Man Takes Two Hostages. Kills one and Kills Himself.

For anyone who doesn't already know, in Bailey, CO, which is just a short drive from where I live, there was this guy that busted into a school room and took a bunch of hostages. Eventually it went down to the last 2 hostages and the cops busted in and the suspect shot one of his hostages, a 16 year old girl, in the head. She lived for several hours after that in which doctors worked feverishly to save her life. In the end there was nothing they could do. She passed away. The gunman shot and killed himself as well. I really get upset when things like this happen. If you want to kill your fucking self, stay home, put a gun in your mouth and pull the goddamned trigger. Other people want to live. Leave them the hell alone. He took someone's daughter away. Having a daughter myself, and losing a son of my own nearly 6 years ago, I can imagine the tragedy her parents are going through right now. Senseless, meaningless. No reason for it at all. Stupid ass shit. That's all there is to it. AAAAARRRRRGGGG........nothing I can do about it. That's the most frustrating thing.

Uhhh....What the Hell?

Woman Kills Family
So this woman in Illinois drowned 3 smalled children and then stuffed their dead bodies into a washer and dryer. She then knocked out the pregnant mother of those children and used a pair of scissors to cut the fetus out of the woman, leaving her to bleed to death. She then told people that she had a stillborn baby. There was then a funeral for the baby and there she told her boyfriend where the baby really came from.
Sounds like some sort of Satanic ritual, doesn't it?
Twenty bux says this woman who did this was a church going christian. Again and again you hear about horrendous things like this happening in otherwise calm faith loving communities. How often do you hear about satanic rituals going on where people are murdered and tortured and so forth? Especially children....this is just sick.
Religion has nothing to do with it. People are people and some people do terrible things. Guess what, Lieberman. It has nothing to do with rock 'n roll music. Idiot.

Got my new 6800gs

Actually I got the new 6800gs last week sometime. I also got my Arctic Cooling NV Silencer for the card on the same day. First I put in the card without the NV Silencer just to see how it worked. Seemed ok. No artifacting. Temps got up to about 76c after an hour of playing F.E.A.R. Combat. Koo koo...definitely much better than the other card which had no working fan at all.
I'm also in the process of building a PCI-e based system. So I put my card up for sale on some forums and on craigslist. No bites. So I decided to go ahead and throw on the NV Silencer just to see how big a diff it could make. WOW what a diff it made! Load temps after an hour of FEAR went from 76c to 58c! No joke! I played some Quake 4, some Call of Duty 2, NFS:MW and some Flatout 2. Temps never got higher than 59c. Fantastic for air cooling on this card. I mean yeah it's only a 6800gs AGP card, but the damn thing runs pretty hot normally.
So I'm temporarily happy again with my AGP based system ;)

Went Hiking Today

So I went on a trail to get to some waterfalls called St. Mary's trail. The trip up there about killed me. I'm not in very good shape especially for a trail that is categorized as "difficult". It's about 2.5 miles up and 2.5 miles back down. Maybe a little more. It took me about 6 hours from start to finish to do this trek. I took alot of breaks. What I like it do is walk as far as I can until the chest pains set in. Then I sit down and relax until the pains subside and I have time to catch my breath. Then I continue on up the way. All in all it was a pretty great trail. I don't think I personally had as much fun as I do on the 7 bridges trail. I think it's just the thought of getting to cross on all the bridges over the creek. On the St Mary's trail there are no bridges. You do walk most of the way along side of the creek though. Well it's a different creek. I'm not sure what the name of it is. Probably St. Mary's creek or somethin'. I took quite a few pictures and even some video while I was up there. It was the most difficult hike I've ever been on. Several times I really wanted to quit and go back. I'm really happy that I made it to the falls. They were quite beautiful. I think they are even more spectacular than Seven Falls. It should be noted that at the end of the 7 Bridges trail there are waterfalls. However, these are not the same falls. The St. Mary's falls are really in the middle of nowhere land. There are signs up there that have been there a very long time. A hundred years or more. There is an entire network of trails up in the area that go from St. Mary's to the summit of Mt. Rose and to Rosemont and Frosty Park. It about killed me just getting to St. Mary's falls. I don't know if I could do the entire trek all the way around. They say that if you continue around through past Frosty Park, there is a trail to Jones Downhill and then back to the 7 Bridges trail. So it all comes full circle. It's about an 11 mile hike one way if you're going to do that though. Quite spectacular. I would like ti do that hike some day. The hike up to the 7 bridges trail is that not difficult. I would rate it a medium for me, a really out of shape fat guy. The St. Mary's trail I definitely rate difficult. If I would to attempt this 11 mile loop, I would take the 7 Bridges trail up and then come around and down the St. Mary's trail. I'll post links to the pictures once I have everything up.

My Computer Problems

So I was all set to go to the LAN Party last weekend but then tragedy struck. Actually bad luck struck. I had an AMD 3500+ processor laying around doing nothing so I decided to go out and buy a motherboard for it and hook it up and use that at the LAN. I get the motherboard home and realize it doesn't fit right into my old case so I have to go back to the store and buy a case. So I get it home and put the motherboard in the new case and hook up the power supply to the motherboard and to the case fans and LEDs to make it all fancy like. Of course I went ahead and moved my hard drives, DVD drive, RAM and video card to the new motherboard. Then I went to power it on.........nothing. No fans whirling, no lights gleaming. I check all my connections again. Nothing. Immediately, I thought it must be the power supply so I tried another power supply that I knew to be good....Nothing. So I take everything out of the case and set it up on my workstation and try powering it on again. Again nothing. I'm like what the hell. Figured it must be a bad motherboard. So I hook everything back up in my old case using my old motherboard and I get on the internet and do some research about the problem. I read somewhere where someone used a paperclip to connect the power pins on the motherboard. I tried that. Guess what...the damn thing powered on...but only for a second. The fans began to spin and the lights flickered for just a sec. So I put the power switch pin connector back on and hit the power button again...it powered on! Sweet. So I unplug it from my wall at my workstation and I carry it over to my computer setup area and plug it all back in and hook up the mouse, keyboard, monitor and network cable. All good to go!! Just one problem. I hit the power button and it doesn't come on!!! WTF over?!
So I forget to unplug the power, I open the case and check my connections. I push down on the main power connector and it powers on again! WTF? Then I read somewhere about motherboards not powering on if they are screwed to the case too tightly. So I loosened all the screws a bit and since then I haven't had any problems with power.
Now that my power is up, let's go!!! I boot up...blue screen of death at windows startup. Again and again...So I do a windows install on another partition and bring up the system and begin troubleshooting my other windows xp installation. I go on to read about how to move a hard drive / OS from an intel based system to an AMD based system. Unknown to me, there preparations that must be made in order for it to work. Koo koo.. So I take all the hardware and move it all over to the old system to make the recommended preparations. But, windows won't boot up on that system now either! AAAAahhhh!!!
So I spent another few hours reinstalling all my games that I want to play at the LAN and downloading windows updates. Windows works fine, all updated and all my drivers work fine. I test play a few games just to make sure. Everything is all good. Off to the LAN I go!!
I get to the LAN at about 6:30pm with a Quake 4 tourney scheduled for 8:00pm. I play my first quake 4 tourney match and I win. Yay me. Then I go to play some Call of Duty 2 just for wasting time and the graphics start to glitch. I quit the game and check my temperature settings. The card is running at 96c!! It usually runs at around 75c at full load so I don't know WTF is going on. So I turn off the system for about 30 minutes while I go get something to eat. I come back and power on the system. I play FEAR combat for about 5 minutes and the graphics glitch again. Again I check the temp. It's at 104c this time!! Holy crap!! So I open the case and guess what...the fan on the 6800gs isn't working! The card is only 1 week old and the fan went out. I take the card out and check the connections with the heatsink and notice that parts look to be melted. So I had to RMA the card. Expecting a new one soon.
Soooo anyway all that BS I went through to get ready for the LAN was all completely useless because of my bad video card. I wanted to cry.

Crocodile Steve Irwin Killed by Stingray

Reports are in that Steve Irwin was fataly injured by a stingray while underwater diving filming a documentary off the coast of Australia. Unbelievable. He did all those crazy things with snakes and crocodiles and he gets KILLED by a stingray? It's probably the last thing he thought he would be killed by. My thoughts are with his family.

New Pictures!!

I have put up new Baby Pictures on my site Right Here Make sure you hit F5 to refresh to get the new photos if you've visited the site before. I have also posted photos that I took at the Colorado State Fair. You can view those Right Here