General

I was starting to get the white screen of death when playing Battlefield 2 Bad Company through Steam. I have researched and googled and tried the various changes such as underclocking the video card to renaming the executable used to launch the game to just “bf2.exe”. I even forced my graphics to be in DirectX9 mode by editing the settings.ini file. Nothing worked. The problem seemed to be that my video card was breaking.

I later discovered that my video card, an EVGA 9800GT, was starting to have more severe problems. I started getting artifacts and random lock ups during boot up of my computer and throughout the day when I wasn’t doing anything. I figured that this was all just coincidence in my video card nearing the end of its life. Strange, because a couple of months ago Nvidia reverted their video drivers because it caused people’s video cards to overheat. There were reports that some people had their video card broken because of those Nvidia drivers. I wonder if Nvidia has taken on a new approach of getting performance gains by severely overclocking your video card through their drivers. Perhaps it is all coincidental for me. Nonetheless, this is the 2nd video card I have gone through in 2-years. My previous one was an EVGA 8600GT that also died and started to produce artifacts and lock up my computer.

After going through 2 EVGA brand video cards, I decided to try the GIGABYTE brand. I ordered a GIGABYTE GTS250. Hopefully it will last me more than a year! I am disappointed with EVGA. They do have a lifetime warranty, but it will take weeks before I get my video card back. I plan on sending my EVGA 9800GT card back, getting it replaced, and then selling it to recoup some of the expense on my new GIGABYTE 250GTS once my new video card comes in.

I took this picture of a BBQ Hot Wings place called Wing Stop right next to a health shop called Health Unlimited in San Leandro, CA.

Out of the box, Mozilla blew it with Thunderbird 3. Here are the new changes which really suck and how to sort of fix them:

1) “Better” search. Do you really want to sit and wait for Mozilla to index all of your emails? The search is damn slow and opens up a new tab and is hard to sort. No thank you. To get the same quick search results as in Mozilla Thunderbird 2, I changed the search bar options in the upper right hand corner to do SUBJECT, TO, OR CC FILTER.

2) Indexing. The indexing just slow! Even when you go to Tools->Options->Advanced and uncheck the Global Search and Indexer, it’s still doing something in the background. I see that Thunderbird still wants to download my 200,000+ emails in the “All Mail” box. WHY!??!?

3) global-messages-db.sqlite. This file can get INFINITELY big as it is used for the indexing and searching, I believe. It is located in your Thunderbird profile folder. For Windows Vista/7 users, it should be under the folder C:\users\YourUserName\AppData\Thunderbird\Profiles\SomeUniqueRandomCharacters. As an individual user, you might not care about this file growing insanely large, but in an enterprise level these files will consume so much disk space. Mine was reaching over 200MB+ and growing. I just have to shut Thunderbird down and delete it. Disabling the Global Search and Indexer will stop this file from growing big after you shut down Thunderbird 3 and restart it, however, this is a PER USER option. Any other users logging in the same machine will have to do this themselves. What a pain!

4) So you’ve turned off the indexing and search, but your IMAP accounts are still going berzerk and downloading mail. What’s going on? Go to TOOLS -> ACCOUNT SETTINGS. Expand your mail account(s) and go to SYNCHRONIZATION AND STORAGE. You need to tell Thunderbird 3 to download messages from your IMAP server from the past X days. By default, it’s set to download all your IMAP emails locally to your computer. HORRIBLE IDEA! I changed mine to just 1 day(s). I don’t need my emails from 2001 locally on my computer. If I did, I would have chosen POP instead of IMAP!

In conclusion, once I realized the problems with Thunderbird 3, Thunderbird 3 became bearable to use. It’s just very annoying!!! I wish there were more mail clients around. I also don’t like Outlook, so what mail clients are left to use?

Great Thai food! Two people for lunch with two lemongrass iced tea drinks = ~$24. Definitely will eat here again.

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Pineapple and duck curry - $10.50

Pineapple and prawns fried rice - $8.50

Upon walking to work, I see another one of the giant inflatable rat! This time it’s some construction workers protesting about unfair pay, or something like that. This was on Center St and Shattuck Ave in Berkeley, CA.

Sweet Tomatoes Sunday Easter brunch!!!! No reservation necessary.

Sweet Tomatoes Sunday Brunch

Don’t miss the Sunday brunch at Sweet Tomatoes!

Sweet Tomatoes Sunday Brunch

My sister came back from Spain and brought me back this. Unfortunately it was all crumbled into pieces, but it was supposed to be 2 doughnuts.

Simpsons Spanish doughnut

Check out Soluna’s in San Francisco. Located right next to city hall and BART‘able with a little walking. Nice place to take a date for dinner and then off to catch the San Francisco Opera or San Francisco Symphony about a block or two away!

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Grilled Ahi from Soluna's in San Francisco

Chicken at Soluna's in San Francisco