Atomictumor

Did you know that Lee Iacocca has a line of margarine? He does. That’s capitalism (or unemployment) for you.

Got home from a hard day at the salt mines, and whats waiting on my doorstep but a special little package from my bestest buddies at wilcoworld.net.

Now, Knoxjon’s talked about it, Katie Allison Granju’s talked about it, Pitchfork panned it, Daco loved it.  I talked about it, here I am talking about it some more, cuz this is one of the damnedestly good records that come along rarely.

Something else I’ve talked about is the swag that they package with records you buy online, like stickers, and posters, and free online downloads.  This one came with its own little cd, just hanging out in the case waiting for somebody to pop it in the car.  I think its kinda scared of the record.

Got a kickass t-shirt too, but I’m not gonna show it to you.  Thats what you get, internet.

So, I had a problem.  I have this habit of renting movies, and it seems like whenever I rent a movie, after a while it clones itself onto one of the blank DVD-Rs here in the house.  Not sure how it happens.  I think it has something to do with food after midnight, or something.  Anyway, before long, I have this stack of formerly blank DVD-Rs that now have movies that I or the kids enjoyed watching at one point, and probably won’t, but may want to watch in the future.

What to do with this big ass stack?

I have a big booklet that holds about 100 discs, which is full, and I could get another, if I want to spend 20 minutes looking for the disc that I want, because, lets face it, I’m not Martha Stewart, and organization and Atomictumor are two things that appear to be diametrically opposed.  Like bees and fiberglass.

So I called my old girlfriend technology, and she turned me on to the idea of electronic DVD storage.  I’ve had something like that happening to my CDs for a while now, and I’ve loved my jukebox, so I figured that would be a good idea.  There are pretty much two entries in the crowded and lucrative field of electronic disc organizers, the Century CD thing, and the Imation Disc Stakka.

There were pros and cons for both of them:

Century CD Pros

1. Was about half the cost
2. Was advertised to allow searches by cover art, so Pigpen could just pick out the movie he wants off the computer by the cover
3. Looks like a crockpot, for that crockpot computer style.

Cons:

1. Seriously, click that link for the Century CD up there.  See that big part about “discontinued by the manufacturer”?  Yeah, that should be a red flag.
2. Looks like a freakin crockpot.   Thats really not cool.

Imation Stakka Pros

1. With a name like stakka, its gotta be good…
2. A bit more of an aesthetic appeal

Cons:

1. Twice as much
2. No functionality to search by covers

So, after a few days of pondering, I jumped the gun and got the Century CD from this website I hadn’t bought stuff from before, computergeeks.com.  It got here the other day.  Ironically, I was talking online with a friend at the time, and she was party to exactly how much this thing sucks.

When I opened em up, I found there was no software.  There was a little slip of paper directing me to a website to download the software.  The software, DDS, is a sub Access level database generator.   Once working, you pop a disc in the century CD thing, it asks if its a new one, you say ‘yes’ and pop the name in, and then it rotates around.

And wow.  This bitch is loud.  Its like an underwater chainsaw.  It damn near literally makes me jump every time it comes on.

When it comes on.  I had the first one hooked up fine, and popped the second one on top (which is nice, to add a unit you just stack it), and the second one jammed.  I head over to the tech support site (I’d link it, but like the ether, it’s disappeared now), and the advice was “Strike the unit on a hard surface”.

REALLY?  If only all IT were that easy!

So, I had two choices.  I could RMA the beast, or take it apart and see if I can improve it.

With the ghost of BJ laughing her ass off at me, I took the sucker apart.  I managed somehow to fix the jam, but the noise is caused by the worm gear that rotates the thing, and theres nothing I can think of to do to quiet it down.  WD-40 would probably mess up the discs inside, and besides, I don’t think it works too well on plastic.  I saw somewhere that maybe silicon gel or something might work, so I might just lube the thing up and hope for the best.

We still didn’t have cover search capabilities.  I dug around, and found that the people selling this thing now have new software, Media Tracker V2, which they’ll be happy to sell me, at $20 bucks a pop.  The ability to search covers is on a ‘wish list’, and evidently the stores selling these things just magically added that to the advertisements on their own.

So hell, that means its RMA time.  Only I emailed computergeeks.com for one three days ago, and again yesterday, and still have heard nothing.  I have noticed that I’ll be paying for return shipping, as well as a 15% restock fee, which makes it almost worth it to run these pieces of crap over with my car just for the satisfaction of hearing them crunch.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I think I’m going to keep the damn things, as a constant reminder about buying stuff on the internet…

OK, so I figure I’m gonna toss a dog a bone here, and describe the herculean efforts involved in building your own computer. I undertook the process, as most of you know (and as all of you do now) a few weeks ago, and it takes some time and effort to successfully build a badass computer (or even a neutralass computer), so I figured I’d just lay it all down here so that those of you with the grit to go in there and build a machine yourself, that may have never done it, will know what to do.

Or something.

Lets begin!

—

First step, as with all things done right, is planning. Plan, plan, plan. Deliberate. What do you want this thing to do?

• Check mail and get on the internet?

  You can do that on your phone. If thats all you need a computer for, people like me are going to kick sand in your face at the beach, and nobody wants that. Not me, and not you. No, you need to have grandiose schemes for your computer, and the sheer ball to make those schemes a reality.

• Play video games?

  Get an Xbox. They’re cheaper, and have a little controller thingy. Not that you can’t have a controller thingy on the computer, but c’mon, a big fancy computer dedicated to just playing video games, while pretty awesome, is still a waste of a lot of stuff.

• Hack the government?

  OK, Mitnick, but you’re better off using a friends computer for that, aren’t you?

• Control all of the resources of a fledgling island nation, including a fully armed nuclear arsenal?

  Hell yes. Now you’re damn well talking, and I’ll tell you how to build THAT computer. Then you can check your email, get on the internet, and play computer games instead like I do.

OK, so once you’ve figured out what your ultimate goal is (world domination, naturally), then you can start thinking about what you’re going to need in the computer. A computer, not unlike a pecan pie, has a few different ingredients. It has a case, with some lights, and metal bits, and little rubber things on the bottom. Thats the part you see.

The other parts that you might not necessarily see, oftentimes tend to be the most important. While its logical to assume that a case with maybe some racing stripes, flames, or christmas lights strung up on it will be a bitchin’ fast computer, that assumption, surprisingly, is false. Those things only moderately increase the power and speed of your computer, but significantly increase the amount of women (or men, if thats your thing) that are wildly attracted to you because of the computer. We’ll get back to that later.

So, there are a few things that you have to keep in mind with building computers. The pecan pie analogy is good, because everybody (but me, ironically) like pecan pies, but lets drop it for a bit and switch gears to understand the parts of the computer and what they do.

Lets compare a computer to some weird guy.

Now, the computer has a few parts that would compare to some weird guys brain. The processor, obviously, is the thinking part of that guys brain. Its the part that takes in the input from the eyes, ears, nose, and other places we won’t talk about, and tells the mouth to start talking about bananas. It, well, processes things. Like why you haven’t written your grandparents in months. Or why you haven’t cleaned up your backyard in months. It processes through a clever maze of switches (switches for your bitches, if you’re an old skool Dr. Dre fan, and really, deep down, who isn’t?) that open and close, letting data in, but never releasing the little teeny tiny minotaur who wants to mate with the wifi fairies to create little flying angry minofairies.

I digress.

So, the processor processes. Excellent.

Now, it wouldn’t do much good if it didn’t have anything to process, so thats where the memory comes in. Now, memory comes in two types, the long term memory (which we’ll get to in a minute, settle down), and the short term memory. The short term memory is called RAM, which stands for Radical Awesome Midgets, in honor of the rollerderby champ team from Silicon Valley in the early 70s.
Man, those midgets could skate, lemme tell you.

The RAM takes the data that the processor is about to put to the switches, and doles it out very quickly and efficiently. Too much, and the switches get tired and cranky. Not enough, and, well, you’re not going to have much of a computer. The more RAM you have, the quicker your machine will be, because it’ll have that lightning quick poker dealer style doling of 1s and 0s to the processor (which, if you recall, processes).

Now, there are buses involved, and they drive those ones and zeros on the big mighty open highways of the Motherboard. As everybody knows, the motherboard is obviously named after Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Inventions, who are now using their zircon encrusted tweezers on the wild plains of Montana just like Frank said they’d be. The motherboard is the central nervous system of the computer. It takes the power from the power supply (more on that later), doles it out to the processor, the RAM, and all the little nooks and crannies. It controls the input, and how the input gets outputted. It has all the power, and theres nothing that anybody can do about it. If the motherboard ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

So, the RAM and Processor sit in the motherboard like the kings of the castle. The motherboard gets its juice from the powersupply, which is a fancy adapter, like those little black things that always take up two friggin spots on the damn power strip so you can’t plug the blender in with the microwave and the toaster and the crockpot and the TV and two lamps, because the damn thing is just so big, and OH MY GOD why can’t they just run another line out from the adapter so the bastard doesn’t take up two spots.
The inventor of the computer (Jonathan Computer) recognized this problem, and designed the computer power supply so it sits in the case, and delivers power specifically for the parts you need. Now, the power supply can frequently be a weak link in a bad ass computer, because when you sit at CompUSA and you’re looking at the PSUs (which stands for power supply, uh) realizing that you’ve already spent way too much money on the motherboard (because AT couldn’t shut the hell up about it) you decide to just buy the cheap one. Hell, they all look the same, right?

Right. They really kinda do, which is why I suggest sprucing it up. Stick paper clips in it, with little styrofoam balls at the end. Its not really a fire hazard, because who’s not going to wake up if they smell styrofoam burning, right? Right.

So, the PSU has several little outputs for the motherboard, case fans, video cards, hard drives, DVD drives, and whatever else. Its like a little square octopus. Or, like a little square alien octopus once you get those paper clips in there. It delivers power to everything, not unlike a socialistic economy.

Remember we were talking about long term and short term memory?

No?

Well, maybe thats because you don’t have enough RAM. The long term memory, now, is the hard drive. The hard drive doesn’t really improve performance most of the time, because, with some exceptions, they tend to run at a fairly standard speed. If it runs much faster, the computer has a tendency to go backwards in time, causing you to lose that Excel spreadsheet keeping track of all of your John Cusack movies. The hard drive is where Windows lives, or Linux, if you swing that way (not Macs, tho, Joel, because they don’t count, and have different rules). Its where all of your pictures (yes, even THOSE ones) are, and all the music that you ‘bought’, and those games, and the codes for those nuclear silos, and all the things that make your computer more than an inanimate object with racing stripes.

Then beyond that you have some wires and screws. Those are, I dunno, the wires and screws of this theoretical guy. This theoretical robot guy. They do… things. With electricity. If you want to know more about wires, go to college.

If you want to know about screws, well, just wait for the next spam to slip through…

Next time!

We explain THIS PICTURE!

I’ll teach you how to spend lots of money online!

$$$$$$$

AND

OTHER THINGS!

As I drove by, thinking about stopping and getting a copy of Radiohead’s Kid A to replace the one that broke a few months ago, I noticed that Cat’s Music on Illinois Avenue had closed.  Without fanfare, or discussion, or even a ripple in the water, the last (and only) music store in Oak Ridge that doesn’t have a “mart” after it had closed down.

I heard talk from LissaKay a while back that the sowing section of Walmart had shut down, and a week or two ago I saw the barren barrenness of the closed down section.   Once again, folks in this town of 25,000+ have to drive to Knoxville to get something.

The decent pawn shop in town closed a year or two ago, Atomic Pawn.  Yeah, theres the one next to that neon sign on the Turnpike, but that place is pretty small, and probably not much longer for the world.

I watch the car dealership, Paul Benton motors, that used to be one of the Fox joints switch from selling whichever of the domestic brands it used to sell, to selling Suzuki’s.  I see this as a struggling move, a gasp of air, but since the inventory of the lot has damn near disappeared (and not because they’re selling like hotcakes, I’d imagine) it would seem that the dealership is still in hot water.

A few shops in Jackson Square, mainstays of the place, closed last month.  Never went to em, myself.

And therein lies the problem.  Nobody’s going to these shops.  Sure, a CD at Cat’s was more expensive than Walmart, but I don’t know that thats the full reason.  Walmarts selection sucks, so surely people are getting their music elsewhere, what with all the little longhair’d hipster kids running around town.

Oak Ridge business is choking.  Simply put, its more expensive to get stuff here.  Sure, its convenient, but people don’t seem to mind running down to Knoxville to get what they need.  Why?

I ask myself this, not an hour after getting back from Turkey Creek on a trip to Target and Earthfare (good beer, yum).  Thats the problem.  People have gotten themselves used to the drive, the commute down for decent shopping.  Groceries?  Sure, we can get that in town.  Everything else, we buy in Knoxville, with Knox County taxes.

And now, to my absolute amazement, the Target deal in town, which I was sure would be a shoo-in, is standing at 50/50 in the public eye, according to the Oak Ridger.

Let me say this plainly: I am 100% sure, without a doubt, that this deal will be what makes Oak Ridge.  If we turn down this Target, we’re going to be on the ass end of any business development.  If Oak Ridge shoots this thing down, we’re telling every developer out here that its a waste of time to consider Oak Ridge as a lucrative business market.

Don’t have a problem with that?  You say you don’t mind driving to Turkey Creek or West Knoxville for your stuff?

By preventing the city from moving ahead, in every business model out there, the place is moving backwards.  What happens when business closes?  What happens when its more convenient for folks employed here to just live closer to the shopping (and the lower property taxes, natch) in Knoxville?

Man, I don’t have answers.  I wish I did, but seems to me that if we don’t take a deep breath and step out into the unknown on this Target gig, we won’t get much more in the way of chances.