I got into the World of Warcraft Stress Test through some miracle of association. (Thanks Vance!) When I joined the game for the first time, I was hit with information overload. Vance joined me on this first romp through the Teldrassil, the starting town for the Night Elves, and he graciously helped bring me up to speed. I recall that it took a minute or two just to figure out how to send a message on the right channel (private vs. party vs. world). My initial impression is that the interface is not as immediately intuitive as I would like. Left-click selects things; right-click interacts with things; but movement is done through the keyboard, much like a shooter. It’s not bad so much as it’s different, at least from anything Blizzard has previously done. I felt like I was being dragged along through much of this initial experience. It wasn’t until later, when I had time on my own to experiment, that I began to feel comfortable in the game.
My replacement memory modules arrived from Mushkin today, after taking an unwanted detour to Dothan. I was surpised to find two 512 MB modules in the package after I had reported only one as defective. I won’t complain though because the new memory is Mushkin’s “Level One” PC3500, rated for operation at the faster 2-3-3 timings instead of 2.5-4-4 like the old modules. I did initially run into some issues properly configuring the memory settings in the BIOS and I was further disheartened when MemTest86 produced errors. After being placed on hold for a little too long, I got a helpful tech at Mushkin who recommended that I bump the memory voltage up to 2.8 V—my IC7-G defaults to 2.6 V. Sure enough, this did the trick and all errors disappeared. Now I’m cruising along happily on a Gig of RAM again.
Titus and I headed back down town for our second and final day of DragonCon. Klingons and fairies were nowhere to be seen as you could feel the conference winding down. Even so, I felt like the day’s events proved to be among my best experiences of the *Con.
- 10:00 AM–11:30 AM, Inside Star Wars Characters [MOTF]
- 11:30 AM–1:00 PM, Famous Unsolved Codes [EFF]
- 1:00 PM–2:30 PM, Garrett Wang, Voyager’s Harry Kim [TREK]
All of the events that we attended were great, but I was particularly impressed with the presentation of Famous Unsolved Codes by Elonka Dunin and the witty ramblings and recollections of Garrett Wang on the Trek programming track. I’m uninitiated in the art of code cryptography, but Ms. Dunin presented in such a way that made the topic engaging and accessible.
Well, I’ve attended my first DragonCon and I can only say that I wish I had checked it out sooner. It’s a welcome break from the ho-hum, day-to-day metropolitan Atlanta life. As you are surrounded by wizards and storm troopers, you can only feel like this is one place where anything goes and no one is going to judge you. It really is pretty neat, though I did feel underdressed.
Titus and I arrived at the *Con shortly before 10 AM and registered for a two day pass. We laid out all the events we wanted to go to and proceeded to hit them one by one. Here is a breakdown of what we chose:
- 11:30 AM–1:00 PM, Cryptozoology [X]
- 1:00 PM–2:30 PM, Fighting MPAA Lawsuits [EFF]
- 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, (Un?)Trusted Computing [EFF]
- 4:00 PM–5:30 PM, Back to the Future [CLSF]
- 5:30 PM–7:00 PM, How Comic Book Characters Evolve [COMX]
- 7:00 PM–8:30 PM, The FCC Takes a Stand in the Copyright Wars [EFF]
We actually stayed until 10 PM, but I watched subbed episodes of Witch Hunter Robin in the Anime Video Room while Titus attended “My So-Called LiveJournal(.com)” across the way. The “Fighting MPAA Lawsuits” session was cancelled (presumably by Francis), so we found time to get lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown Atlanta. The *Con is hosted at the Hyatt Regency and the Marriott Marquis, so lunch was only a short walk down the block. In between sessions, we found time to browse some of the cool fantasy works in the art gallery and survey some of the shop vendors. There’s a little bit of everything to suit one’s various fancies.
I think I’ve gotten to the root of my PC problems. I had the brilliant notion to test each memory module individually. Sure enough, one module passed MemTest86 at the rated speed and one didn’t. Now I’m running on the one 512 MB module and my data corruption issues have disappeared. Perhaps what bothers me most about the issue is that I didn’t previously try testing the modules individually rather than as a pair. I’ve had intermittent PC problems for a good year now and I never made the right deduction in all that time. I contacted Mushkin and they should have a new module to me by Monday.
