okay... and then my supposedly straight friend "Jon" said to my other supposedly straight friend and I guote. "I see you masturbating in my thoughts; and it's killing me." I wish I could sleep... I'm going to try again.

"The monster's alert and death sounds are spoken in German; they are "Schutzstaffel" (literally, "protection squad") and "mein Leben" ("my life"), respectively. The Schutzstaffel (commonly known as SS) was a notorious paramilitary organization active during Hitler's tenure in Germany, responsible for a large part of the horrors committed by the regime. "
Text courtesy of -- http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Wolfenstein_SS

I'm addicted to this song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KctobWLRU6M

The goal was simple, to spend less than $100 and make it into a usable backup PC. At first, I established that there was a problem with the power supply and of course, it needed to be upgraded as well. So immediately I went online to look for bargain parts.

The list of parts is as follows:
$40 - Brand Name 512 MB of PC100 Ram.
$30 - A very nice Sony DVD/RW Drive
$20 - PIII 1.4 GHz CPU, 512kb L2 cache, bus speed 133 Mhz.
Subtotal: $90 not including shipping.

Part used which were just laying around:
$0 - Maxtor 40 GB Hard Drive - From older PC.
$0 - Old Floppy Drive and Floppy 5 1/4" bay mount.
$0 - 400W Power Supply from older computer.
$10 - PCI-based Geforce 6200 (from Walmart on clearance)
Total of $100 minus shipping costs, to which most did not include.

I tested the RAM, Hard Disk, Power Supply, both CPUs and could not keep the system stable. As long as I was in XP or Windows 2000 and online the damn thing would crash. I put it away for about 6 months, and recently began to tinker with it again.

Today while showering I realized that the only time that it locked up was when it was redrawing a page and multiple tabs were open in any web browser. Further more it only happened in windows and not off my Mint Linux Live CD. One of the key differences between both operating system relative to my solution were how the Video Card drivers. So it's locking on redraws, duh, I thought to myself, maybe it's the graphic card.

I installed the PCI based graphic card that I had purchased in mind for this system... updated the drivers and went online loading 25 pages of full-size images (of the new Nissan 370z). I went down through each tab scrolling up and down erratically with the wheel mouse and hitting F5 to refresh... as expected, it didn't freeze.

Maybe this case is closed... it's tough to say, but I've tried to replicate the persistent error and as of yet, have not been able to do so.

I'm use to the reinstall process though it seems to take forever to reconfigure things to my liking. Oddly enough, this was a clean install just loaded about a week ago. I know there's a way to make a customized re-installation disk for your system... should it crash as mine has chosen to. I'll need to look into this very soon... if you know of any let me know.

I have a few interesting IT links about recent industry articles... but before I do that I need finish my story.

Brief linux appreciating moment.
Every time my Microsoft OS goes down on me... or blows it's load, I find myself running to Linux for emotional support. Right now Linux Mint is asking me where the bad OS touched me.

This scandalous affair all began with my co-worker at NU handing me Puppy Linux... ah, cause I was a dork and he really couldn't make sense of it. At that time I was not open-minded towards the touch of other OSes. Almost blindly spouting praises to the OS with the largest market share.

I had hated Apple and not used it since prior to MacOs8.6... I laughed at OS2/Warp as apparently did everyone else. I had tried an earlier version of Debian and then used it as Frisbees. Now please don't misunderstand the point I'm trying to make, at this time and for many years MS Windows has been and will likely remain superior to it's competitors. I still stand by my remarks that Macs are overpriced. Sure, they have made significant progress

I've now tried my hands on over 30 flavors of Linux and seem to finally have a favorite. For the moment that is Linux mint a much better made Ubuntu derivative. In time I expect to see Linux grab more of the market. Most distros are very light weight and you can really bring an old PC back to live with them. Mint, DreamLinux and Ubuntu have almost managed to get an easy to use, configure and run OS... that does not require the headache I recently experienced with SUSE on a server installation. Programs like YAST, Synaptic and Mintinstall are a step in the right direction. The NTFS Configuration tool is amazing. Now I can access all of my windows files from Linux and run most of the software with Mono and Wine. (Though admitedly I haven't managed to find Foobar for Linux or Fruityloops for Linux... when that day happens... bye bye XP).

Even MacOSX.3 and up are very user friendly, somewhat pretty and great from some users. Now running of Intel Processors, able to Dual-boot into Windows XP or Vista, and lightweight they are starting to offer the best of both worlds.... at a very costly price. My next laptop will be an Intel Based Mac... this way when it gets old and decrepit like my current laptop it will still be usable. My ten year old Mac has been less problematic than my 3 or 4 year old PC. Which btw... will soon be dual-booting between XP and Linux.... because I can't keep reinstalling it's damn OS every week. To tired to finish thoughts... ugh....

Here are a few highlights of the article I read:
The end of an Era - Windows 3.x R.I.P.

"Windows 3.x has come to the closing moments of its long life. On 1 November Microsoft stopped issuing licences for the software that made its debut in May 1990 in the US. "

"Windows 3.x required an 8086/8088 processor or better that had a clock speed of up to 10MHz. It needed at least 64KB of RAM, seven megabytes of hard drive space, and a graphics card that supported CGA, EGA and VGA graphics.

By comparison, the Home Basic version of Windows Vista requires a 32-bit 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 20GB of hard drive space, and a graphics card with at least 32MB of memory. "

MS OfficeLive It's about freaken time.

Ubuntu Linux: 8 Million Users

Microsoft to open the 'm' language and Samba engineers visit microsoft

Linux to shop on more desktops than windows

Please let us know if there are any problems with the servers, and we'll do our best to fix them up nice and quickly.

Enjoy the speed, folks! ;)

...and now for the long drive home :|

Edit: The avatar-upload problem has been fixed. We apologize for the delay.

Registrations have been re-enabled, as our mailserver has been fixed.

"Through early 2008, Apple accounted for 66% of all U.S. retail outlet sales of systems costing $1,000 or more, according to analyst NPD Group. The percentage climbs from 70% when counting only desktops. Apple notebooks accounted for 64% of sales, NPD reports. "

--- Comments--
Is this the true Vista Effect? I don't believe that we can accurately connect the increase in Apple's sales to Microsoft new OS. Since, this only includes computers purchases of $1,000 or more. Apple does have the Mac Mini, which I do not know the market share of. However, it does show an alarming trend which I've been expecting to see. We also do not know alot about the research criteria from the article. This data does exclude online sales as well.

The latest browser market share data is in, and Safari has hit 6.25%, breaking 6% for the first time. Last month’s share was 5.81%, so this is a significant increase. It was only nine months ago that Safari broke 5%. Safari market share has now almost tripled from 2.14% in June 2005, when the WebKit Open Source project launched.

This growth, combined with recent WebKit adoption in projects such as the Iris Browser, Qt 4.4, Android, Adobe AIR, Epiphany, KDE Plasma, iCab and more, is breathtaking and shows huge positive momentum for the WebKit project. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who has contributed to the project.

http://webkit.org/blog/188/safari-hits-622-market-share/

IE 73%
Firefox 19%
Safari 06%
Others 02%
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

Furocity Forums are now active at http://forum.furocity.com/

In the extremely rare case that our site goes down, you can also take a look at our new Livejournal Community, located at http://community.livejournal.com/furocitydotcom/

Premium-only Features:
Set a theme that will always show on your profile
Multiple profile avatars
Multiple journal avatars
Better tagging system for galleries
RSS feeds for journals and galleries
Journals and Galleries on profile page
.gif animation for avatars

Tentative Ideas
Rename ticket ($5) to rename account
Popular images on main page

Sorry for the maintenance, but it was an important upgrade to our servers. Speed, security, and kittens have all been improved.

Yes, kittens. Now they're WARKITTENS. Everyone loves warkittens.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled surfing.

Rock Band Ultimate Real Drum Kit Mod in Action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84FJQvg8f0I

We're still not sure exactly why the error was occurring, but everything should be fixed, now.

We apologize for any problems that this caused.

New Profile Tag Added
We've recently added a new tag to our profile system, the [IMGLINK] tag, which allows you to link using an image, and have added a new button to the editing toolbar above all long-text entry fields on your profiles, journals, and galleries. Should you want to link to an image using a thumbnail, you would use the tag as follows:
[IMGLINK=full-size-image]thumbnail[/IMGLINK]

For example, using:
[IMGLINK=http://www.furocity.com/profimages/1.jpg] http://www.furocity.com/profimages/1-s.jpg [/IMGLINK]

Yields:

Upcoming Furocity Features
We've been mulling things over for a while, trying to come up with new features that will be useful to everyone.

Here's what we've come up with:

Are there any features that you'd like to see? Let us know, please!

Ads? On My Furocity?
It's more likely than you think.

We've recently placed advertisements at the bottom of all pages here on Furocity. Hopefully, these ads will not be too annoying for you, our users, but we needed assistance in keeping the server costs down at a manageable level.

Premium members, however, will -never- see any ads, and anyone viewing a premium member's profile won't see the ads, either.

Premium Membership Problem Fixed
It has come to our attention that some browsers were not allowing members to sign up for our Premium Memberships (thanks, dragonmage1703 and mekenoka!). Once you had clicked the "Submit Order" button, the browser would just stall. We have changed the way the system works, and it seems as though the problem has been fixed. If anyone is still having issues with the Premium Membership ordering system, please send us a PM or an e-mail.

Even worse -- due to lack of interest in the Premium memberships, we've been forced to put ads on Furocity, something I hoped that I would never have to do. Unfortunately, the site costs a fortune to keep running, and I can't really afford so much each month to keep the site afloat.

Hopefully, people will decide to get some damn memberships so I can take the ads down. I hate having the friggin' things on the site.

In celebration of this event, we have halved the price for all Premium Keys for the next 30 days. In addition to this, all accounts which have been upgraded before October 23rd using a new Premium Key will be entered into a drawing to have their key length doubled, in addition to all of the other Premium Membership benefits!

If you want to get in on the action, head on over to https://www.psumonix.com/furocity/ to claim your very own Premium Key.