make new drugs and treatments.

SOLTEK is the best Mainboard manufacturer Ever!

Ok here's a little history. A few years ago, some scoundrel in Japan stole a competitor's formula for making capacitor dielectric (computer parts.) Since this new formula was much cheaper and simpler to make than his existing formula, he immediately went to production with it. What that guy didn't know, was that the formula he stole was incomplete! His company produced millions of tons of this stuff and sold it to a number of vendors. Needless to say, in every device which contains these parts, they fail prematurely. The bad formula degrades and produces hydrogen gas, which causes the part to "vent" or explode.

I bought a SOLTEK mainboard a little over a year ago, and it has been the best mainboard ever, and runs Windows XP rock-solid. Average system uptime is about 2 months. I'd heard horror stories where certain ABIT-brand mainboards had suffered from these bad-parts problem. Then one day my PC locked up and wouldn't start. So I popped the cover and lo and behold, this is what I saw: The circled parts are several of the defective capacitors leaking the bad formula out their tops.

So I did a google search and ran across the BadCaps.net forum, where they describe the situation in detail. Here's some more bad photos. Willawake, the kind and considerate moderator there, suggested that SOLTEK might actually provide replacement caps for my board. Even out of warranty! So I mailed them, and sure enough, no-questions-asked, they sent me free replacements! Now replacing 13 capacitors on a 6-layer motherboard is not exactly an easy task. But I'm about to try it. See http://www.badcaps.net/tips/ if you want to see how this is done.

If you need to custom order replacement caps for your board, you can do so here. Chris (the administrator) is a friendly and smart guy with great prices and fast service. There's even an option of sending your board in for repair.

All-in-all, I am very pleased with the level of service Willawake and Chris at BadCaps.net has provided, along with SolTek. SolTek by all means could have told me to get lost... but instead they mailed new parts outside of warranty, at no charge. Now THAT's service!

Wish me luck as I rip out my board and heat up the soldering iron... :)

A.R. Yngve

I finished the Alien Beach novel yesterday. Very impressive! Such creativity and imagination. I'd highly recommend anyone who's into sci-fi to read this free online novel. The story touches on so many fundamental levels, it will leave you speechless. :)

Embarrassing myself

It's been awhile, so I thought I'd post something especially odd. If I may embarrass myself totally, here are three really old, incomplete, and buggy electronic audio tracks in MP3 format. People often say "track" in reference to music which is composed traditionally, but the "tracks" below have a unique distinction in that they are literal tracks - 100% digital - the process of writing them is called "tracking." A very good module tracking program for Win32 today is MadTracker 2.5 or Modplug Tracker. (Winamp contains a special plugin for playing MT2 modules.) :)

These files have never been released, and were originally written around 1993 on a 386-33 in UltraTracker module format. Back in the day, UltraTracker was the premier "module" composition program written specifically for the Gravis Ultrasound soundcard. Winamp will play .ULTs, but its support for them is not 100% correct so some of the effects were mangled here. Most notably, some note cut-offs, micro-volume-ramping, panning, and portamentos were damaged. Being that there is no .ULT converter, we're stuck with the results (unless someone has a DOS 6.22 boot disk laying around so I can fire up UltraTracker. :)

DemiCon T7S - electronic / hard rock / dark
I was throwing around module ideas for a friend and fellow bandmember's BBS called The Seventh Sun. He wanted a .mod to play whenever a user connected, but it never fell through due to hardware limitations of the time. We gave up on the idea and I hacked the song to pieces while toying with a few 16-bit samples. So the track ended up making no sense. Spooky! :dazzled:

Fuhr Aime (Summer Melody) - 6:10 - electronic / classical / funk?
Shortly after highschool I met this girl named Amy Jablon... lets just say it was a very interesting time... kinda like how this track turned out. Four "piano hands" and two strings - it is an amalgamation of epic proportions. You were warned! :red:

Riding Stellar Winds - 8:09 - electronic / bass
This track was supposed to have about a hundred more samples in it, but I ran out of audio-card memory thus it was never completed. Later I switched to 16-bit samples but didn't change the song. It contains sub-20Hz audio frequencies, your teeth will rattle if you play it loud enough! Another very strange track, I'm not liable for any damages... :wink:

Great 'blog', updates? Cam

Here is a rather cool website/blog about cooking. Mike can make a mean recycled carrot cake. Check it out: http://cookingforengineers.com

I'm actually working on some updates to heliosstudios.net (gasp!) Yep, planning to remove the frames and add an electronics section, where a recent project will reside. There are so many to add, this could take awhile... hopefully not 4 months, ack!

I'll give a few spoilers about the current project - it's an all-in-one "PCB station" which incorporates a double-sided photosensitive 12"x9" PCB exposer, a microprocessor-controlled Cupric Chloride etcher, and a photoresist stripper. This is to make high-quality circuit boards "at home." Incorporating this project on heliosstudios.net is possible because I -finally- broke down and bought a digital camera. So photos should be forthcoming througout the entire project as the design is finalized and constructed. It should be interesting.