OK. I created a new category of topics as of this post. This is for rants since I tend to have a lot to rant about.

Today’s complaint is brought you courtesy Discovery.com and Cheetah Mail. Last Christmas, I purchased a DVD from the Discovery Channel. Every since, I’ve been receiving emails from them. Each time I receive an email, I unsubscribe. But somehow, I keep getting these emails. Well I had enough today.

I called Discovery.com and told them I didn’t want to receive any more emails. They told me they couldn’t help. In fact, they told me they didn’t even know they had an newsletter that went out via email.

So, I traced the source of the email to a company named Cheetah mail. They are an email blasting company that apparently handle the newsletters for Discovery. The person I talked to over there told me they couldn’t remove me from the list. So they have an email system that they own and manage, but they can’t remove subscribers from any lists? That’s crap.

After talking for a moment with Cheetah mail and posing a few threats regarding Spam, I told them they had better remove me. They should contact me when I am removed. If they don’t I’ll take this to the next level.

What’s the next level? Well companies this large have CEOs and CEOs don’t like getting angry letters. Yet, if this keeps up, they will get one from me the next time I receive an email from Discovery.com.

So be warned about Discovery.com and their Spamming practices.

Hurumph. Too much work. Only 3 weeks left.

To post a follow-up on the Matrox TripleHead2Go, this is my solution to the lack of multi-monitor support with Nvidia and their new 8800 video card series. About 3 posts ago, I began a rant about this and it turns out the the Nvidia drivers for these cards just aren’t up to par.

Anyway, the Matrox TripleHead2Go is a product that allows you to utilize a single monitor output on the video card to spread it across 3 monitors. This product tells your computer that you have an ulta-wide monitor. The product works just as advertised and I now have 3 monitors running side-by-side. On top of that, I now have my two 8800 cards running in SLI mode so I get nice, smooth graphics for gameplay.

The company reports that you can play games in the wide-screen format as well. The trick is that the game has to be able to support wide-screen formats which not all games support. Yeah, I can play Quake, Call of Duty, and similar games with this wider perspective, but I can’t play Battlefield 2142 as such since you can’t change the aspect ratio for this game.

What is up with this crazy daylight savings thing that we still observe. Isn’t this supposed to be for farmers and why does the whole country-side have to adjust their clocks. Why can’t the farmers simply change the alarm on their clocks?

Now I have to update my computers and cell phone for the new time change. I have to worry that my PHP programming is going to work. I have to change the recording time of MODSonair.

I don’t care for this one bit.

I know you wanted to hear, “Oh! It’s a great computer. It’s superfast and a dream come true.” Well, I can’t quite say that this time. I seemed to have run into problems this weekend with the whole process. Let me explain.

On Thursday night, I had all my parts together and ready for assembly. I decided to start putting everything together. By the end of the night, all that was left was installing the cables.

Friday, I put the wires in and got ready to install Windows. At this time, I realized I needed to also install a floppy drive. Without it, you can’t setup your raid drives because the floppy drive is the only means of getting your drivers into windows during installation.

I had a floppy drive and one disk, but it was inside of my presently working computer. So, out it came and into the new computer. This is when the trouble began.

First, I couldn’t get the new computer to read the data on the floppy disk without error. After fiddling around with it for a while, I found out (by trial and error) that it was the flat cable that was bad. With the cable replaced, I was on my way to installing Windows on the new PC.

However, next I needed to turn the old computer back on. Doing so displayed an error that the hal.dll driver was missing or corrupt. Uh Oh. This Windows driver contains information about your hardware and tells the computer what to setup during boot. Looking around online (via a laptop), I notice that there are many other people out there that have experienced this same problem. The solution was to replace the hal.dll file and recreate the boot.ini file. Just like about 70% of the others out there, this didn’t work for me. Goodbye working computer.

It was at that time that I made it a mission to complete the new machine and make that my primary computer. The old machine was dead to me. The data? Well, that could be retrieved by setting up the hard drives in the new machine later (yeah, that did work).

Back to the new machine because my troubles were not over. Everything was going well until it was time to setup my four monitors. I was previously working with two PCIe GeForce 6800 cards to power my four monitors. Who would have thought there would be a problem with the newer and greater 8800 card series.

Turning the computer on with four monitors resulted in Windows being unable to boot.

Turning the computer on with three monitors resulted in the NVidia driver crashing at boot.

Two monitors worked fine. Why?

For 1.5 days I was convinced it was a power issue. I figured I couldn’t get enough juice to the cards. Amazingly, these new cards require 30amps of power to run. Trust me, that’s a ton of power. But, after visiting forums and calling BFG (the card manufacturer) I realized that this wasn’t the problem. The problem is most likely the drivers from NVidia. I found two forum posts referring to the hope the NVidia would support multiple monitors in the near future. Damn!

So, newer doesn’t always mean better. It’s a lesson I already new and don’t like being reminded.