chaz720.net - journal

July 05, 2001

see i'm leaving. this warehouse frightens me, has me tied up in knots. can't rest for a moment. soom i'm going i'm slippin' slow away, hoping to find something better than i've got inside of here. the warehouse slips away. hey reckless mind, don't throw away your playful beginning. you and i will fumble around in the touches, and be sure to leave all the lights on. so we can see the black cat changing colors, and we can walk under the ladders, and swim as the tide turns you around and around. hey we have found, becoming one in a million, slip into the crowd. this question if found in a gap in the sidewalk. keep all your sights on. see the black cat changing colors, and you can walk under ladders, and swim as the tide choose to turn you, and here is it. life goes on, end of tunnel, tv set, spot in the middle. state fade, statistical bit. and soon i'll fade away, i'll fade away. this i admit, taste so good, hard to believe an end to it. smell touch feel, how could this rhythm ever quit? bags packed on a plane, hopefully to heaven. shut up i'm thinking. i had a clue now it's gone forever. sitting over these bones, you can read in whatever you're needing to. keep all your sights on. yeah man, the black cat changing colors. when it's not the colors that matter, but that they'll all fade away. this i admit. seems so good. hard to believe an end to it. warehouse is bare, nothing at all inside of it. walls and halls have disappeared. my love i love to stay here. my love i love to stay here. in a corner was wondering, if a change could be better than this. and then i worry, maybe things won't be better than they have been here in the warehouse. at the warehouse. how i love to stay here, at the warehouse. every man and woman get alive. that's our blood down there. seems poured from the hands of angels, but trickle into the ground. leaves the warehouse bare and empty. my heart's numbered beat, still echo in this empty room. fear wells in me, but nothing seems enough to defend, so i am going away.

hey, how 'bout that crazy ol' Aggasi and Caprioti... Go USA.

Anyway, Hope you all had a wonderful Fourth of July and I hope that no one got in any trouble with the authorities. I went down to the taste of Chicago on the 3rd with a bunch of my sister's friends to see the fireworks and later went on to a party over at Bill's. Good Times. Yesterday it was a bbq over at Jay's followed by the ritualistic destruction of the world... or rather a small scale model of it, obtained by Sean from Rand McNally. I definately agree with Toby, we need to build little bonfires more often and hang out again, once again, good times.

Well, I learned something interesting the other day, and that is that I shouldn't play Unreal Tournament anymore. I had just gotten my computer for the most part working happily, and I found the CD for Unreal Tournament, a copy of it had come with my new sound card and I'd figured I would install it and just see how it ran on my, for all practical purposes, new system. (a note on that, I feel as though when you format your machine and start over after not having done so in probably around 2 years, and install a different OS, it's like you have a new machine all the sudden.) Well, the installation went swimmingly, and the game started up with the always familiar, often too dark intro which I skipped to get right into the game, clicked options and went to preferen- oh wait it seems my screen has gone blank... So I hit the reset button but my computer fails to restart. So I turn it off and wait and switch it back on... again nothing. So I crack my case off and look at the motherboard's post lights and it appeared to be getting stuck at "early chipset initialization". Which, just so you know, in the computer world is a symptom shared with "getting hit by a truck syndrome". Yeah, that was about a week ago and my computer still doesn't work, prolly ought to do something about that. Well, I ordered a new motherboard for it so, let's all hope that helps, oh and yes fuck epic megagames

Oh, and I don't even want to talk too much about it as I fear I will probably jinx myself out of being able to actually use it, but it looks as though I will finally be able to get broadband at my place of residence. Not somuch for me, but for my sister who will be living here for a year or so, and she really would use it a lot to get music with bearshare or something along those lines. And yeah, when I'm in town I'd use it too. If you don't want to sort through that page, I'll give you a quick sum up

50 bucks a month
5Mbps downstream
256kbps upstream
Uses wireless microwave antennea
equipment is 200 bucks
free installation
fucking availible in my area

Based on the fact that the speed at which the cable and DSL people were rolling out service to new areas was actually slower then the contrary movement of the geotectonic plates, I came to the conclusion that these services will never be available in my area. So the natural solution was to go for some form of wireless communication, which is far less susceptible to progression of the earth's crust. The only two solutions available at press time are two-way satellite and microwave. So I was comparing the two and found that microwave was better in essentially every way imaginable, and it wasn't even really a choice. Satellite's upstream is rediculously slow, and the latency of the signal is, in a best-case scenario, half a second on top of any ground-line latency, which is deplorable for gaming. Largely due to the fact that the signal travels about 92,000 miles everytime you send it out. Comparitvely, the signal that my connection will be using will be with the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago, or aproximately 34 miles away. And as far as the internet goes, Chicago is wired up like I am on caffine this morning. So once the information gets there it's homefree to wherever it chooses to roam.

So I keep going on and on about adding this, that, or the other to my car to get some added performance out of it (all in all, 30 horses or so.) but as I've said, I think that this is one of those things I'm going to consider doing but never actually get around to. Yes, it would cut a couple seconds off my 0-60 time, and yes, it would make my car more fun to toss around, but then I had to ask myself just one question... do I really want to drive around in a rice-burner? And the answer being, not particularly. The only reason I was considering doing anything is because it would truely make my car unique. It seems trite and un-inspring to me, to take a car and make the 14 millionth modified instance of it, it just loses something after a while I guess. And I think that it would be cooler to explore some new grounds, maybe surprize people rather then just stirring up a round of sighs. And if you have time, I reccomend reading this page. It's basicallt just someone tired of all the honda civic/acura integra hype. The guy there is a little bit extreme in his preachings, but he still raises some good points, worth a minute or two.

July 18, 2001

It's a broke day but everything is okay, I'm up all night but everything is alright. It's a rough week and I don't get enough sleep. It's a long year, pretending I belong here.

little things all going wrong all over the place, nothing much to see, nothing much of a pain, but yet all the things hold a certain ominous feeling. Something is just feeling weird. I cause a tension of sorts. I feel like I'm being punished, and I know what for, but it doesn't feel like the onslaught is going to go away anytime soon, what to do what to do... I feel like I just want to go crawl in a hole for a while, but yet I can't, like I always end up on the spot regardless of what happens. I get tossed back somewhere I'm familiar with, but not very fond of. let's see how long I can stay off the spot, it's just going to take a lot of self control...

July 26, 2001

wow, if you all didn't know better you'd mistake me for an audiophile... I've been spending altogether too much of my efforts on my car stereo. But then, you have to enjoy doing something, and for me maybe it's this. I'm not done yet but as of this afternoon my car looks like this I already have two more amps I'm installing, I just need Bill to obtain some more wires/cables for me to do the rest of the installing. I think I had better calm down before I go broke :P

Work has been nothing but awesome all summer. I've gotten to go to baseball games, Great America, even paid holidays, it's crazy. I've been keeping pretty busy so this journal has taken a back seat, just touching bases with the site again, only around three weeks until I go back to school and I get to have fun like mad again.

You know I've noticed I always seem pretty content with where I am, but something ahead always seems to draw my attention to it, be it going back to school, getting off for summer break to work at Motorola, or visiting somewhere. I'm not sure if that has to do with me not liking where I am, or just preferring change most of the time. I suppose it could be either or both, well, anyway, back to life.

July 31, 2001

Yesterday Hans, Rosie, and I went water skiing again with my boss John. Once again it was a lot of fun, and I come back with a few points of advice for anyone who would like to go water skiing and/or wake boarding.

Keep your knees bent and your arms straight. This is one of those pieces of advice you will agree to, and then ignore time and again, like keeping your head down in golf.
If for some reason you feel like you are going to fall while wake boarding, for god sakes fall backwards not forwards.
Above all else, do not eat burger king within 2 days of when you go out or you will suffer a fate worse than death.

Other than that just try to remember to have a good time, and when you cruise past the ladies on your wake board, they will stop to check you out, even if you are vile and unattractive.

Grand Turismo 3 is plaguing us like an uncurable ailment. Something about the game is so addictive, it should have a surgeon general's warning on the side of the box. I'm not sure what it is about the whole fantasy of having gobs and gobs of money to buy/win/race/modify every car you've ever dreamed of with incredible realism... Actually, no, I completely see why we're addicted. I think anyone can appreciate a nice car, hell, even the Pope rides in a caddy. And given the opportunity to race all kinds of real cars gives people a proverbial hardon. So, if you have nothing else to do with large parts of your day, or you find heroin simply to expensive a habit, go grab a copy of GT3, oh and if you don't already have one, a playstation2.

Speaking of playstation 2s... (No good can come of conversations that start like that, just a forwarning). I don't know if I ever mentioned my idea here, but I guess I will now. For a moment or two, I was considering getting an lcd screen that mounted in my dash and retracts into the cd player in an all-too James Bond like fashion. This would allow for the installation of a playstation 2 in my trunk complete with controller cords that went to my center console where the controllers would be stored, all done very descretely. And because the playstation 2 can also play dvds I would have that functionality as well, joy of all things joyous right? Well, I then brought a point to my own attention, and that was that this was going to cost almost 2 grand to pull of, so that I could have a playstation 2 in my car for mostly other people to play. And in the spirit of making sure that I did ont act kindly toward anyone riding in my car, the idea was sacked. So to Hans and the others who were looking forward to playing videogames in my car, tough cookies. However, I would like to make it known that dispite my cancelation of the project, it's progress can once again be jumpstarted with the appropriate application of $2000 to my person. Meanwhile, I have recently focused my efforts on making my car sound better still than it did before. I now have three amplifiers running in my car, so my setup is as follows.

Alpine CD player with hella-great sounding output. and it even has a feature called Ai-Shuttle control (if I want to add a cd changer it's as easy as one cable from the back of my deck to the cd changer)
The front speakers in my car are pioneer 6.75" coaxial speakers that handle around 40W rms and 120 peak, these are driven by an Alpine two-channel amp that can put out about 50W rms and 90 peak (gain turned down to protect the speakers :D) these amps have an 80Hz HPF to prevent bass from getting to those speakers.
The rear speakers are in the exact same configuration as the fronts
The subs are two 12" MTX thunder6000 series woofers that can take about 250-300W rms and 500W peak a piece. These are powered by a Kenwood 600W amplifier that puts about around 200Wx2 rms, that's a rough estimate and depends on things like what voltage my alternator is putting out and things like that, 200 is just a nice clean number.
I have recently re-run all the audio wiring, so now everything between the battery and your ears is high-quality extra low noise monster cable which, by the way, makes an enormous difference in sound quality.

I have all the settings on the amps tuned in such a way that I can turn the volume on my CD player all the way up and it achives a very clean sounding (albeit loud as all fuck) output without any distortion, because that, in my humble opinion, is what car audio is all about, clean sounding output, with respectable frequency coverage and some decent power.

Speaking of completely and laughably out of control car stereos... I was at tweeter the other day and I was giving a hand to this guy, jeff, who was rebuilding his subwoofer box for a competition the following day. His subwoofer system was bordering on insanity. It was well past the realm of listenable music, so far past in fact, that at full volume you could not enter the vehicle because the pressure levels might very well stop your heart. Now, why might someone do something like this to your car? simple, cash prizes and trophies. The same reason anyone gets into competitions. A hobbiest who takes his skill at, say, building subwoofer boxes, and applies it toward winning at showcases. I compare it to building a soap box durby car, or any other craft that has competitions associated with it. Most people argue that these competitions are nothing more than a test to see how much people are willing to spend on their stereos, and that the finished product is in no way practical for use. This, once again in my humble opinion, is as rediculous as saying the same about drag racing. Yes, it does cost money to get started, but there are regulations on the different classes so people are challenged to get the very most out of their equipment, and yes the final product is in no way practical for every day use, but how many top-fuel or funny cars do you see driving around on your way to work? "but Ryan, drag racing is different in that way that I classify things in my head for some unknown reason..." I respect people's choice to categorize things into their own psychological models just as much as the next guy, but you'd be surprized as to how often people try to validate their arguement solely on the basis of "yes you bring up excellent points, but it just seems to me that you are wrong, bye."

My internship at Motorola is drawing to a close this week. It's been a little under three months and I've had a lot of fun being here, working on several different projects like designing and building networks, Research and Development databases, and writing network testing software. More importantly I have a pretty good idea now of what goes on behind the doors of large companies that work on mind-numbingly expansive projects that span several departments, and in the case of the projects I've been working on, continents. All in all, something I would definately do over again, and who knows what next summer will present, right?

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