That would be me!  Every day before my vacation, I’d log into mountaindewgamefuel.com site and rack up as many points as I could.  I considered it my daily quests =) and it paid off.

Without any notification, email, whatever.. well my name was listed in the official list of winners for the mouse drawing I had entered for on 07/05/09 but I never checked there each day to see if I’d won.  I always figured they would just send me an email saying as much.. but no.  They just sent me my new Razer Deathadder gaming mouse in the mail!

..

It’s not the fanciest-smanchsiest mouse out there.. but it’s a great shape and size for me and the texture of the top is.. well hard to describe.. like a really really fine suede type buffed feel to it even though it’s plastic.  For free it’s an awesome mouse =)

The amount of gold you can earn per day from click through stuff has steadily increased… right now it’s sitting at 800 gold (points) per day.  I found a nice set of links for all the click throughs so I don’t have to actually go to all the facebook/twitter/myspace/other partner websites/etc to get the click points.  There’s about 450 points of videos that take about a minute to click on all of too.

The chance of winning a Mountain Dew t-shirt or a messenger bag are pretty high.. but I spent most of my points on entries for the hardware stuff.. mouse, speakers, keyboards and a 100 or so for the Alienware laptop they give away one of each day too.  There’s usually 2 or 3 million points entered for the laptop though so I don’t expect my 100 to win that ever.

I had resisted merging my warcraft account with a battle.net account.. but I did for the promotions and the battlebot pet/fuel.  I figured that it wouldn’t be long before they required it anyway.  The login trouble that plagued so many the last few days was only striking those that had not merged their account with a b.net account yet.  A change from the early days of the merged accounts that had initially had login issues.

Ok.. I really like my larger monitor.. but now that I have Old Guy Eyes it’s tougher to comfortably read everything on this screen now that the stuff is so small at this higher resolution.

I switched back to Firefox browser recently and use the noscript addon.. now I’ve found my 2nd favorite one.. nosquint!  Let’s me set the text and image zoom level for each site and remembers those settings.  You can make a zoom level the default for all pages if you like.. something you can’t do in Firefox by itself.  I usually keep the images set to normal 100% and bump up just the text to 120%.  Keeps things from looking stretched, fuzzy etc but makes the text readable on this 22″ monitor for my aging vision.

3rd favorite addon? Xmarks.. hands down.  The ease that we can all synchronize all our bookmarks (remember.. four kids and four computers) across all the rigs and all the browsers is so nice.  Have access to your bookmarks from anywhere online too at the xmarks.com website too.

Others I like are Personal Menu to get rid of the menu bar.. Mouse Gestures even though I only use like 2% of it.. and Read It Later.

The site was taken down due to flooding of the “useronline” function I had set up and it was causing a Denial of Service against my web host due to the server errors it was causing.

Was coming from somebody in Canada through Shaw Communications… so maybe the Canada Crew folks need to throw up a firewall and see if they have something malicious spamming out of their machine they don’t know about.. or it’s just a coincidence with a script kiddie from there, which could be.

If it’s one of you guys doing it intentionally, all I’ll do for now is ask nicely for you to please stop.  I don’t wanna have to take wide measures against ya all.

Thanks,

Scott.

I wanted to start reading up on the latest and greatest in building a computer. I imagine I am at least 6 months or more off of getting one, but with WoW having issues I need something to do. There was a website/forums that I used last time I built my computer and for the life of me I can’t recall it’s name. I think you turned me on to it Scott so I hope you know what I am talking about. I know you said you didn’t like helping people build a computer because you get jealous or whatnot so I’ll try not to bother you too much about it. 

-K

On May 1, it was announced that Blizzard has obtained the domain name Diablo3.com.  Previously, it was dedicated to those who were huge fans of the Diablo series (myself included, but didn’t even realize the fan site til I went to Diablo3.com).  So, are we going to see an announcement soon of the continuation of the Diablo series?  Me, personally, I hope so.  I loved the game, and there were still some questions to be answered at the end of the game.  Now, my opinion might change should it go MMPORG though.  I don’t care for those types of games, nor do I have the time to play those type of games (I don’t have the time right now to even play Oblivion, The Game of the Year Edition).  I thought that Blizzard went the wrong way using Warcraft as the basis for their MMPORG instead of Diablo, but that’s a different rant.

 So, what do you folks think?  Has Blizzard set up a major announcement coming soon…or are they just continuing to tease those of is who thought that Diablo is one of the best (PC) video game franchises of all time.  After all, it was Diablo that put Blizzard on the map. 

Got this from a co-worker at Argosy (and I thought gaming geeks were only at Ameristar).  But, this was too ridiculous to pass up and NOT post it here.  Read some of the comments as well.

http://gizmodo.com/361539/chocolate-master-chief-penis-helmet

You might not get your TV back..

It’s not the end all, beat all benchmark for a computer.. (is there one?) but SuperPi mod 1.5 popular little program to gauge changes in the speed of your computer for overclocking changes you make, etc…

It calculates Pi out to however many decimal places you want.. 1 million is the one most of the overclocking community use when referencing SuperPi numbers..  It uses a long established Gauss-Legendre algorithm.  Don’t look at me.. there are lots of people that can look at formula like that and “read” it and understand it just by looking.. I ain’t one of them.  I haven’t known any of them for almost 25 years now either.  There are faster ways of calculating Pi to 1M spots but that’s not the point.

My current 1M Super Pi score.. 21.356 seconds.  It used to take 35 minutes to get 1M spots back in the days of 90MHz Pentium PC.

2.8 GHz E4300 Core2Duo (default 1.8 GHz) (the fastest I can get it to run 100% stable..boooo a <b>lot</b> of these CPU’s will clock up to 3.2 and 3.4 with minimal cooling and slightly bumped voltages.  I’m gonna need a fan on my motherboard’s northbridge though to get 3.0 GHz or above I’ve deduced.

2 Gb PC6400 RAM at 2T 4-4-4-12 at 311MHz

7200RPM 16Mb buffer WD 320G HD

Gigabyte 965P-DS3 motherboard.

Well, I finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade myself. The problem was that I bought a new case for my “future” PC and when I received it, it was so damn beautiful that I couldn’t contain myself any further. I did go with an AMD processor even though I am a staunch Intel guy, but since I’m on a budget and I got a great deal, I went for it. All-in-all, I’m pretty happy with my choices since I spent just over $700 (just under $600 after all the rebates). Without further ado, here it is:

Thermaltake Tough Power 650W Power Supply
GigaByte SLI AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane AM2 65W Dual-Core BLACK Procesor – I can overclock this baby to 3.3 G very easily (and I will!!!)
G.Skill 2 GB DDR2 800 Mhz (PC2 6400) 240-pin Dual Channel Memory
Kingwin Revolution H.D.T. CPU Cooler – this baby is sweeeeeeeet
Seagate Barracuda 250 GB / 7200 RPM SATA (3.0 GB/sec) HD
EVGA 8800 GTS 320 MB GDDR3 PCI Express (x16) SLI Supported Video Card – sweet and with the mobo, I can upgrade to a second card later on (after I add more memory)

And that totally sweet-ass case I was telling you about…
CoolerMaster AMMO Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Case

All-in-all, I’m pretty happy with my purchase. I’m also giving in and bought Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit), but did not include this in the overall price because this was not a necessity for the PC itself (I already have XP). While my system is not “top of the line”, it’s a system that I can easily upgrade in the future (the mobo accepts the new AMD Phenom chips, a max total of 16 GB of memory and is SLI ready when I want to add that 2nd video card to the mix). I also bought a 2nd case fan, but didn’t list it (why would I?). With the ability to easily upgrade, this baby should keep me up and running for quite a long time. I can’t wait to actually see what BF2 and CS:S look like on max graphics!!!

Just got the last of my parts and the O/S for my new PC in today. Got everything connected. Now it is time to head to work. Guess I will have to wait till after work tonight to install the O/S and finish everything up. Ugh, gonna’ be a really long night.

-Popcorn

(BTW, Jason, you are going to LOVE the Nine Hundred case and the P/S)