Couldn’t resist to post:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4632991n
And the restaurant itself:
http://www.heartattackgrill.com/
Scantly clad nurses, check.
8000 calorie burger, check.
French Fry bar, check.
Today is a good day to die.
Couldn’t resist to post:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4632991n
And the restaurant itself:
http://www.heartattackgrill.com/
Scantly clad nurses, check.
8000 calorie burger, check.
French Fry bar, check.
Today is a good day to die.
So I got all the parts from newegg.
I’m trying to find the words to sum up how this PC experience building process went.
Oh right.
Dead on Arrival.
Thanks Newegg.
It’s quality, with a K.
So I want a Network Attached Storage device, or a NAS for short. I want all the cool stuff NASes like Synology’s DS207+ can do — Bittorrent, FTP, web server, and iTunes server, and the myraid of other things that a NAS is capable of.
I want to stream Xvid, Dvix, and MKVs onto my TV so I can sit on my new couch and watch them.
I thought maybe I could get a NAS and hook it to my 360 and do it. Great, but let me tell you it’s a bitch to hook anything up to a 360. Even if I did get it to work, which I have on occassion, not all Mp3s will be found, and not all videos will play. I tried my brother’s PS3. Different console, same story.
Another thing about a NAS like the Synology or QNAP. They’re expensive. 300 dollars expensive. That’s just for a glorified harddrive enclosure running Linux under the hood. Sure there’s memory and a processor that runs at 500 Mhz. You have to remote in via telnet to fiddle with the settings. So now you’ve got a box in your house that you have to remote connect into instead of being able to just directly access like a computer. A NAS is a good idea, but that’s kinda silly when I think about it. Oh, and then the harddrives. You want 2 TB? That’s another 300 bucks. Granted a 500 GB will run you a lot less, but that’s still on top of the NAS box itself. So for maybe 450 bucks you have a great NAS to backup your stuff.
Or, you could have a media center PC.
And, what I really wanted after all this thinking is a media center PC. I believe I should be able to do all of those things I mentioned above that a NAS could do and then some. If I wanted to browse the web on my TV I can do that. Setting up MAME would be sweet too. It’s like I could play games in my living room. How novel is that?
So that’s what I did, I killed a couple of birds with one stone with the help of this blog post at Coding Horror. He basically built a very cheap, small, media center PC. I pretty much just bought the parts he proposed — although I did a bit of research and reading on my own before deciding to go with them. I won’t lie. He did all the legwork and I’m borrowing his brilliance. I have no problem with that. It saves me the weeks of agonizing over which part is which or wondering if the parts are good enough. I know someone’s got these parts and built the computer, so it’s got to be good enough. The nice thing is that the parts I got off newegg are actually cheaper than what he purchased them at. So I save a little bit more. The breakdown:
| CPU | AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5 GHz (45w) | $54 |
| Mobo | Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H Micro ATX | $89 |
| RAM | Kingston 2GB DDR2 800 | $23 |
| DVD | Lite-On 20X DVD±R SATA | $27 |
| Case/PSU | Antec Minuet w/80plus certified PSU | $109 |
| HDD | Western Digital quiet 500 GB | $60 |
| $362 |
I didn’t bother with a Hauppauge Tuner card or the remote at this stage — maybe that doesn’t make this a true blue media center PC or HTPC or whatever it’s called, but I don’t give a rats ass because I can, if I build it, sit on my ass and watch stuff on it. I figure a basic mouse and keyboard will do me just fine. I did get an HDMI cable to connect to my TV so in the end I was around $375 and then after shipping and handling and taxes $438. Not a bad deal.
This will be the second computer I’ve built. Let’s hope I don’t brick it.
If I don’t manage that, then I plan to install Ubuntu on it.
As they say on TV, to be continued…
I have a sister site to Courne Supremacy called Paradiseworld.net. I have to remind people not to go to dot com version of the site since I don’t own that and it’s a pr0n site that will totally fuck up your computer. I do most of my blogging on Courne Supremacy now, since it doesn’t get easily confused with the pr0n site. Well, I suppose unless you somehow typed in Pourne Supremacy, well then, your on your own and tell me how that goes.
I used to do this thing on Paradiseworld.net where I would post a new sketch everyday and then write something about it, or just write something in general. I don’t draw everyday anymore and I’m looking for more finished projects, but I made this great painting for my brother as a belated Christmas gift (my gifts are all belated). I was so glad with the results I thought I would post the image to both my sites and my DA page. So this is a re-print from Paradiseworld.net of how I put the image together, but you can read that after you look at the image itself. It’s safe for work, but…if you consider youself to be a paragon of virtue and good taste, well, I don’t apologize, and no, you can’t unsee it. Another note, if you click on it, it will open to 1920×1200 pixels. Enjoy!
From Paradiseworld.net:
Happy New Year!
No, putting this painting up doesn’t signify that I will be updating with new daily sketches, but, it is a new painting. I did this for my brother, the GrimbySlayer, as a Christmas gift. What better gift to give than Catherine with handcuffs and a suggestive candy cane.
In my nearly 18 month absence from updating this website, I have been drawing and gradually making improvements. Most of those improvements are in art technique and not so much so in my portrayal of the fairer sex, but we all have our vices, don’t we? This image for instance, started out as a grayscale image so I could get the range of values correct without worrying about color and texturing. I spent a lot of time getting the values, proportions, and balancing right of the girl (Catherine). Adding color was simple. I just overlayed the color on a separate layer. I had to figure out how to blend it in Photoshop but it wasn’t too difficult. I ended up using a layer setting called “vivid light” and then adjusting the color using the sliders in the hue&saturation dialog until they were what I wanted. A nice side effect of this process is that I can change the color to whatever I want without screwing up the shading.
The hair has a totally different process. I did do a grayscale version of her hair but I hated it. I redid it a couple of times and I found making a grayscale image and then trying to overlay colors looks like ass. It looks like ass because the edges of her hair are individual strands and that’s hard to cut that precisely to overlay color. So instead, I made a blonde palette for her locks and created a hair brush which is a just a couple of dots that streak and fade out with pen pressure. With that I was able to give her hair that layered subsurface-scattering kinda look.
The candy cane I will admit looks like utter shit.
All the leather that she’s wearing I’m quite pleased with (aside from the obvious reason). Next to the glossy looking shading I gave it I also added a layer of texture — something I’ve been wanting to try and do and this image gave me my first chance at it. I don’t think it looks great, but it’ll improve with time. Her stockings also have a layer of texture giving it a fishnet look (and making her look trampier).
The handcuffs turned out really well. I started out with an image I found on google of a pair of handcuffs. They did not look like that. Rather the cuffs were displayed almost flat so I could get a pretty good front view of them. I used the vector tool in Photoshop and traced the outline of the cuffs and made the two parts: the clasp and the main half ring thing that connects to the other cuff. I took those vector outlines and skewed and distorted them until I got something with a bit of perspective. I shaded them to look like chrome. So really super bright for the parts facing the light source.
Oh, you may find some inconsistencies with the lightning. Yeah…I’m working on that, but I feel that overall it’s not terrible. Though not great.
I like the way the bean bag/sack of toys looks. I don’t know what’s in that sack. You might imagine that it should have some corners protruding since its supposed to contain presents. To achieve the look I got a texture of crushed velvet, desaturated it, and turned it into a photoshop brush with some scattering effects and alpha and then I just sloppily drew over the nicely rendered image of it on a separate layer to give it a textured look.
Overall I liked this workflow the best and I like the detail that painting it gives me. I’ve tried to ink and color my work, but I’m not a big fan of lines. I am learning to do more inking with various japanese pen brushes and super thin pigment liners, and it’s looking good, but I like the fully painted and rendered look. I think that suits me best. Just to prove I am still drawing you can see my drawings here on DeviantArt:
http://albinogrimby.deviantart.com/
I also don’t post too much to Paradiseworld anymore, because I have a new blog at
www.cournesupremacy.comcar hire bulgaria
Yeah, I don’t have another better reason for posting there versus here. I guess one better reason is that I’m tired of maintaining the backend of Paradiseworld and the PHP scripting I did for it, I’d rather just use wordpress and have a blog without all the hassle. Plus Paradiseworld’s format is more restrictive based on how I built the website. It’s about drawing on a daily basis and putting those works front and center. I don’t sketch everyday anymore and instead I’ve turned my eye towards more finished projects. The Courne Supremacy is an outet for me to document those changes.