The Underground Man

COH, 60fps

I broke down today, my birthday, and bought a new video card for my PC. Only about four weeks after having bought the last (and most unsatisfactory) card.

This one is the GeForce 7600 GS (I like Nvidia products) and I was speculating that my video card, and not my CPU or RAM was holding me back performance-wise on Company of Heroes.

Before the upgrade, at minimum settings, I was getting 6-9 FPS (frames per second) of video. With the new card in place, I'm getting 65 FPS - more than satisfactory. Upping the quality settings to middle-of-the-road, I still get a quite acceptable 20 FPS.

So for the expenditure of about $139, I've saved myself yet again from a large capital outlay for an entirely new system.

Truth be told, if Apple made an iMac with a replaceable video card I would have popped for the $1500-2000 for the top-end iMac. It's got a nice video card in it right now but if you load it up with RAM and high-end Nvidia 7600 GT card you're looking at $2500. Quite bloody pricey.

My system is an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1.25Gb of RAM.

Oh, and Company of Heroes is one of the few games to exceed my expectations. Great buy for $20!

Company of Heroes

I'm really enjoying the new game Company of Heroes. It's been very challenging to get it to play well on my PC (lower-end processor and intermediate video card) but I spent some time tweaking it last night and it sucked up most of the evening.

It reminds me of the old, great boardgame Squad Leader. My best friend and I used to play in my parent's attic when we were in high school and lost quite a few evenings managing squad-level combat in Western Europe. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that designers of CoH had played the game because it resembles it so much.

I managed to hold my own against the Krauts last night for the first time, using a desperate combination of anti-tank defenses (devils teeth), mines, and 57mm anti-tank guns. Being on the defensive seems to require a lot of careful planning or micro-management and defending on two fronts is particularly difficult.

I tried it out on my new 20" widescreen monitor last night ($229 on sale at Outpost.com) and the graphics are admittedly quite lovely. I particularly like the camera controls. I saw the game on one of Fry's cinema displays last week and just had to have it.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for great graphics.

tired of my PC

I'm just getting sick and tired of my PC. It's an Athlon 2400+ CPU that is now somewhat dated. I just downloaded the stupendously huge (1.8gb) demo of Company of Heroes, which I've been trying out on my MacBook Pro (running Windows XP). It (the game) runs quite well on the MacBook but the demo barely moves on my Athlon with 256Mb graphics card (a GeForce FX 5200).

I suspect that replacing the video card may only make a marginal improvement in performance and I'm not about to go out and spend another $150 on a video card.

So I'm beginning to give serious thought to going all-Mac. I think a 20" iMac may be in my near future. It's the only sound choice.

Ferrari in hospitals

I caught an article on the front page of the WSJ yesterday that was just fascinating. It talked about how the "hand-off" of patients from surgical theatre to ward or from ward to ward was not done well at most hospitals - indeed, it was implicated in a lot of post-surgery complications - and how some doctors at an English hospital who were Ferrari fans had received advice from Ferrari on how to improve the process.

Very interesting article and some principles that could be used in a lot of our work environments. I'm a firm believer in standardizing roles as much as possible so that an organization can grow and staff know exactly what they are doing on a given day.

More time seems to be wasted with people either working on the wrong project or doing work in the wrong order. I strongly recommend The E-Myth Revisited for a well-written explanation of how to optimize any start-up business.

I'm running what amounts to a startup group in my agency right now and find myself going back to these principles in an attempt to build a sound infrastructure for growth.

Sirius, part deux

Well, fed up with the FM transmitter, I stopped at Radio Shaq last night and picked up a tape adapter - allowing me to feed the satellite audio directly into the Infiniti head unit.

Reception problem solved. Further reading showed that the FCC had required Sirius to lower the broadcast power of their in-car add-on units. Thus rendering them quite useless in a metro area.

Of course, now I have a wiring nightmare of antenna lead, power lead, and audio lead to route somewhere and conceal to make it neat but at least I was able to listen to the Beeb in the evening and morning commutes.

If life wasn't so busy, I would actually enjoy the challenge of ripping into the car stereo to integrate this properly. As it is, I'll just have to find the time and/or have a professional installer help once I come up with a nice solution.

Sirius - I'm not sure

I'm really not sure about this satellite radio gig. I'm living in a major metropolitan area and the best that Sirius had to offer is a unit which broadcasts on an unused FM frequency. Unfortunately, there are just about no unused frequencies in the Baltimore/Washington area.

So I got a broadcast filled with terrible static as I drove by car about the city yesterday. So bad that if I cannot fix it by the time I leave on Thanksgiving vacation, I'm going to return the unit and get my money back.

It would seem the only practical way to make this work is to crack the console and use an audio input on my stereo head unit rather than an FM frequency. That, of course, is major work on my car as it was not designed for the addition of other components. There isn't an audio-in jack and I'm not looking forward to doing the wiring work myself.

But there is no guarantee it will work even if I get it properly wired. Very frustrating.

I was so looking forward to listening to the BBC and the CBC on my commutes.

love and hate..

I definitely have a love/hate thing going on with my PC. On the love side, it's a 2500+ Athlon that I built from scratch myself and have tuned on and off for the last year. A new game, as frequently happens, has occasioned my updating certain components.

In the last couple of weeks I've added a new hard drive (provided free by my uncle the philanthropist), a new video card and a new CD-RW writer. I dug an old Plextor PX-708UF DVD burner out of storage and now it does most everything I want it to do.

But advancing in "Rise of Legends" the screen gets pretty busy and the complexity of the number of units being managed seems to challenger the process or video card somewhat. Hence the upgrade of the video card to something with 256Mb of RAM.

Mucking about with the memory, I realized it was only running at 266Mhz. Now, it's 400Mhz DDR ram so something was obviously quite wrong. Turns out that while my Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro motherboard has four slots, it can only manage three of them effectively. By fully populating all four slots I inadvertently lowered the memory speed. Pulling a DIMM increased my memory to the full 400Mhz.

Of course, to have as much RAM as I want, I now have to go out and buy a 1Gb stick.

The way I found out the cause? Cruising the FAQ at the Gigabyte Web site. Truly obscure.

Game runs much better with the 50% increase in memory speed. I am constantly reminded of why I love Macs - now if only I could play this game on my Mac.

Spooks

A good friend at work brought back to mind the BBC series, Spooks. Called MI-5 here in the 'States, it's a compelling series on the activities of the counter-terrorist arm of British Intelligence.

Very smart scripts, excellent acting, complex moral choices. I'm Netflixing Season 3 and I've just acquired Season 4. Season 5 is in progress right now but not out on DVD.

Let me recommend it to all.

Rummy is history..

Rumsfeld is history and I doubt very much that history will judge him kindly.

I've felt all along that he was right in trying to redirect the make-up of the US armed forces to one that used smaller, more mobile forces (aka special forces). That is necessary for the US to compete on the battlefields where the wars of this century will be fought.

However his inflexibility in Iraq, his inability to correct his mistakes, and his arrogance toward those who understood the problem better than he, have led to the US being embroiled in a war it cannot win (in Iraq at least) against an enemy that cannot be defeated in open battle. He thought he knew better than Bush I and James Baker (his Secretary of State) who made the then very-unpopular decision not to go into Iraq and remove Saddam.

I confess I was quite wrong at the time. I thought, as many did, that they should have removed Saddam. Time has proved them right and me wrong. It would have been a terrible mistake then and it has proved so now.

Withdraw to Kurdistan and southern Iraq and let the Sunnis kill each other. Fortify Kurdistan and do a deal with the Turks to push a pipeline west to the Med.

You get your oil, a defensible border, and stop your young men and women dying pointlessly. At this point, there doesn't seem to be any alternative and it's better to just accept it than waste time, lives and money pursuing a goal that cannot be achieved.

Let's hope a Democratically-controlled Congress has the balls to make it happen.

Gmail on phones

I've been using Gmail on my phone (a Samsung A-920) for the last few months and it's been really painful. The Web browser on the Samsung is kind of crappy and while I can read my email it was a real chore.

But now Google has done it again. They have produced a nice usable application (Java-based) that one can download onto one's phone and it is a much improved experience over navigating there with a dedicated phone browser.

Try it out at: http://gmail.com/app (navigate there with your phone browser).

It seemed to instantly identify my phone when I downloaded it so I'm pretty happy. Now if I can just find an app to let me customize the functions of my phone's buttons, I'll be really happy.

Oh, Canada..

I just got back from Canada this evening. It was a very emotional and a very good trip. I went to my Uncle Joe's funeral in Ottawa, by way of Chicago and I got to reacquaint myself with a good dozen of my cousins whom I hadn't seen in 35-odd years.

All are doing well, and there was much exchanging of telephone numbers and email. My uncle had a very nice funeral and my cousin Anne-Marie delivered a lovely eulogy.

I've got to say that Canada has come a very long way since I emigrated. When I left in the mid-70s the whole Francophone movement was just starting. It was mandated by the federal government that all documents produced by the government would be bilingual. Bilingual education (French and English) was already mandatory in the schools but I think honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Now, however, Ottawa at least seems completely integrated. As I walked the streets of the downtown, I heard French spoken as often as English. People seemed to use it interchangeably in stores and my hotel. Just great.

Canada is also very, very clean. A bit of relief after seeing the refuse on the side of American highways. Little things mark it as almost having more European sensibilities than American and I'm looking forward to going back next spring.

If time and the winds permit, I'll be back to visit my cousins against for Easter.

Joe Fielding, RIP

My uncle Joe just passed away last weekend. It's upset me pretty deeply, as he was a big figure in my early life.

Here is his obituary from the Ottawa Citizen.

FIELDING, Colonel Joseph E.
March 11, 1930 - October 27, 2006
Peacefully on October 27th, at the age of 76. Beloved husband of Olga Mary (nee Budzey). Cherished father of Anna Marie and husband Peter, J. Gregory and wife Michelle, and Robert John. Loving grandfather of Danielle, Christopher, Julian and Luke. Predeceased by his parents Clement and Myrtle, his sisters Dorothy and Helen, and his brothers Charles, Edward and John. Survived by his brothers Richard and Clement, and his sister Sheila. Joe was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica and came to Canada in 1951. His passion for aircraft and flying took him to the R.C.A.F. where he became a flight instructor and a CF-100 fighter pilot. He left the air force briefly to pursue an engineering degree, achieving a Science Masters' Degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from M.I.T. in 1963. Highlights in his career included the CF-5 program, C.D.L.S., Washington, DC, B.T.S.O., Comox AFB, and the CF-18 program. He will be missed by his wife and family, as well as his extended family including many nieces and nephews and their children who have shown special love for their "Uncle Joe". Family and friends may pay respects at the Garden Chapel of the Tubman Funeral Homes at 3440 Richmond Road (between Bayshore and Baseline) on Friday, November 3rd between 2 and 4 p.m. and between 7 and 9 p.m. A funeral mass will be held at St. Martin de Porres Church, 3891 Richmond Road in Bells Corners on Saturday, November 4th, at 10 a.m. Private family interment at Beechwood Military Cemetery will be held at a later date.

I'm going up for the funeral. Given that side of my family is Irish, I'm hoping that we have a nice wake for a kind and warm man.