Main  - Home - "The Latest" - FAQ - Submissions - Archives - Poll Archives Suggested Links - Slashdot.org - ESPN.COM - CBS SportsLine - Weather Channel - PC Gamer Online - User Friendly - National Geographic Feedback - Contact/E-Mail Prìomh Picks Music Caroline's Spine - "Nothing to Prove" Project 86 - "One Armed Man" Larue - "Reason" Papa Vegas. - "Something Wrong" PC Games Hellfighter NHL 'XX (EA Sports) Half-Life: Opposing Force Starcraft VGA Planets Abandonware Civilization Chuck Yeager's Air Combat One Must Fall: 2097 Emulators NBA Jam TE (ZSNES) TV Shows Beast Wars 2000 NHL Playoffs. Detroit Tiger opponents!

IMPORTANT: Napster Deadline   -- Primis            7-27-00,  11:55PM This requires immediate attention.  If you're an MP3-lover and/or Napster user, Napster will not be in service as of sometime tomorrow (Friday), and by Saturday it definitely will be a smoldering hole in the ground. I seriously suggest you log onto their quickly and get anything you can get your hands on whether you have the space for it or not -- it looks like Napster's going down never to return in its current state.  There will be a lot of other users with this same thought, so it should be a lot easier to find what you need, since hordes and hordes and HORDES will probably be online up until shutdown time. At the time of this post, Napster was hosting about a Gig and a half more MP3's than they normally do at this time of night, and it'll only get more packed as the deadline nears. If you need anything get it now, while you still can.  You've been warned. UPDATE (7-28-00, 2:30PM):  Currently I have not been able to connect to the Napster servers.  Whether this is just another typical Napster-is-not-working dealie, or if it means they've already shut down is unclear.  FYI, I'm working on finding some good Napster alternatives and will pass those along to you soon as possible. UPDATE (7-28-00, 10:30PM):  Earlier this evening Napster avoided the bullet, and will NOT be shut down, at least for now.  Happy beverages for all!  Still, I'd recommend binging on Napster while you still can... A 21st Century Destroyer?   -- Primis            7-25-00,  3:40AM Kinda' older news, but it's obscure enough a lot of people might have missed it. The US Navy (or rather its contracters) is/are in Phase II of the development of  anew hi-tech destroyer, dubbed the DD21 (they're going to apparently reset the number designations, since they're up around DD9xx right now). It's an ugly-looking thing in the artist renderings, and looks more like a submarine than a destroyer, but it's supposed to be radar-invisible and fast.  They're also aiming for it to only require a crew of 95.  That seems unreasonable to me -- I'll be impressed if they can make it require under 200, since most destroyers nowadays have crews from 250-300. One has to wonder just how they plan on dealing with damage control with such a small crew (though I suppose the whole point is to not get damaged in the first place). They plan to run at $750 million a piece or so right now once production is well underway. At any rate, it's an interesting concept.  I'd be curious to hear some feedback from people on it -- it's an interesting(if not evil)-looking craft and if all goes as planned, should probably scare the crap out of every other navy in the world. The Story of Thermopylae   -- Primis            7-22-00,  2:40PM I remember when I was still in school, and the days in history class that we spent covering the story of the ancient Greek battle of Thermopylae during the Second Persian War.  My history teacher, Mr. Gallup, was a true fan of this sort of thing which helped immensly in his presentation of that battle and the war as a whole.  He even made us sit through an old black and white movie of the story called "300 Spartans".  Needless to say, I've been fascinated with Greek warfare and Thermopylae ever since. The other day I happened upon a book entitled Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield.  It's a fairly factual account of the ordeal at Thermopylae with a few other things thrown in for artistic license's sake.  I just finished reading it last night and I don't hesitate to say it is one of the best books I've ever read. The story never lags, and goes to great pains and details about things which quite frankly make it all come alive. I honestly never wanted this book to end, the story was that good.  And that is the mark of a good book and story, to grab you to the point where you're kicking and screaming because the story is over, and you're still wanting more.  I knew it had to end eventually, and even as I could see the pages towards the end begin to thin out I held out hope that somehow the story would continue... The book is also educational -- you can't read the through the book and not end up learning a whole slew of new Greek words and phrases, as well as a better detailed understanding of Greek phalynx warfare, Spartan culture, and Thermopylae as a whole. Go out and buy this book now.  Especially if you're a fan of such things, but even if you aren't you still should read it.  It might be a bit much for some, at 440 pages, but it wasn't nearly enough for me. My Favorite Subject... Me!   -- Primis            7-20-00,  11:40PM We all have probably gotten bored online at some point and done a search for our own name or online aliases, just for the heck of it.  I admittedly do it every once and a while just to freak myself out or look at stuff and go "Oh yeah, I remember that!". Well, a lot more people have beeing doing such searches lately by the looks of things.  Enough at least to inspire a company to launch a new search engine called EgoSurf.  Type in your name and prepare to be surprised.  It seems to work better on odd and unusual names (like my own), and if you happen to have a rather common name you might have a tough time finding something actually pertaining to yourself, but it's all in good fun.  At least for now. GA5AX / K6-2 550 Solutions -- Part Two   -- Primis            7-20-00,  11:25PM Well I got a chance to play around with the setup a bit, and after much persuasion from a friend (thanks a ton, Dave) I tried a new quality heatsink -- a funky-looking circular dealie that looks like pure evil, and was pure evil to try to get in. OK, show of hands, how many of you have a custom-ground heatsink?  It had to be ground on one side in order to get it in around a couple other nuisances on the motherboard.  It also wasn't exactly made for my type of processor but, oh well, we got it in anyhow. Also got some compound between it and the processor which should have helped.  In theory then it should work beautifully with all this.  In reality I was hoping it would at least let me bump it up to 500mHz, if nothing else. So how'd it turn out?  It just happens that it now runs perfectly at the full 550mHz.  I have yet to see it with a hiccup.  In fact, it runs cool enough that I'm maybe even toying with the idea of seeing if it can't -- *gasp* -- handle an overclock. So my official position on the whole deal is that the if you're experiencing this overheating problem, a good quality heatsink/fan combo can fix it. Go out and spend $20 or $30 or so on a quality heatsink and it seems to run fine. The end result is a beautiful thing -- I'm now running a K6-2 550mHz with 196 MB of RAM, a 16MB Diamond Viper 3D Card, and a 15 Gig hard drive.  It's not the most formidable setup in the world, but it's not anything to sneeze at either, and I'm extremely happy to finally have something decent after all this time (remember that it was just months ago that I was still running a 120mHz machine with 48 MB of RAM and no 3D card). Hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll have a report on if I attempt to overclock it, and how successful it was, if at all.  I'm very tempted to give it a go now that it's running so cool.  Also, because this motherboard is supposed to be good for overclocking (we'll see).  I'll post what I can get it up to as far as still being stable and any other suggestion that might cross my mind.  Part Three lives!  ( I in no way endorse or recommend overclocking -- do so only at your own risk). GA5AX / K6-2 550 Solutions -- Part One   -- Primis            7-19-00,  3:25PM Wow.  This is turning into /. or a newsgroup or something.  Hopefully this will be of use to someone though But seriously.  I recently acquired a K6-2 550mHz processor for my system and was looking forward to plopping it into my GA5AX (rev 4.1) motherboard -- a nice upgrade from the Pentium 233 I've been running for a couple months now.  One problem, after changing the mobo settings to run the 550 (100mHz, 5.5 multiplier, 2.3 core voltage) and... wheee.  Fun.  It locks up, GPF's, and won't even boot half the time. After a week of poking around and trial-and-error, I've found at least a temporary solution, as well as the cause to this common problem. The cause is apparently heat-related -- for whatever reason the K6-2 550's don't react to most heatsinks like they should when running on a GA5AX and thus run way hotter than they should.  I've seen some solutions for this such as that gel-substance between the heatsink and chip, tons-o-fans, and the like. (I'm going to go bug a friend tonight and see if he has any of that gel). However, the temporary solution for now for me is to knock the board speed to 95mHz instead of 100, and the clock multiplier to 5 instead of 5.5.  The end result has it running (stable) at between 475 and 500 mHz or somewhere around there. This seems to be a common solution -- run the processor at or under 500 in a variety of ways, or else get an uber-cooling method and go ahead and run it at 533 or even 550.. However, I plan on getting the sucker to run at 500, if not 533 or 550, so I'll post Part Two of this whole affair after I get some more time to fool around with the setup and to try some extra cooling methods (probably tomorrow). For more help/info on this, I'd reccomend some reading at http://www.surfusa.com/wwwboard/wwwboard.html.   The posts regarding this whole GA5AX's inability to hit 500 or above with the K6-2's are frequent, and I've gleaned a lot of helpful and useful info out of there. First Wave   -- Primis            7-17-00,  12:20AM While some people argue that he was a fraud and full of it, the fact is S L A Marshall was probably indeed accurate in his assertion that most US soldiers on the battlefield before the 1960's never fired their weapons once while in combat, due to a variety of commonsense, and psychological reasons (at any rate the US Army improved their rifle range training and soldiers have been more effective ever since).  He also set the standard for post-combat debriefing for historians, so as to get a blow-by-blow account of a battle by interviewing each soldier and what they saw, as soon as humanly possible while their memories were fresh. One of my favorites of his accounts pertains to the landing at Normandy, particularly the first wave of landings at Omaha Beach. It's rather grim, and depressing, but it's also an interesting read for anyone who's curious as to just how exactly things went down there. It's Back   -- Primis            7-6-00,  4:20AM God bless Charlie.  He brought back his site 33AD.com and it's even better than before. Not only is it the only place I know of to get legal MP3's from Jesiah (formerly known as Jesshiah), but there's plenty of other great stuff there as well.  I know Charlie's put a lot of work into the site so if you check it out and like the legal MP3's and other stuff available, toss an email his way and let him know.  I know he'd appreciate it.  And tell him I sent you to his site, because I think he still hasn't quite pieced together exactly who I am yet.  ;-) Eeep! I give!   -- Primis            7-6-00,  4:15AM For good measure and as a peace offering, I also finally updated and changed the poll.  The results of the last one (which was an absolute Holy War<TM> apparently) are in the Poll Archives.  The new poll is of actual use and I hope to make this site somehow better for you by sing the poll data (how about UPDATING it once and a while, genius?!). The Best of IRC v2.0 Released   -- Primis            7-6-00,  3:45AM As of July 4th, version 2.0 of my popular The Best of IRC document has been released. "What's the BoIRC?" you ask?  Silly rabbit, the BoIRC is a compilation of some of the funniest, most interesting quotes I've had the pleasure of logging over the last 4 years.  It began as a personal collection just for giggles, and it caught on with a bunch of DALnet types.  v2.0 marks the document's first birthday (which is why I finally moved on to v2.0 from v1.7).  If you're interested in beholding the BoIRC in all its glory, contact me and I'll get you a copy, and I may eventually put it up for download here on the site. "God Bless the Infantry!"   -- Primis            7-6-00,  3:35AM Yeah I have a new/old addiction -- I'm back to playing Chain of Command on 2AM's gaming service.  Chain of Command is an online-only squad-based World War II combat game, and it's cool.  Warning: If you follow the link and download the stuff you'll probably become addicted too, such as seems to have occurred on IRC.  It's an incredibly-frustrating game in a way and that's what keeps you coming back.  Right now I'm solidly in the rank of Sgt and am one of the more consistent players in the game. Go, download, and have fun.  Sgt's orders. "Freebird! Play Freebird!..."   -- Primis            7-5-00,  1:15PM A bunch of people have been asking me how the uber-concert in Hillsdale went a couple weekends ago.  Truth be told it was an excellent affair that nature tried itssbest to ruin.  It rained off and on for about 3/4 of the festival, and then absolutely poured during the final band's (Bleach's) set, cutting their set criminally-short. All in all it was a most-excellent show though.  The surprise act of the festival was probably the ska band Two Jakes Short from Grand Rapids, who put on, in my humble opinion, a great and energetic set.  And I admittedly don't even really like ska that much, but they were that good.  Sanctus Real was really good as well, and I hope they find a new bassist soon to replace the guy who did his last performance with them at the festival.  Fresh Brewed was good except their vocalist was having an off-day or something, I think, and Muffle was a good show-starter to set the tone. Shaded Red put on a good show through a constant drizzle, and covered a lot of styles and such.  Bleach's set was really good except it was cut so short by the pouring rain. That and they didn't get to play my favorite song "The Perfect Family", but they were solid. All in all though, considering the crowd and the not-so-pleasant condition the crowd sat through (and the fact that I severely sunburned my legs to the point of getting sick), it was an excellent festival and I hope someone finds a way to keep it as an annual event. DISCLAIMER:  All materials above and contained herein are the property of the owner and individual contributors, and may not be reproduced without permission of the afformentioned. Copyright 1999, 2000.  The SportSlam Online™ is copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000.  Neither Yahoo! nor Geocities hold any rights whatsoever to the contained material. This site is optimized for no browser in particular -- we're not that ambitious.