Cliffhanger

Brady Justin and I went on a day trip to the Maquoketa Caves State Park in Iowa Friday. After about 3 hours of hiking and exploring, we came across the valley over look. It was a gazebo with a gnarly old pine that hung right off the 30 to 40 foot cliff. The only sane thing to do was hang off the tree right over the drop.

Tested!

I tested my second pneumatic cannon this weekend. It's made out of PVC, has a heavily modified sprinkler system diaphragm valve, and a breech loading feature. The barrel is 1" PVC, 38" long and the air chamber is 2" PVC, 8" long. The gun is fueled by a 20oz. CO2 bottle (just like on a paintball gun) and a pressure regulator to keep it in safe operating ranges.

I still have to finish the gun stock/handle, and paint it up, but I was just checking to make sure it worked.

Enjoy the video!

Awkward

I was just trying to log into my 'Steam Community' pages for all of my Valve games such as "Teams Fortress 2" and "Left 4 Dead."

I typed in the incorrect password and it gave me most awkward notice I have ever seen. "Error validating humanity." Wow.

Resurrecting The Champ

My old PC, the one I was using as my media PC, has been resurrected from the grave on three separate occasions. I am afraid he is too far gone now and have sent him to his final resting place.

About 5 years ago, I bought the PC from New Egg as a "Bare Bones" LAN gaming rig. I built it scratch from the ground up. CPU, power supply, cooler, hard drives, case, drives, video card, the whole works I pieced together myself. It was my first build for a PC and I am sure I made quite a few mistakes. Over the years I added some more parts and upgraded as technology advanced, but it hung in there.

The first time it died, I spent a few hours tinkering and found a stick of RAM went bad, no big deal, pulled the RAM, ordered some more and along he went.

The second time it died, it was all my fault. I added some more hardware and failed to upgrade my power supply. After a while, it just took a shit. So I went to Staples and bought a new one, and along he went.

The third time the champ died, I could not figure out what the hell was wrong. After a few weeks without a PC I got fed up and bought a new one. I was due anyway, it had been four years since I got this one. PC's performance was more advanced and Vista was out now.

I never threw out the old beast, it just slumbered for a year in a box, waiting. One day after the holidays I got a hair up my ass to work on all the old PC's I had lying around that had been gifted to me from family and friends. I wanted to see if I could retrieve any of my old data from the beast. I put the hard drive in another PC that worked as a slave drive. I was amazed that after doing a check disk scan, a few bad sectors were repaired. I put everything back together, and he fired right up!

I stuck him next to my media center and hooked it up to my TV and you can see in my You Tube video I was running XP on my TV. About 2 weeks ago I woke up and it was dead again.

I have tried ever trick in the book that I can think of and have come to the conclusion that the motherboard is toasted. So I disassembled all the hardware, kept anything that might be useful later (like my hard drives) and dumped the rest.

Thanks for hanging in there buddy. I am gonna miss you.