Computers and Art

The saga of the sort of ultimate game computer continues this weekend. It began on Friday evening when the adapter for ATX to EATX was the wrong gender. Liberals are constantly telling us the gender doesn’t matter, but apparently they have been unable to legislate agreement from the engineers as of yet. After the initial shock and dismay, some more time was spent perusing the installation, because according to many net posts, “it ought to work with standard ATX unless dual processors or graphics cards are being used”. It isn’t clear exactly what the problem was, either I somehow had a MB short, OR (and this is more likely) I just did a bonehead thing and plugged the power switch into the wrong pins. I seem to have a pernicious brain problem that if I’m fixated on something like ATX vs EATX and then something doesn’t work as expected, I jump to the conclusion “that must be it”. I suspect that I’m the only person alive that does that.

While it was a bit difficult to string a lot of quality computer time together since I made another round-trip to Wisconsin with the full family this time to visit my Mom. “The End” has been predicted twice in the past two weeks, but somehow, like Bruce Willis in a Die-Hard film, she keeps recovering, and Saturday afternoon she was looking good and seemingly on the road to recovery. We will say our prayers that trend continues.

Speaking of prayers, this our Church brought in “The Jesus Painter” http://www.jesuspainter.com/index.html Mike Lewis. Garrett had seen him at the LCMS national youth gathering in Orlando in front of 35K teens, and was very impressed. He gave a little talk in the Sunday School hour and while he is not soon going to win any contests as a public speaker, the interest level of his story made up for it. He had never painted, but had a background in industrial design, and was currently in art school, when a friend asked him to get on stage and paint a big picture of Christ during a song by the friends Christian Rock band. He decided that was what God wanted him to do, it was a great experience for both him and the audience, and the rest is history. It was a fun service.

Meanwhile, the ultimate computer continued on during spare moments. The Sound Blaster Audiology II card refused all attempts at install, so return attempts will need to be made there. Fortunately the built-in sound on the MB came to life fairly easily. The connection to the 50” Sony LCD has so far been on the disappointing side. It puts S-Video to shame, but at least for text it isn’t that exciting, and there seems to a good deal of difficulty matching settings to formats that will fit on the screen. Lots of progress made though, it is always nice to see it all work together. I’m still hunting down why I’m getting two beeps on boot, and why both the BIOS and Windows XP boots are SLOW (like 5min).

Along with getting in workouts, Scouts, and a few other odds and ends, not a lot of time for reading, but I am very much enjoying “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” by Robert Bork. I owed myself something fun to read after Zinn, and this book has lifted my political spirits, so some serious reporting will soon begin.