Portfolio!

I'm only going to be making one post for a portfolio and add stuff to it. Just to save time and space.

My portfolio as I understand it is a collection of work which I worked hard on. Stuff that just stands out etc. My first submition will be a "Job Shadow", follow people around during their work hours, that I followed my mother on. It didn't end will but I had gotten a nice experience walking the offices of "Alaska Billing Services"

The reflection I guess I'll just copy pasta from the report and add on to it.

START REFLECTION!!
The experience I had from 8:30 to 1PM was eventful to say the MOST. A lot of the job shadow consisted of watching my mother work on the computer. 90% of what they do is done on the computer. The only time we were not sitting in the cubicle was then we were scanning documents to be uploaded and cataloged into “Lazerfiche”, their document reference system, which took about an hour and a half.

I had signed a non-disclosure agreement upon entering the offices. A lot of the billing information is medical and it details conditions, injuries, genetics background, all that good stuff. Naturally I scanned over the document pretty thoroughly before signing it, wanted to make sure I wasn't signing something that would allow them to experiment on me with surgical tools. The HR person then proceeded to tell me how revealing any information from the company could put me in jeopardy under a penalization of a court of law.

Multi-Tasking was something that working there required. Once your busy doing one thing your boss hands you something else. Since most of their work is done on the computer its handy that they had a dual monitor system implemented since last year. I wasn't allowed to work on the computers but I was asked and asking several questions at the same time. I consider that multi-tasking. Sure whynot. While some documents were scanned during the process of uploading into the “Lazerfiche” system. I was stamping already scanned documents that were getting ready to be shred.

Day two started out good but ended bad when I complained about the efficiency of one folder for every piece of paper. I'm not going to talk about that though.

Day two of the Job Shadow starts with getting coffee and meeting with manager. Task Management (process of cleaning patient accounts by calling insurance companies and resending claims) Task Management also involves making sure she is caught up with everything. I will watch her do that for an hour. She uses that lame Internet explorer. Today is another Friday. Charges and Refunds on Friday. Team lead, Scott, and her have discussed this Friday only that mom is to do Task Management. She started by logging what she has and doesn't have to do.

The next step was to balance (checking control log to match to the penny for previous day entries.) ITS LIKE BALANCING A CHECKBOOK! She is done with balancing, nothing was out of place that needed to be re-done.

For the next two hours I was helping mom with a miss-hap that had occured with an insurance company not covering the bill. She tells me that she had to call them like 5 times to get it changed but it never happened. That's when we started arguing when I was starting to file stuff. Eh. I was asking the right questions but mom didn't want me to come anymore because she said I made her look bad. But honestly I don't see why. My experience was pleasurable but I will be going with my dad for the next job shadow. Computers are much cooler. :P
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Xbox 360 Cooling Mayhem!

I decided on a very bored day to drill a hole in the side of my case. The hole is a perfect size for a 60mm fan. That worked out as a great idea unfortunately my retardation was present and I didn't unplug the unit during testing for power sources when I could have saved the trouble and looked online for one. There is one (or two depending on your Xbox MB) its a 12v rail you can tap power from without any consequence. Unfortunately things arent as easy as that. As you may or may not know consoles and retail electronic PCB's have a lacker like coating that you need to sand off until you see a shiny spot you can solder. Supposed to prevent oxidisation or some shit. Otherwise you'll be holding the soldering iron on until the part breaks. That was my second mistake. Third mistake which is fucking stupid when I think about it is that both of the heatsinks are grounded to the main board. There wen't my CPU voltage regulator, now the cpu gets to cooking temps rapidy causing 2 red rings. Fourth mistake. Grounded to the wrong fan pin in the back when I could have grounded it to the huge obvious metal casing that prevented static damage. Now only 3v of power go throught instead of 12v that used to. Anyways the fan mod is not at fault. Only my incompetence. I will try again with my third xbox by first UNPLUGGING IT, sand the contacts, solder, and pray.

Second Xbox 360 I got the day after the break down is a jasper unit. I'm not touching that. If the third unit the teacher is giving me is a jasper then oh well because its already got ugly drill holes in it from an un-informed husband that probably thought it was a xenon.
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Xbox 360, Is yours at risk?

Yes the dreaded red ring of death is old news but it could be new news to you if you don't find out quickly. There are 5 board revisions. Xenon, Zephyr, Falcon, Jasper, and Opus. Both Xenon and Zephyr are the ones with the heat issues and are the most likely to get the RRoD. Xenon owners be very weary as they don't have the air duct or extra GPU cooling like the Zephyr does. Both Xenon and Zephyr also utilize the 90nm process which in turn uses more power and conducts more heat. Later when the 360 Elite edition was shipped with the Falcon main board the GPU process was reduced to 65nm resulting in less power usage and less heat conducted. Though my friends 360 Elite broke down long before my Zephyr premium did. Still working premium actually.

The Opus revision is something new that uses nearly 2/3 the power the original Xbox 360 did 2 years ago. The Opus uses both 65nm process on the GPU and CPU unfortunately there is no HDMI support. Not that one is really needed to begin with.

I'll update more information as I go along. Keep in touch.
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The Epidemic of Gears of War.

Gears of War. Yes one of the more intuitive shooters of its time is having issues with something regarding a certificate. If you have gears of war and are having issues playing it on the PC due to "Cannot play with modified executable code". Set your windows date back to before March '09. That is the only fix available for now.
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RV740: The 40nm Wonder

With the battle between ATI and Nvidia at its highest peak in years, both companies are now rushing with producing faster, more efficient, and cheaper cards. Might seem bad for the companies, but good for you: The consumer.

Both companies are now rushing production of new GPUs using the 40nm process. Smaller process size usually always means there is a gain in performance, with a reduction in power requirements. ATI is trying to be the first to release it's 40nm versions late this month, code named the RV740 series. These cards are the Radeon HD 4750 and 4770, and according to early benchmarking results, often tie the Radeon HD 4850 in terms of performance...

The RV740 is indeed a true wonder. Using virtually the same chip as the 4850 and 4870, it performs well, but has had some modifications.

Transistor count on both chips has been reduced from nearly 1 billion to less than 850 million, and shader count has been reduced from 800 to only 640. But to help make up for this, both cards have had their GPU die shrunk from 55nm to 40nm, and have been boosted in clock speed. The smaller die size also reduced production costs.

The result for you? A lean and efficient GPU with roughly the same power as the Radeon HD 4850, but for the small price tag of only $99. You heard me right. $99.

If you take a look at the price of some of the current 4850s, you'll see that this is an incredible value, which has quite a lot of people hyped for its release. Maybe a little too hyped.

Based on the release date leaks by some sources, it's possible that ATI might not have enough of these GPUs produced to meet the demand for the first few weeks, so don't expect to find these cards easy.

So far only specs for the 4770 have been confirmed. It will have a 750MHz core clock, with GDDR5 memory clocked at 800MHz (3200MHz effective) on a 128-bit bus. Now, you might be thinking that the 128 bus will cripple this card, but that is where the GDDR5 comes into play. This super fast memory is quad pumped, meanining the GDDR5 on the 128-bit bus has the same speed as GDDR3 on a 256-bit bus. 128 bit memory bus is not only cheaper to produce, but uses less energy. This is how the card is able to have such a low price.

What about power requirements? The 4770 is said to have a max power consuption of only 80 watts, compared to the 100+ watts of the 4850. Because the PCI-E bus only offers up to 75 watts for a GPU, it will require a 6-pin power connector for the rest. But don't expect this card to be a power hog. You'll have PLENTY of overclocking headroom.

Now, for some images of the bad boy. The following images are a non-reference cooler design by HIS.



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Vista's Sneaky Shadow.

Many Vista optimisation guides exist but they don't seem to tap the more complex issues that plague the poorly written system. Thankfully Windows 7, which was proven faster than XP, will hopefully be released around this Holiday '09. I've seen my dad use the beta. Pretty cool but since he was using an IDE drive I couldn't really tell.

Vista likes to eat your hard drive. Literally. If you've read Yarhaborts optimization guide HERE you'll cover most of it. Unfortunately the Shadow Copy system help I submitted doesn't shut off when using the Piriform Defraggler. Each time you defrag, the file fragmented is backed up to the system volume information folder. My shadow copy file was using 35GB of my drive. However there is a way to delete or reduce the size for the system volume backup of your drive.

Running as administrator of-course open up cmd prompt by clicking start and typing "cmd" into the search box then just press enter. The prompt should pop up. Now type in without quotes and with spaces.

"vssadmin list shadowstorage".

Give it a few moments and it should show you maximum allocated storage usage. Each time you set the storage usage it will reset to 0 and erase the current backup. Now to set the size of your backup usage or to just disable it type in

"vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=12GB"

You can set the max size to any number you want or even 0 if you want to disable it.
I recommend you resize or refresh before defragging.

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Not Enough Mech in the World.

I've noticed something over the years. There are no retail mech games for the PC available. None that are worth it anyway and no, Exteel is not a mech game. It is not worthy. The last mech sim that I played that was actually worth it was Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries. That was 7 years ago. It is now 2009, c'mon people. That was FASA studios and Microsoft Games when they were still around. Now all the mech sims just plain suck and are only available on the console. Armored Core isn't getting any damn better. In recent days I believe companies should stop making new games and just re-make the old ones over 5 years old. Improve what can be improved and iron out the faults.

Blogging is mainly about whining, ranting, and bitching as well as updates to improve your life. (supposedly)
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