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ZachP
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Name: Zach
Country: United States
State: Florida
Metro: Gainesville
Birthday: 10/22/1980
Gender: Male
Interests: Often (walking with/tripping on the walk with/being carried by) Jesus Christ - but continually being transformed, computers, raging against change to my own peril. And... ellipsises... yea... :)
Expertise: Anything computer related
(some of you take this a bit too seriously.)
Occupation: Unemployed/Between Jobs
Industry: Engineering
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  zpulkin
Member Since:
10/18/2003
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| Workin' at the LaundromatIt must have been a sight for the guy that locks the place up. Dude with a laptop standing motionless staring down at the screen.
He swung right in, hastily shut the window and then slid the far sliding glass door shut. He asked me if I had much more. I pointed to the sleeping bag still tumbling in the dryer and said "almost done." He in turn pointed to the sign on the wall which (in blunt and pointed black permanent marker) shouted "Last wash 8:00, Close at 9:00." I apologetically explained that I hadn't seen the sign before I started washing the sleeping bag. :I was rather distracted by the other person, a (homeless?) man who had been stooped down reading one of the magazines when I got there. He grabbed his bike and rode out soon after I arrived. That...and I was trying to figure out which machine to use.: The owner told me to shut the other sliding glass door once I was done. Just make sure it "goes over the bar." I thanked him as he made his way out. When I turned back to my work I noticed that Sprint had decided to download itself an updated version of the cell card software. So much for getting any work done.
So why was I washing a sleeping bag at a laundromat late at night? Apparently I was the last person to use the sleeping bag... in 1998. My sister needs the bag for her trip. She leaves with friend Megan for New York early on Wednesday morning. They plan to find a campsite on the way up and camp out during the trip up (they're driving up with Megan's brother Tim.) If you're reading this, please pray for safety for Lissa and for her companions during the trip. They'll be staying with Megan's dad and step-mom once they get to New York.
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| Das AutoSaturday past I took my dad's car and made the rounds from Bradenton to Tampa in search of a vehicle. I'd been on cars.com all week prior looking at possibilities. Remembering how comfy my first car was (an '89 Buick Century) I kept my eye out for the same model in my price range. Late Saturday, I found myself at Kuhn Honda/VW in south Tampa to look at a "must see" low mileage '00 Century Custom. The price was right and the car was a 1 owner Florida kept car with just over 79,000 miles. So now I'm driving in style with a slightly newer car than what I'd been accustomed to driving. It's silver, looks new and drives like a dream. No jokes about the "old man" now. 
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| The Second Attempt to Save my CarI house sat for Nick and Elizabeth in Tampa this Memorial Day weekend while they absconded with the kids to Lake Placid for the annual Mullins family get together. My job was to watch, play with and feed the puppy: a 6 month old spaniel of some breed named Rufus. On the way to Tampa, I realized that the car was rapidly losing coolant again (a repeat of the incidents of last summer when I realized that coolant was seeping through an apparent crack in the head gasket into my oil pan.) I stopped twice on my way there to refill the radiator with water (it was disappearing so fast that after 20 minutes the car would be getting ready to overheat.)
When I got to Tampa I refilled it again, thinking it would be fine for driving up and down the street for food & whatnot. I was wrong. I made two trips to the shopping center directly behind the place where they live for donuts and pizza. On the second trip, I started the car to an awfully violent crank up. When I got out onto the road, I saw little wisps of the white smoke of death.
I managed to make it to Wal-Mart and back the next morning where I purchased a desperation can of K and W Permanent Metallic Block Seal (the stuff I used successfully last year to give the car another year of borrowed time.) The car made it through the 20 minutes of idling with the mixture in the radiator, but that would be the cars' last significant run time. After I shut the car down for the 24 hour dry time, I noticed that much of the mixture had ended up expelled somehow from the engine onto the ground beneath my passenger side wheel well. The car was not to move from that spot again. Yesterday, I refilled the radiator one last time and started the car up. The idle was rough, but the car idled nonetheless. I got out to inspect and found water dripping from the exhaust. About 3 minutes later, the car stalled, never to crank again. My last attempt ended in a dead click.
So now I've got to borrow mom's car and go on my lunch break to the tax collectors office. I couldn't find the title in the storage unit, so just to be rid of the car, I'll need to pay the $36 for a reprint so I can have Goodwill or a junkyard tow it away. Such is the end for this poor Spirit.
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| The String of the Shower SituationI'm not one to complain, but tonight there's a story I'd like to share that revolves around our torn-up hall bathroom. About 20 after 9pm, my mom calls to me from the kitchen: "Zachary, are you going to get some exercise tonight?"
I was in the middle of something, so I called back, "Yea, maybe in a little bit." 10 minutes go by (if that) and I hear a familiar refrain: "I don't want to be up so late tonight..." and more extended thoughts about how we all need to shower early if we all want to shower, period. It turned into a mini-argument that occurs about thrice weekly since we pulled the original tub out of the hall bathroom a couple weeks ago.
The end result was that as soon as I was finished with what I was doing, I quickly donned my roller blades and headed out in a hurry - skating at a rapid pace down my normal route. Now, being Sunday night, of course everybody puts their trash out. Normally it's not a problem - people put their cans & whatever else out onto the curb, and there's not too much of an obstacle course to navigate as I make my way down 7st Ave Blvd (only in Bradenton) sidewalk. Tonight, it looked to be clear, so I headed down at a decent clip, jumping the few seams that I know are prone to give me problems and just generally flying, enjoying the Switchfoot song playing on my iPod. Further down the road, toward 67th St, as I passed a trash can next to a mailbox, I felt a stinging WHAP as I flew by. It was too dark to see what I had hit, but it wasn't so bad that I didn't feel like I couldn't go on, so I just kept going. When I returned home, I noticed that whatever I whacked had broken the skin on my shin where it hit. Thankfully we have some hydrogen peroxide - who knows what people put out with their trash!
So the immediate moral I guess is twofold: don't argue with your mom and watch out for stray trash!
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| An overclocking case studyAs I type this I'm running prime95 in the background (to make sure), but I believe I have a stable overclock at 3.33 Ghz (166 Mhz bclock) on my new Core i7 920. I started at 150 and noticed that at stock voltage, only 2 of the 3 RAM modules were registering on boot, so I increased the DRAM voltage by .05 volts. That setting got me to 166 just fine. I attempted 183Mhz with a DRAM voltage increase of .1 volts and a processor bump of .1 volts as well, but prime95 blue screened the system within 30 seconds. I may try again, but if the 3.33 Ghz is stable with a .05 RAM overvolt, I'm very tempted to keep it set there or maybe try for just a little higher ... 3.4 or 3.5 Ghz. The processor is a C0/C1 stepping according to CPU-Z. You may have better luck with the new D0 - from what I read, the engineering samples from the new stepping are power misers & better overclockers.
Time will tell - I plan to run the 64 bit prime95 all night. I ended up ordering a copy of 64bit Vista Ultimate from the Egg when I found that the copy of Windows 7 Beta I obtained was a very early non-functional beta. I've got the best of both worlds though - I re-configured my old array into a second bootable drive and installed XP to one drive-size partition. With 1.1 Tb between the two drives and knowing myself - I highly doubt I'll be wanting for more space anytime soon. There's even room enough that I might try to split the old drive and do a linux partition. We'll see.
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