n3rd.org

Today’s entry was supposed to be about my new computer but in the light of recent events I decided to postpone that for a few days.

During my first year in the States back in 1997 I stayed at two host families, in the first one I had a host sister named Lisa. We got along okay (though I wouldn’t say we were friends) and I haven’t talked to her since I left. Nonetheless was I shocked when a few days ago my friend Iris told me that Lisa Morgan got shot. She survived, but her fiancee died.
Horrible tragedies like this happen almost every day but it usually isn’t until somebody you know is involved that it really gets to you. Two years ago Sandy Edmiston, a friend of mine from Westminster, died in a rock climbing accident. It was the first time in my life that somebody I knew passed away unexpectedly. We were not particularly close but she was an incredibly smart, beautiful and witty girl full of life and one of the most committed and open minded person I had the privilege of meeting. If there is such a thing as fate it certainly wasn’t fair to her.

I consider myself very lucky for never having lost a close family member or a longtime friend and I barely even remember the last time I went to a funeral. Put crudely, dealing with death is a skill one has to acquire, a skill that I probably still lack. So when the time comes I don’t know how I will cope. That’s a question that only life can answer and I hope it will take its time doing so.

There are two things my musical world-view is based on. One: my taste in music is exceptionally good *coughs*, and two: everyone else’s sucks. And what better way to prove this is there than coming up with your own, homebrewn statistic.
For the sake of scientific inquiry I decided to take a look at the yearly top ten songs from 1990 to 2007 as compiled by TsorT and calculated the percentage of songs that ranked high on the I’d turn that shit up if it was on the radio-scale:

So in the top-ten list of 1996, for example, were four songs that I would now rank somewhere between kinda enjoyable and fuck yes. Among them – and I’m not ashamed to admit that – is Toni Braxton’s Un-Break My Heart. Cause she’s hot. Or at least she was eleven years ago.

You really shouldn’t read too much into this. For one, I basically pulled this out of my ass and didn’t really take the time to listen to all the songs (that would’ve taken at least 7 hours, which is basically 6.5 hours longer than I am willing to spend on any one blog post). Just thinking about that Macarena song made me want to lacerate my ears with a hedge trimmer. And yes, you may call me an asshole for linking that.
Secondly, I assume that the farther back you go in your memory the more you start romanticizing things involuntarily. With the exception of Bryan Adams, his suckage reigns supreme.
Also keep in mind that this is based on my likings on the day of writing which can differ significantly from what I thought back then. At least to the degree that I ended up with the graph that I wanted.

So what’s my point here? I can make pretty diagrams with Excel and Photoshop Nothing, really. I would very much like to conclude that my taste in music is evolving away from the mainstream, but this line of argument is weaker than Stephen Hawking’s biceps and so inconclusive that even a Texan creationist wouldn’t buy it.

Here’s something stupid: using my Rumblepad doesn’t keep my monitors from going into standby. Playing old PlayStation games on ePSXe actually required me to move the mouse or hit the keyboard every so often which started to seriously piss me off after a while. A way to solve this once and for all was needed!

Manually disabling and re-enabling standby was for obvious reasons not an option, I had to find a way to automate this. Windows’ power management supports different Power Schemes, so the idea was to just switch to a different one while ePSXe was running.

The first thing thing that needed to be done was to create a new profile with my desired settings, i.e with the monitors’ standby set to Never. Apparently that can’t be done using the GUI (at least under XP, my 2003 Server has that feature), but a little research lead me to powercfg which does the job, albeit via the command line:

> powercfg /create "NoMonitorStandby"

That profile can then be edited with the standard GUI or you can do that from the console as well while you’re at it:

> powercfg /change "NoMonitorStandby" /monitor-timeout-dc 0

You can of course just skip this whole part and use the provided Always On scheme if that works for you.

Once that’s taken care of, keeping the monitor from going into standby is simply a matter of switching to a different power profile, running the program, and then switching back using a batch file:

> powercfg /setactive "NoMonitorStandby"
> epsxe.exe
> powercfg /setactive "Home/Office Desk"

Unfortunately, powercfg requires elevated privileges. In other words: the above script won’t work if you’re logged on with a restricted account (which you should be). There’s probably a Group Policy that handles this, but since the program I wanted to run required Administrator privileges anyway I didn’t bother looking into it. I’m just a lazy fucker like that.

Anyway, as it turns out you can’t use your trusted old runas to start a batch file with elevated privileges (and I assume there is a good reason for this). But not to worry, CPAU is your friend. It’s a tiny, simple runas replacement that even allows you to pass the password along to the command line so you don’t have to type it in every time. It goes without saying that this should not be done in our case since we’re using the Administrator account. Storing a plain text password in an unencrypted text file is a bad idea™.

Assuming our profile-switcher is called epsxe.bat, all you have to do now is call CPAU with the appropriate parameters:

> cpau -u Administrator -ex epsxe.bat -wait -profile

The -profile option is crucial: if it is omitted the user profile is not loaded and the system won’t find our shiny new power scheme.

There are of course many other ways to go about this, the Windows Scripting Host comes to mind (and there are probably third party applications that can do the job as well). But I wanted something simple and lightweight, so that’s what I went with.

By the way, does anyone know if it is possible to set independent standby timeouts for different monitors and/or graphic adapters?

Some things blossom, some things die… and some things just fester until some day they come back from the unholy depths of the internet and torture you with bad metaphors.

As you will probably not know, I failed rather miserably at that whole blogging thing (I wanted to say “spectacularly”, but that’s the exact opposite of what happened).
Nonetheless, I decided to give it another go – from a slightly different angle this time: instead of going for the whole journal/diary thing, I am trying to focus on less, but more fleshed out posts. I also have a few other things in mind that I want to realize on this site, but with my diploma thesis chasing me around, that may not happen till spring. (It’s always good not to set your own goals too high and make up excuses ahead of time. That way you don’t disappoint yourself. Yay.)

In any case, wish me luck (all two of you who’re reading this) and if anything, you can follow my MP3 playlist in the recently played box to the right. And it’s fully automated, too, so even I can’t screw that one up. Now isn’t that something.