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Have I ever mentioned that my neighbors like to party? Well they do. Loudly.

I can always tell when one of those thrice damned "parties" is about to happen. About three days before the "lady" of the house starts wearing this hideous cheap perfume that you can smell a block away. Three blocks if the wind is right.

I don't know what it is or where she gets it but it's horrible. I have actually had nightmares about drowning in a vat of the vile stuff.

I think this one's going to be particularly bad. I heard rumors that they're hiring a live band (as opposed to a dead one??). The problem with that is that this "event" is going to take place in their back yard not thirty feet from my office and I've got a TON of work to do. All of it has a Monday deadline and these "parties" have been known to go on for three days straight before anybody even comes up for air the first time.

I'm in for one hell of a weekend.

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The adventure of my computer build that started over a month ago has finally come to a close. A successful one at that.

After Hardtsonfire sent his old motherboard, cpu & ram, there was a long delay because the Danish post office chose for some unknown reason to route it through Argentina. To say the least, they handled it "roughly". To be more precise, when it got here the box looked like it had been drop-kicked all the way from Argentina to Arkansas.

In any event, I started looking around for the things I'd need to get a system built around it. Windows 7, hard drive, power supply, graphics card, etc. It was around then that Ronniemac73 contributed an Nvidea GeForce GTX 295, which I learned quickly is a beast of a GPU.

The last few things arrived and I put the system together. As I started I noticed that two of the capacitors on the motherboard near the CPU were broken, probably due to the beating they took in shipping.

I got some replacements and took care of that, then finished the build. When it came time to power it up, the only thing that appeared to work was the CPU fan. I tried various things from resetting the CMOS ram to removing the GTX and putting in an old Diamond S3 PCI video card and re-seating the memory. No matter what I tried it simply would not boot.

Ronniemac73 came to the rescue with the contribution of another motherboard. This one is a ASRock A780GXE/128M complete with an AMD Phenom Quad core CPU.

Put simply, it worked great. I finished the build, connecting the DVD RW drive and the new Western Digital Caviar Green 2 Terabyte drive that I'd found on Amazon.

Because I intend to dual boot the system I got out a Linux Live CD and used it to partition the hard drive. a shade over 1.5TB for Windows 7 Professional 64bit, the rest is set aside for 64bit Kubuntu Linux.

Last night I installed the 64bit version of Java 7 and moved my Minecraft installation over to it. It's fantastic.

Where I once would get 15 to 20 FPS (frames per second) while playing minecraft and maybe 7 to 15 FPS while recording it, I am now getting 60 to 200 FPS while playing and 60 to 150 while recording.

Not only that but I have of course also turned on fancy graphics for the first time and set my render distance to "Far" where I used to use "normal" and "short"

To say the least, the quality of my videos is going up.

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This whole thing with getting the new system working is really getting me into a serious growling mood.

First the motherboard & cpu get routed through Argentina on the way here. Then it takes what seemed like forever to get here from Argentina. I'm talking nearly four weeks!

Then, when I finally got the system put together and fired it up, nothing happened. It turns out that the motherboard is DOA because of the crappy way it was handled in shipping.

Then to top things off one of the local geek wannabe types overheard me talking about it in the Nutjob Hills diner and said that I should just have gotten a new one from pc america. I told him that would have been all well and good but this upgrade is happening on a zero budget. Unlike certain rich kids, I tend to scrape by from day to day.

I guess I had one of "those" looks in my eye when I said that because he gulped nervously and quickly left the diner.

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Bob is of course, still missing. I have not personally had any valid useful clues about this in quite some time. However WFRT News has reported about a *Confirmed* sighting in Oregon.

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That's the introduction that will be used if Lenny gets his way. You see, Lenny has been a long time collector of, you guessed it, Cufflinks.

He's got at least five hundred pairs of cufflinks arranged in glass topped display cases in his house. His collection contains nearly every style of cufflink that you can imagine from basic plain things made out of a wide variety of materials to fancier things that are themed in some way like wrigley field cufflinks and a whole line of baseball related designs as well as football, hockey, soccer and even some that look like golf clubs.

His obsession however goes far beyond collecting every kind he can find. He's decided to petition the Nutjob Hills court to allow him to change his name to "Cuff Link".

Somehow I think they'll make him face a competency test before allowing the change.