With the hol­i­day sea­son wind­ing down, I fig­ured I would get back to build­ing mod­els.  Of course, I had to get the Ex-S off my work­bench before I could start a new kit, so I finally got around to fin­ish­ing it today.  Yeah, it only took me sev­eral weeks to build this thing.  Got side­tracked with work-related things and panic clean­ing before my par­ents showed up for the hol­i­days and the model just kind of got pushed to the side.  But I finally got around to fin­ish­ing it today, and I really wish that it was easy to pose some­thing this unbal­anced.  So instead, I’ve just got some pho­tos of it sit­ting there on its stand from dif­fer­ent angles.

I’ll admit, this is most def­i­nitely not my finest work to date.  Towards the end of build­ing this kit, I think I was just so fed up with its com­plex­ity that I just wanted to fin­ish it and move onto the next one, so I started to skip some of the decals and paint.  Maybe one of these days I’ll actu­ally get around to find­ing a trans­la­tion of Gun­dam Sen­tinel and read­ing up on how this mon­stros­ity actu­ally per­formed in com­bat.  Maybe even­tu­ally I’ll get around to attempt­ing a decent pho­to­shoot of this thing at a later date, but for now it shall sit on its stand between my ZZ Gun­dam model and NANOHA (my server).

Final Opin­ion on the Ex-S [Ext] Gun­dam MG 1/100 Kit: “WARNING.  May cause tem­po­rary insan­ity, annoy­ance at grav­ity and obses­sion over tiny lit­tle details.”  I believe that about sums it up.  This kit is truly for hard­core mod­ellers only, or those crazy enough to try and build it (which includes me).  For the time being, I think I’ll stick to slightly more sane suits.

Next project: Prob­a­bly a Metal­lic Fin­ish HD Color MG 1/100 Hyakushiki, some­thing that thank­fully is much eas­ier to pose and per­son­ally one of my favorite suits of all time.

Over­com­pli­cated Exces­sive Model Pow­ers Activate!

More pics after the break…
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So I finally got tired of hav­ing both my backup server and net­work share server down and decided to do some­thing about it. Unfor­tu­nately, rebuild­ing both of them is not cost-effective at the time since com­pletely rebuild­ing the Solaris Raid-Z server I used for back­ups and the Cen­tOS 5 server I used for net­work shares would involve siz­able expen­di­ture of both money and time (which as we all know equals money). So I ended up look­ing around for some­thing a lit­tle more bud­getable and ended up find­ing the Acer Aspire Easy­s­tore H340, which Newegg.com sells for $379.00. The H340 runs Win­dows Home Server, which I used sev­eral times set­ting up home media net­works for clients while I was in col­lege. It’s essen­tially a stripped down ver­sion of Win­dows Server 2003, with­out all the fun that is con­fig­ur­ing a Server 2003 instal­la­tion from scratch (which I’ve done more times than I want to think about). Microsoft released it a few years back in the hope they could get peo­ple to start using cen­tral loca­tions in their homes for back­ing up and stor­ing media to play on their var­i­ous com­put­ers and Xbox 360s. Of course, Linux did this ages ago and I’d been using Linux and Solaris servers to do back­ups and share media until their hard dri­ves crapped out on me over the past year.

Win­dows Home Server Console

(Run­down and more details after the break)

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So, for the past week and few days I have been using some­thing that I hon­estly expected to be yet another Micro$oft abom­i­na­tion — Win­dows 7 — or as I call it, Win­dows Se7en, in honor of the Kevin Spacey movie, Se7en (AKA Seven).  As much as I hate to admit it, how­ever, it has not yet proven to be an abom­i­na­tion, or as evil as Kevin Spacey’s char­ac­ter in said movie.  In fact, its been quite coop­er­a­tive except for a few minor things.

Ini­tial Win­dows 7 Desk­top (2 monitors)

One Week…

Over this week and a few days of using Win­dows 7, I actu­ally have not had any crashes or major hassles/problems with the oper­at­ing sys­tem, aside from the stu­pid User Account Con­trol secu­rity pop­ups I get when try­ing to install soft­ware.  XFire’s auto­matic update doesn’t work any­more since it needs Admin­is­tra­tor rights to install that, but man­u­ally run­ning the updates solves that prob­lem.  Win­dows does keep telling me it needs to back itself up, but it wants a drive that has 196GB free — the amount I am cur­rently using on the sys­tem drive — to make a com­plete sys­tem image.  While this is a more effec­tive backup method, and pre­serves installed appli­ca­tions and set­tings, how many peo­ple have a drive with equal capac­ity to their sys­tem drive lying around, aside from us nerds.  I haven’t run the backup yet so can’t com­ment on the process, I’m wait­ing to final­ize my deci­sion on my new net­work stor­age server (can’t decide between one gigan­tic server or one mod­er­ate one for stor­age and one small one for backup — the more likely option).

A few things have come up though dur­ing the week.  Itunes can’t save its library with­out giv­ing an error due to the way that it uses tem­po­rary files to save its library.  This is a stu­pid minor thing that hope­fully will be fixed by Apple because Microsoft sure ain’t gonna fix it and I’m too lazy to run through the 6+ steps to fix it myself that involve exces­sive reboots.  By default, the oper­at­ing sys­tem will auto­mat­i­cally index your drive.  While this is good if you ever want to quickly search for a file, it does hurt sys­tem per­for­mance, so I dis­abled it for my sys­tem drive.  Also, Win­dows 7 is a stan­dard Microsoft Oper­at­ing Sys­tem.  By that, I mean it is INCREDIBLY bloated.  It takes up at least 15GB for just the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself, let alone soft­ware, so don’t expect to see a full blown ver­sion of this on SSD net­books any­time soon.  The new fea­ture that lets you auto­mat­i­cally have a win­dow take up half of your mon­i­tor doesn’t work prop­erly if you have two or more mon­i­tors.  Win­dows Fire­wall blocks every­thing by default, but its been that way since XP so its not sur­pris­ing at all.  A lot of the bells and whis­tles are nice, but are shame­lessly stolen from Mac OS and Linux.  Come on Microsoft, lets see some inno­va­tion for a change.

But there have been some good things as well.  The power but­ton in the start menu defaults to shut­down now instead of hiber­nate (like it did in Vista), mean­ing my com­puter actu­ally would shut­down if I ever decided to click that but­ton.  The fact that I went with the 64bit ver­sion means my com­puter will finally use all its resources, since XP 32 bit decided to ignore one of my sticks of ram all the time due to the fact it had to deal with graph­ics mem­ory as well.

(Run­down and Instal­la­tion process rant/review after the break) Read the rest of this entry »

Quattro’s Rick Dias sees you and does not approve of your lack of sunglasses.

So it was brought to my atten­tion by fel­low poster Aorii that I should make a post about my Gun­pla build­ing hobby.  And I thought, “What a good idea,” but didn’t get around to it for about almost a week due to crazy projects at work involv­ing server migra­tion of 140 web­sites and edit­ing a web appli­ca­tion I didn’t really under­stand, as well as my own per­sonal server migra­tion (thank­fully con­sist­ing of only about 14 sites).  So, here we go, a post about my strange hobby that most American’s can’t under­stand.  But to fully under­stand my hobby, you have to under­stand how I got into it.  And that’ll take a few paragraphs.

Well, it all goes back to when I was just a wee lad (or young boy, depend­ing on where you are in the world).  Back then, I was intro­duced to the won­der­ful world of model build­ing by my late (as of the mid 90s) pater­nal grand­fa­ther, who had a great tal­ent for pretty much build­ing any­thing.  I mean, this guy could take some chunks of wood and steel and build just about any­thing you could think of.  Bar stools, bird­houses, sheds, stat­ues, the list goes on and on.  Any­way, he bought me a model of one of those 1930s era cars with the sui­cide doors that you see in gang­ster flicks all the time and we stayed up until around 11PM build­ing the thing (mind you I was like 6 at the time so this was really late for me).  Next thing you know, I’m build­ing model cars and model air­planes until I ran out of room for them (and I still have most of the com­pleted ones too, as well as a few unopened ones I’ll get to eventually).

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