Field Marshall Hrádek

End of Times

Well folks, so long. I have moved my blog to www.fieldmarshallhradek.com so you won't see any new posts here unless the other one doesn't work out.

posted by FM Hradek @ 4/09/2005 04:51:00 PM 0 comments

Signatures

Okay, no I am not really hot on signatures as far as e-mails go or even in forums. Lately, I have gotten fairly involved with Day of Defeat and the Source engine Beta and so I caruse the forums a bit. I see a lot of crap sigs, amazing sigs and then the "blah" ones. So, taking my modest Photoshop skills, I present to you my sig: Yes, my online handle when I play games is always Mean Mr. Mustard unless its role playing... then its Creswell. I am staying late at work to make up lost time from yesterday. Have seen several movies lately that I should mention. "Ghost in the Shell: 2" was interesting. It was dissapointing actually in that it really didn't introduce anything new. More rants about reality, purpose and soul. The updated CGI graphics to some of the scenes are good to see and some extra details in some of the charecters also were a plus. I think it may be worth matinee prices though if you really enjoyed the first one but I personally give it rental status. "Kaera: The Prophecy" was in my opinion great. This feature was completely CGI like Final Fantasy. It was worth full price at a theatre for the stunning visuals but its not nesseasrily a flick I would have to own. The concept was unique, the voiceactiving and visual awesome, the whole experience was refreshing. Frank Miller's "Sin City" was also very well done. I think that this was a great rendition of the comic book to movie scene. Some, if not most scenes are beatuifully remisisant of a comic book with stark contrasts and noticable exagerations in details. Definately worth the full price. It is a tad disturbing in places.

posted by FM Hradek @ 4/05/2005 06:24:00 PM 0 comments

Craptastic Hardware

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that the millions of chipsets that are produced at VIA don't need to be strictly PCI 2.2 compliant. I spent this weekend updating my home network. My puppy Kiko decided that the 100 foot LAN cable running from my cable modem to my router was fun to chew on. I suppose I could have replaced or even repaired the cable but the wireless solution seemed to solve more than just my broken connection. My wife would be relieved that the cable was gone and I wouldn't trip over it every day. Anyway, the Netgear WG311T netcard was my first choice. 108 Mbps type G, it was what I initially purchased. I would play Counter-Strike: Source for like 15 minutes and bam... hard freeze. I restart and same thing. After doing research, I find out that the 108 type wireless NIC cards have an issue with VIA chipsets. The NIC chipset by Atheros doesn't communicate very well supposedly because of the PCI problem mentioned earlier under stress loads (like gaming). So I took it back and got the 54g which features a T1 chipset. Works like a charm. It even has a better connection to the router. The numbers like 11, 54, and 108 are the transfer rates between other wireless computers on the network. 54 MB per second is enough for anyone. If folks bring over a computer to a LAN, I will simply either buy a couple USB wireless NICs to use or get a couple long cables to set up temporarily. Since the router is now over the modem which is by my X-Box, I took the opportunity to sign up for X-Box LIVE. It was a free 2 month trial and so far I like it. Its easy to use and I find it fun to race or fight against other people online. I especially like Rally Sport Challenge 2. I got some solid practice time for my piano in this weekend. Daylight savings has thrown off my previous sleeping schedule so I came in an hour late today. I removed the forums from my website since they seem redundant (thanks JP). The Pope of the Roman Catholic church died this weekend. Although I myself am not a practising Catholic, I admired his willingness to promote peace and unity throughout the world regardless of faith (or lack thereof). His contributions to humanity were great. I wonder what his replacement will have in store for that church.

posted by FM Hradek @ 4/04/2005 11:20:00 AM 2 comments

Weekend Love

The short weekend has come to an abrupt end. My wife enjoyed a 4 day weekend. She has been able to take care of a lot of things too. We watched a movie called "The Notebook" which was pretty good. For those of you in a relationship that is permanent love, see this one together. I would see it matinee price at a theatre although I have to admit that it may rate higher if I was a girl. I have added a bulliten board to my site. I am probably going to delete the secure area. The bulletin is easy to post links to things and have closed password only areas. My only concern is that the Apache security is supposedly uncrackable and I have no clue about PHP password encoding. Its not like we store any top secret files on the site but I like to make sure it is secure. My church website redesign is coming along really nicely. I need to get together with my pastor to smooth out the details. I am really pumped about our trip to Hawai'i. Its coming quick!

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/28/2005 09:28:00 AM 0 comments

Birthday! Will it be happy or sad?

Yes I turn 26 today. I am now a little over "halfway to dead". Actually, I need to stop saying that. I plan on living to 125 so really, I am a 5th of the way to dead. I figure that death comes to those at the time they expect it unless they are unexpectedly sick, in an accident, or God decides its time. So if I keep telling myself I will die at 125, why wouldn't I? "The hypothesis tested by one man's life" So I need to now find a group of people willing to help me test the hypothesis. And no, saying you will die in 5 years won't work. It takes years of conditioning. I think that when the body gets old it gets weak and willing to give in to death. Anyway, its another year for me. I haven't heard from anyone recently. My friend in the USAF replied to an e-mail from me. That made me happy. I haven't heard form him much.

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/23/2005 09:53:00 AM 2 comments

Bleeding from every orifice?

Yep, another stooopid kid goes and kills a bunch of people today. Its too bad and my condolences go to the victims' families. I have to admit anger though and the result of this act. It will be yet another thing the fascist groups can use in their agenda to disarm freedom loving people. More senseless emotionalism that leads to such wonderful (sarcasm) laws such as Prohibition, USAPatriot Act, Assault Weapons Ban 1994, etc. is the result of these unfortunate events. I marvel at the willingness of sheeple willing to hand over their liberties so quickly. What scares me even more is that millions of people are unaware that their freedoms are being eroded so quickly. As long as people with a poor understanding of the world around them continue to allow those in power to placate them with daily luxuries and propaganda, the future of freedom loving people is at stake indeed. I spent the weekend helping my friends move. We organized their new garage and helped clean their old house. I had the pleasure of having the fella show me how to dicern the polarity of Ford speaker wires since Ford makes it terribly difficult to see without a voltmeter or using proprietary speakers. I also met a guy who works at Intel. That was a neat conversation. I have been pondering my future schooling. He suggested computer engineering and it sounds very interesting.

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/21/2005 05:58:00 PM 1 comments

Beta test news, updates, and life.

Well there have been some exciting updates lately in the games I play. Day of Defeat: Source Beta had a fairly aggressive update that updated some gross bugs, fixed syncing in sounds and graphics, and redid the menu system. There is more but I am sure that those details aren't of interest unless you play the game yourself. EQ2 is adding an in-game mail system. That will be a huge change that will make playing with companions easier. I finally have my own soldering iron. Its portable and uses butane. I installed and soldered in the wires for the speakers in the rear for my car. That was fun. I will be doing the same for the front speakers too. Probably tomorrow. We have been looking at houses and found a beautiful home on an acre out in Lakebay, WA but that was too far. We need to be closer to civilization. Besides, with our plans of school and careers, we need to have easy access to things if our schedules only get more complicated. I have been fairly tired today. Although we have been eating this really healthy food... Its a lifestyle change. Yesterday we wanted to go out for dinner and take a break from cooking. I am crashing because of the load of carbs I had yesterday. Its making me incredibly tired and lacking energy. Its interesting to see how my body reacts to different foods and how all the chemicals and hormones interact. I used to get really angry and irritated when I got hungry... Probably an imbalance in insulin levels and that has since gone away. Man it feels good to be healthy. I might not be at my ideal body weight yet, but over time I know I will be.

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/18/2005 01:17:00 PM 0 comments

Back to work?

I went and saw "Downfall" twice this weekend. That movie made a huge impression on me. My friend has already posted on it and summarized it well so you can see it here. Let's see... its recommended viewing full price at the treatre. I saw it twice and on a scale of 10 I give it 10. We stopped by a pub and had a beer and had dinner at Olympic Pizza. It was really good pizza. We also stopped by a beer store that sold a lot of imports. The transition to my new host is complete and the URL and all pages work fine. I am pleased to announce a gallery that has been put in place. I have a folder with pics from our "13 Hour Road Trip", our pets, and our Christmas tree hunt this last winter. It turns out really well. I was worried about finding an efficient way to post many pics. The cool little PHP gallery did it fine. I also added all my current music projects to the files area. That area is still not finished. I think for those I will make a link page. Hopefully my speakers I ordered from Sonic Electronix for my car arrive today. Our friends moved into their new house this weekend. I like the area and the garage. The yard is good for the family but the house is a little small I feel. I am glad though, that they are finally putting their efforts into something of their own.

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/14/2005 10:12:00 AM 3 comments

Site Update

Hope nobody noticed the huge transition I made last night. You know, www.fieldmarshallhradek.com is my main site and this blog is nested inside my site which was hosted by Comcast here but I found a new hosting service call Surpasshosting. $4.95 a month (or $48.00 a year) gets me 2GB, huge bandwidth, PHP, Perl, MySQL, CGI, mail, and Chron compared to my old ISP hosting at 25 MB and no additional benefits. I am moving my domain there too so no more popups that by URL forwarder forces on you guys. This will allow my audio samples to be full .mp3 format instead of the hideous .ram files that I am using now and I plan on putting together a gallery too. Sheesh, I know that this paragraph sounds like a damn advertisement but heck, I am excited and you should be too! I had to do a lot of changes to the site to make it friendly to a UNIX based hosting service. Comcast let me get away with a lot of stupid HTML mistakes so I cleaned them up and everything should work as before. We have a new member in our family called "Kiko". She is a pitbull/dalmation cross about six months old. I plan on posting pics soon. My wife has wanted a dog for a long time.

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/09/2005 09:50:00 AM 1 comments

Craziness

Well today was exciting. One of our main database servers went down today twice. It was an intense moment. The first time there was a replication problem on a main server caused by a deployment. The second was a combination of too many connections and a MySQL key during table change becoming unstable causing a complete shutdown. So I guess my day was exciting. Now I am waiting for my script to run. I should hand hold it all the way through. Hopefully it will finish soon. Its rather warm lately. 64° F in the middle of March. Its enjoyable and all but I fear a drought coming on this summer. There has been virtually no rain or snow this winter.

posted by FM Hradek @ 3/08/2005 05:53:00 PM 0 comments