Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Yesterday I opened up the new Prymal Rhythm website at www.prymalrhythm.com.  It’s not completely finished, but we had to get something out the door fast.  There will be additional content, such as a photo gallery added in the future.  But otherwise the site is pretty much done.  Check it out, sign up for their news letter, pre-order an autographed CD.  And if you live in Denver or Ft. Colins, grab some tickets to one of their shows.

Above is a picture of the campsite my friend James and I set up for the annual ABATE biker rally.  It’s been a few years since I was last out there and it’s good to know little has changed about the things that happen at that huge party.  I’d post more pictures on here, but I’d have to censor them.  And I have quite a collection from just one night of clicking.

I’ll be following up with a few comments that were left on my blog while I was away… so, uh… to kill a little time, watch this completely unrelated video of a simulation of the earth being smashed by a 500km wide asteroid!

I recently gave the lowest bid to the KABVI to build them a custom PC.  It’s the first quad-core system I’ve built, and also sports a very bad ass SLI-ready nVidia motherboard (capable of accepting up to three video cards in SLI mode).  Plus it has that cool piano black case.  Though this wasn’t built to be a gaming system (though it truth, it is capable…I should ask if I can barrow it and play Crysis).  It was built to be fast, familiar and stable, which is why it’s running Windows XP and not Vista.  It’s great to know you can still buy OEM licenses for SP3.  So thumbs up, Microsoft!

The PC was set up to function as a networked server.  I installed wireless adapters in two other PCs and maped shortcuts to a shared folder on the central PC that the other two can move files to.  I also donated a laser printer, a nice HP Laserjet 1200 that was given to me by another client of mine.

Here is the obligatory photo of the guts:

It even has a floppy drive with flash memory card readers built in.  Bling bling!

Anyway, it was a fun build.  First time I actually had to attach the heat sink with a backplate and screw pins.  (Yeah, it’s an Intel system).  I think the power supply might have weighed just as much as the case.  And the 22-inch widescreen LCD they had me plug it into was pretty sweet too.

Just a little over a month ago I wrote a blog announcing my undertaking of a voluntary website redesign for the Topeka Habitat for Humanity website. So if you’re wondering what’s been keeping me busy, it’s been this site. I’ve been working on it rather steadily for the last week getting a lot of productivity done. I was recently given a heads up about the upcoming Home Show at the Kansas Expocentre  so it was clear we needed to get it online very quickly. Fortunately, we are already very near completion, and have set the official live date for TODAY!

The new website, to be located at www.topekabahitat.org, may not be online just yet, but here’s a screen shot for you to look at and salivate over until the real thing is put online sometime later today.

The template design comes courtesy of NTT designs, a site referenced to me at ubuntuforums.org.

The photo gallery is still a work in progress and is not online yet but will be soon. We plan to have an interactive map (hopefully I’ll be able to get the Google Maps API under my belt to achieve this) and use it as an index of previous and current builds, linking to a home page of sorts for individual houses. Again, a work in progress, we’re kickin ideas around.

Ok… now back to my book about Python…