demodulated

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. My WoW-loving buddy has somehow talked me into trying the full game.

He sent me another trial and I bought a 60-day playcard ($30 at Walmart). I tried to upgrade the trial with the playcard but, despite my friend’s assertions, it did in fact require the purchase of the retail box. So I shelled out another $35 for a product key and 1 more month. I’ve got until November to give it a go.

Luckily setup was a lot easier this time around. Blizzard had generosly updated the 2.5GB installer on Filefront with the next-to-latest 1.11.1 patch. My friend sent me a link to directly download all the patches so I didn’t bother reconfiguring my router for the bittorrent updater, and I blocked the behind-the-scenes P2P uploader that tried to sneak past me. I downloaded and installed the 5MB 1.11.2 patch very quickly and was up and running in record time!

So far no foul-ups in about 6 hours of play. I honestly do like this game so I hope technical difficulties don’t stand in my way this time. I’m now a paying customer (ugh) so I won’t be keeping my vocalizations to myself anymore!

~~UPDATE~~

I see in my logs that a surprisingly large number of people find my blog by searching Google for “WoW trial”. Surprisingly I’m currently the top listing on page 2 (#11) for this query. Mine is pretty much the only evaluative page for this query so I’m glad to have the opportunity to give people a little reality in their search for information on this game.

Listening to the old Hullabaloo mixes (especially Ruffneck’s oldskool set from Hulla 3! WOW) have gotten me all antsy in the pantsy for hardcore techno! So I’ve posted a scan of my copy of Happy 2 B Hardcore, signed by the DJ Anabolic Frolic who organized the Hullabaloo parties. I brought the CD to one of his parties and finally tracked him down by 6am. He was glad to oblige, but was surprised when I pulled out a fat Sharpie pen. It should have been confiscated at the door!

And just for kicks (and plugs) here’s a link to a happy hardcore DJ set I mixed a couple of years ago. I’m nowhere near as talented as the world famous Hullabaloo residents and special guests but we all have the same motivation!

Spyrochaete - Inappropriately Happy 79:18
128KBPS, 75MB MP3

The Hullabaloo website is giving away MP3 versions of every DJ mix ever recorded at a Hullabaloo rave at a rate of one per week. What is Hullabaloo and why should you care?

I attended my first rave in October of 1996 - Destiny 16 in an abandoned supermarket on Jane street. I instantly fell in love. The place was huge with 2 gigantic “rooms” separated by a curtain, each featuring a stage with a lone DJ behind record decks playing electronic music. In the shells of storefronts were little chillout areas with projectors showing psychedelic animations and vendors selling funky shirts and mixtapes.

Having been to a couple of nightclubs it struck me as very odd to see thousands of people dancing facing the DJ at the front. Nobody was checking eachother out. No slimeball assholes were cruising sluttily clad young women with low self esteem. People were dressed colourfully, were smiling and laughing and carrying on, and sitting down at random to talk with strangers.

But it was the dancers that mesmerised me so. This rolling sea of heads and hands like cilia waving on a hardwood membrane. All in unison.

My friend Joel and I frequented a rave club called The SpacE! at 28 Gunns Road for maybe 100 consecutive Fridays. This little place was the epitome of underground. I adored every square inch of that place. It had a largeish undecorated main room with towering stacks of speakers on either side of a DJ table. A pillar in front of the decks sported a florescent orange sign reminding DJs that “Louder isn’t better, better is better.” A neon-striped hallway led to the second room surrounded by oversoft couches which remained quieter and void of DJs except for on special events.

One such special event was Hullabaloo, a rave featuring a variety of musical styles but primarily highlighting happy hardcore techno. DJ Hixxy was booked that night but supposedly was held up at the airport and could not attend. It didn’t matter. In terms of organization it may have been little more than an ordinary night at The SpacE!, but this thin, intangible sizzling electricity filled the air. A certain breed of raver was drawn to this party for some reason - decent people who didn’t have to know eachother to be happy to see eachother. This was a somewhat foreign concept to me as an 18-year-old dabbling in goth and grunge culture, but it was impossible not to get caught up in the flow. Hardcore, breakbeats, and jungle made my feet move for hours and hours.

In truth it was one of the tamer, less eventful raves I’ve been to, but I’ll never ever forget it.

I braved an inconceivably packed and sweaty bottom floor to see DJ Vinylgroover and MC Ruff at the second Hulla. I reclined against a wall and hogged one of few fans as I watched the enormous and intimidating MC Ruff singing and dancing like an elated 6 year old on his birthday, revving up everyone in the room with every lyric. I couldn’t stand the heat any longer than the span of that one DJ set so I enjoyed the thumpy goodness of the upstairs trance room until the early hours of morning; rectangular sunbeams sweeping slowly over a never-resting crowd.

The third Hulla is the scene of one of the most beautiful moments of my life. I’d been enjoying the night very much and was walking through a wide hall on the way to another room for another adventure when a many-necklaced girl stopped me, smiling. “Would you like a bracelet?” she trilled happily. I asked “How much?” “Nothing! Please have this!” She slipped a thick wooden bead bracelet over my wrist, gazed softly deep into my eyes, planting flowers in my brain with her pupils, and skipped away to give a present to someone else. I stood there for about 30 seconds drinking in the enormity of her action. It would change me forever. I gave the bracelet away to a friend a year later but I kept a few beads to remind me of the goodness of giving. That single act by a stranger saved my life time and again in my darkest hours when I had little faith in the world.

I met my friend Max at Hullabaloo 4 at The Warehouse. I also met my friend Ebineezer Goode that night. Max and I are still friends after these 9-odd years. I’m seeing him this weekend. Our chance meeting was so infinitesimally unlikely and we’ve remained in touch all this time. Mind boggling.

I met my very good friend Jules at another Hulla (7?). I was getting antsy sitting in one of few couches for hours (once you’re lucky enough to get one you guard it with your life) and my attention was wandering from my friends. Near me sat Jules, a lovely girl a bit older than me, who was bummed out because she couldn’t her friend she came with. We chatted and chatted and chatted, finally exchanging numbers. She’s now one of my best friends and we’ll be chums forever. Another insanely unlikely meeting - if her friend hadn’t gotten lost we’d both just be specks in the crowd. The power of the unlikely.

And that’s the significance of Hullabaloo. A Hulla-day was a holiday. I’d think of little else in the closing weeks before a party. I’d bring notebooks for my new friends to sign and stickers to put in theirs. I’d make copies of my favourite tapes and hand them to strangers. I’d buy people water, help friends find lost mates, and I’d be helped by others more times than I can count.

The “real time” of these 10-hour marathons was so tangible you could cut it with a knife. Sometimes I’d find a night dragging on, sometimes I’d blink and it would be over, and by the end of the night my head would be swimming with all the fun and people and activities and music and all-round pleasantness I’d enjoyed that whole night.

The drive home was always a quiet and intraspective conclusion. Toronto sleeps Sunday mornings and on my way home from a Hulla party the city was mine. I’d drive right on the speed limit just to prolong the silent stillness of the otherwise bustling metropolis. I’d think up poetry, I’d mentally adlib with the music I was listening to on my car stereo, I’d plan the rest of my week… the 30 minutes it took me to get home from Hulla parties were probably the most productive for years.

I attended the first 17 consecutive Hullas, and one or two after that. In the end there would be 41 Hullabaloo raves. I outgrew what the scene had become but I’ll never outgrow its legacy. I truly feel powerful knowing I was part of something so underground yet so important. Raving was a movement, but an apolitical movement. We did it because we were free to, and we clung to that freedom with our lives. We really accomplished something by accomplishing nothing.

And so I am ecstatic that DJ Anabolic Frolic, world famous hardcore DJ and Hullabaloo founder, is releasing his huge archive of Hullabaloo mixtapes one week at a time. For a look into the inner workings of my demodulator, be sure to check the site from time to time.

I am very proud to say that I now have the fastest computer I’ve ever seen!! Cheeses n’ rice, it’s blazing fast!

I took out and reinstalled my motherboard with a few extra stand-off screws just to keep it nice and snug in the case, and I plugged in all the leads from the case. I had a little scare with the CPU fan input because the wire had 3 plugs but there were 4 pins on the motherboard, but the white plastic support fit the 3-hole wire just fine. The power coupler fit great and gave just enough extra slack that I could comfortably wrap the main power cable around the others which helped keep them all out of the way of airflow. The cables look really well shielded but I hope this method doesn’t result in noisey attenuation.

I installed the back USB plate and connected the one on the front of my case as well as the firewire port. The box says the motherboard supports 10 USB ports but I don’t know where the last 2 are. There are 4 on the back of the motherboard, 2 on the expansion back plate, and 2 on the front of my case. I used up all the USB plugs as far as I could see. Oh well. I only have 3 USB devices so I wont’ nitpick. Plus I have 2 firewire ports which is 2 more than I’ll ever use.

The video card went in easily enough, though I’m not crazy about the little rubber doodad that replcaces the plastic snap on AGP boards to keep the card in place. I suppose that’s overkill anyway. I plugged *2* molex HDD power leads into the custom condenser cable and slid that into the card. Easy as pie.

I couldn’t find any back plates for the case so I just stuck my 2 spare sound cards in again and later disabled them in the OS. I don’t like using PCI slots for no reason so I’ll yank ‘em when I find those back plates.

So before closing ‘er up I put ‘er into position and plugged in the keyboard, mouse, monitor (plus DVI to VGA adaptor), and sound into the onboard sound card and turned it on. The symphony of smooth rolling, quiet spinning raw power filled my ears, followed by a single BEEP that reassured me I’d done the most important stuff right! Huzzah!! All the fans were spinning

I immediately checked out the BIOS to check out the CPU temperature and was relieved to find it manageable - around 45 celcius which is average in the BIOS since the CPU and fan run at 100% there. My CPU detected just fine, RAM timings looked right, all my drives showed up, and I needed very little customization before declaring the job a success!

However, I noticed that the power and HDD lights on the front of my case weren’t coming on. I had installed the backwards… odd since the labels on the plugs were facing the same way as all the others. So I turned it off, made a couple of adjustments, closed it up, and plugged it all in for the real test! The lights worked!

Just for fun I tried booting my old copy of XP. Instant blue screen. Oh well. I’d made ample backups for just such an occasion. I was surprised to find my old installation working fine when I upgraded from Athlon XP to Athlon 64, but I guess 64 to X2 is just too much of a leap.

Windows installed in about 20 minutes despite its overstated estimate. Of course since most of my hardware was onboard it wasn’t able to detect sound, network, USB2.0, and other stuff, so I guess that must have sped things up a tad. I rebooted, made a user account, and was ready to rock!

Oh yeah, and I didn’t need any special driver disks to get Windows setup to find my SATA HDD this time! I needed to burn a custom image with nLite on my socket 754 mobo, but PC Village assured me this was the fault of the mobo, not the OS, and it looks like they were right! One fewer headache is always nice.

I booted into Windows and everything looked fine until I tried my old DVDRW drive. No worky. I’d put in a disk, it would spin up, and the whole machine would freeze. Very odd since the CDRW was working just fine - I’d installed Windows off of it. I tried a few reboots before and after installing the Nforce chipset drivers but no joy. I opened up the machine and unplugged the CDRW from power and IDE and the DVDRW worked fine. Maybe it’s my 380w power supply struggling, or maybe Asus doesn’t really take IDE seriously anymore. Regardless, I can live with one optical drive. That leaves one spare for when I rebuild my 64!

Drivers drivers drivers, reboot reboot reboot. Very boring but I made a resolution long ago to take Windows seriously when it says it needs to reboot, so I do so at my earliest opportunity. All the onboard devices including network worked just fine, and so did my video card. So far everything was going relatively smoothly!

Windows informed me I had 30 days to activate so I clicked the icon, clicked a Next or two, and clicked finished. Phew! I’d expected the worst after my previous ordeal!

Windows Update announced about 50 updates so I downloaded and installed those while putting on Firefox and Gaim. Gaim has a really clunky and annoying interface and it took me a really long time to get it back the way it ought to be.

I had used the Firefox Extension Backup Extension to archive my bookmarks, extensions, history, cookies, and passwords before formatting. FEBE is an extension itself so Firefox must be running in order to use it, but it complained that I couldn’t restore preferences to the current profile so I had to do some research on how to do so. It involved a commandline command which was really annoying. However, I made a profile and logged in, ran FEBE, changed back to the default profile and deleted the spare one, and presto!! Firefox was 99% as I had left it! It even remembered previously clicked links! The only inconsistency is that it forgot which extensions I’d disabled so I just deleted those two.

Windows Update completed and I rebooted. Boot took slightly longer but the updates caused no problems. But then I was presented the message I’d been dreading - “Your hardware has changed significantly since you last installed Windows XP. You have 3 days to activate your software.” Didn’t I just do that?!?!

And of course it didn’t work. And now I only have a cell phone and no land line. Cheapskate that I am, I installed Skype and guessed my password after many, many tries. I plugged in the fancy microphone that came with the motherboard and a message popped up onscreen asking what I’d just plugged into the grey plug (NEAT!!!). I chose “microphone” from the list and it informed me that I’d chosen the wrong plug, then showed an animation smoothly illustrating the relative position of the pink plug I should have used! Super cool! I fixed it up, made some volume adjustments, and Skype worked like a charm! I sat the well designed microphone atop my LCD monitor and called Microsoft.

Thank goodness, dialing numbers on the keypad worked in lieu of slowly dictating the 48-digit installation key. Just like my last ordeal, this key was refused and I was connected to an Indian MS rep (she spoke much better and was more chipper than the last woman I spoke with). She asked for the first 2 groups of numbers, asked if this was my first time installing the software, and asked why I was reinstalling. Highly annoying. She dictated another 48-digit code which worked fine and thanked me for calling. Yeah, I’ll speak with you again next year babe.

And that was about the end of my woes! I ran 3DMark06 and was blown away!!! I could never imagine such graphics as anything other than a slideshow but I was getting between 10 and 24 FPS on this computer humbling app! The detail was so crisp and the effects were very dramatic. My CPU scored 1780 which is about double my previous CPU score, and the GPU scored 1920 which is nearly 10 times my old video score!!

I installed a bunch of games and each one looked more amazing than the last. FEAR is quie detailed and the quick frame rate makes it easy enough to play without relying solely on bullet time. Quake 4 is a brainless and idiotic game but it shore does look purdy. Half Life 2: Episode One with AA and HDR is exceptionally quick and very very sharp. Every game ran at 100% full detail with AT LEAST 4x antialiasting at 1280×1024 and gave me an average of 35 FPS!! It’s absolutely breathtaking

I haven’t done any real desktop computing yet so I’m not convinced of the benefits of dual core yet, but the desktop is certainly very snappy and responsive. Icons and windows draw instantly and dragging windows is very smooth. My SATA drive is already feeling dated as it’s clearly the worst bottleneck so maybe I’ll need to do something about that some time in the future. 2 x 10k RPM Raptor RAID 0? Or, since drives are so damn cheap, maybe I should set up a RAID 5 array! Though if I ever add SLI that’ll need a very beefy power supply.

This is the best extravagance I’ve ever indulged in. I’m so happy with this system! Now I’ll have to struggle to find a game to challenge it!

I’ve been neglecting my proud nerdly heritage out of exhaustion and frustration. I tried assembling my new PC on Tuesday after a long day but was stopped cold by a rude awakening - apparently new motherboards require a 24-pin EATX power supply and I only had the old 20-pin ATX type.

I googled EATXPWR (the label on the power plug with too many holes) and quickly read that I was far from the first person to be surprised by this switcheroo at the last second. Yesterday I zipped over to PC Village where the proprietor apologized immediately and told me what I needed before I could even explain why I had returned. He told me that supply is low and demand is high for power supplies right now so he recommended against upgrading to an SLI-certified PSU just now. Luckily, he had a $10 20-pin to 24-pin coupler for me.

If a simple cable that reconfigures the wires to different holes was all I needed, why the fudge did they have to introduce this new plug in the first place?!

So after a late family dinner I was too pooped to build my new baby last night. Hopefully my tentative social plans tonight won’t pan out so that I can set up my new box!

I’m loving the new motherboard just by its looks alone. The copper heatpipe is really snazzy and the heat sink and fins are serious business. The board features 1 IDE plug, 6 SATA plugs plus 1 SATA RAID plug (don”t know what the difference is), 4 onboard and 6 expansion USB plugs, 1 onboard and 1 expansion Firewire plug, dual gigabit ethernet, 8 channel sound with SPDIF, and it’s jet black!

I had a little booboo while installing the CPU heat sink. I HATE installing the damn CPU heat sink and my heart stops pretty much throughout the entire procedure. I fumbled with a little guesswork at first but retreated to the wordless pictograms included in the package. It was a little confusing until I realized the paper illustrated installation instructions for 3 slots, 2 of which were completely irrelevant. I thought I followed the instructions to a tee but I screwed it up some how. I connected the clasp on the side of the plastic actuator arm first, then used a flat screwdriver to slip the other clasp on. The final step is to crank the actuator arm to secure the heat sink in place but the arm wouldn’t turn! It felt like it would snap right off if I applied too much pressure, and the heat sink feels really snug already, so I guess it will have to do. Unfortunately I can’t seem to get the thing off now! I guess I’ll have to destroy the heat sink the next time I upgrade. What a start!

So hopefully tonight’s the night! Benchmarks to beat are 45000 in Aquamark 3, and 220 for the DirectX9 SM3.0 test and 780 for the CPU test in 3DMark 2005. For reference, my old Athlon XP 2200+ scored about 2300 in Aquamark 3. I don’t know if that old benchmark will see any improvement on a dual core CPU but I’m hoping for big things from 3DMark05.