The Parable of Watching Welding on TV

I decided to share this here, not sure why but I do know I need to update this more often.  :)

Today my parents were talking with one of their old exchange students on Skype and I had the thought to sneak up and pop a balloon to scare the exchange student.  Then I realized that wouldn't work because the pop wouldn't be loud on her end.  I thought back about how I'd always been taught to not look at a welding arc, and it's for good reason!  On occasion I find myself looking away out of habit when they show somebody welding on TV, but it's safe to look at on TV.  Like how the balloon pop isn't loud to someone talking on Skype.


The reason is the computers' limitations.  The microphone can't pick up sounds as loud as a balloon pop, and the speakers on the other end probably can't make sounds that loud.  Same thing with the TV, the camera can't pick up light as bright as a welding arc, and the TV couldn't display it even if the camera was that sensitive.

Then I realized, this has spiritual connections.  It may be a little technical or far fetched, but it was meaningful to me.

God is sending us messages all the time.  He speaks to us trying to guide us to happiness, or, the more fertile parts of life (1 Nephi 16:16).  The scriptures describe God's voice as still and small (1 Kings 19:12) or as a feeling (Galatians 5:22).  The message he is sending is the most amazing message we can hear in this life; more glorious than anything we can message.  Are we able to receive it?

First, we might not be sensitive enough.  We may only feel part of the message, nor not believe it when we receive the message the first time.  How might we grow sensitive enough to hear it?  My best understanding is to practice listening.  Spend time focusing on listening to what God has to say every day.  This happens best through personal scripture study and prayer.  That's part of why those two things are mentioned over and over.

Second, we might use the message to hurt ourselves.  The scriptures talk about the Jews missing the mark and this knowledge they sought became a stumbling block (Jacob 4:14).  They started wanting spiritual knowledge that they weren't ready to receive, and it caused their downfall.  Do you believe all that God has taught you?  Do you keep wanting to learn more but aren't doing the simple things God has taught you to do?

Sometimes it seems like I keep hearing the same message over and over from God.  Sometimes it was conference, or it's talks at church, and I realized it's because I'm not listening.  When I stop listening I stop progressing.  Leaning back on the Book of Mormon lesson, the pointers on the Liahona stop working, and I start to get lost.

So what do we do?

I know that as we keep trying, God will strengthen us.  His message will get brighter and brighter in our hearts.  We may feel like we aren't getting anywhere, but we are getting somewhere spiritually.  Every day we hold to God's word and live his commandments we grow stronger spiritually.  Our desire and ability to repent increases.

I know God loves us.  We may not understand how he expresses his love, but it is always there.  He will help us understand if we just listen.

I got a bigger memory and lots more RAMs! 8000 RAMS!

InvisibleBread.com, go check it out!

When upgraded to Windows 7 it said it needed 2GB of RAM.  I had done fine with 2GB on Windows XP so I thought I didn't need to change anything.  When I got everything installed, updated, and ready to go, I tried to play a game.  It was painfully slow!  I went back to see what the problem was and found that Windows 7 used about 1.3 GB of RAM just idling.  I thought Windows 7 had better memory management!  It seems it does, but it just needs twice as much as Windows XP did.  Figures.

So I go on the hunt for new memory and find that RAM has changed in these last few years.

Old motherboards used to have a FSB rating which is the speed the motherboard runs at.  The memory, processor, and peripherals would then be set at a multiplier of this if they ran faster.  The wrong combination of speeds would leave one component waiting for the others to catch up.  Getting the right speeds made the whole computer run faster.

These days on AMD motherboards they use HyperTransport.  To describe it simply, it's like upgrading a traffic light from a timed light to an automatic one.  It basically directs traffic instead of just letting it pass at a set interval.  So with this, there is almost no correlation between processor and memory speed.  Get the speeds you need and they'll talk nice... except in my situation.

My motherboard is an ASUS M4A785TD-M Evo, which says it supports AM3 processors and 1800 MHz RAM OC.  I found out the OC means when they made the motherboard they set it up so it theoretically could run with faster memory, but they didn't really test it (or couldn't because the memory didn't exist yet).  With a little research I found out AM3 processors don't like memory that runs faster than 1333 MHz anyway.  So, any faster memory wouldn't work anyway.

I ended up getting two 4GB Crucial chips.  It clocked at 1333 MHz with a latency of 7.  (Model BLT2KIT4G3D1337DT1TX0.)  I went with 7 latency instead of 9 because it was only about $3 more expensive.

My motherboard still had the old BIOS that came with it, and when I put in the new RAM the motherboard wouldn't even POST.  I was about to send the memory back when I decided to try updating the BIOS.  The BIOS update version 2104 fixed it, except the timings were set for a latency of 9 instead of a latency of 7.  After some more research it seems you have to manually set timings.  Motherboards don't check that on their own.

In the ASUS bios under JumperFree Configuration menu I had to set the memory timing to manual, then change four settings.  First, I set the tCL, tRCD, tRP to 7.  Then I set the tRAS to 24.  The rest I left at automatic.  After I saved and rebooted it worked like a charm.

Space Empires 4 Review

I've been on a personal quest to find the best video games we can shrink our collection down to.  A recent one somebody suggested was Space Empires 4.  I was looking to combine Sins of a Solar Empire with Civilization 4 and replace an old game I enjoyed called Masters of Orion II.  I searched online about it and found next to nothing in way of reviews so I thought I'd add one more to the billions of web pages out there and hopefully it will help someone who is looking for information on it.

It was released in 2000, so I expected it to be decent, but it felt very much like one of those early 90s RTS games (like Outpost, Dark Reign, Masters or Orion).  The graphics were simple enough, which wasn't bad, but it was more the play style and the user interface, which caused me to loose interest.

The interface had me constantly guessing.  It had it's own style of control which was as pain because games are pretty much standardized with controls.  Things like right click to move units or cause the default action, one left click to select things.  I felt like I had to click three or four times to do what one click should be able to do.  It got old fast because I wasn't willing to learn a whole new interface at my age.  :)

The play style was pretty close to your traditional 4x conquer the galaxy games but it had a lot of small quirks that really didn't need to go there.  I built a colony ship, sent it to the planet, and then I couldn't build anything.  Turns out you need to also send colonists over with your colony ship.  I guess that makes sense but that means several more steps before I can have my colony up and running and just adds to the list of things I might forget to do to makes the game more frustrating.

Also the tech tree bugged me.  Instead of a list of available technologies you can research it just has tech levels in like 20 different categories.  If you want to get a specific tech you're left trying to guess what the programmers thought it should be categorized under, and often you need a specific level in several categories.  That leaves you having to refer to complicated tree diagrams online to try to get what tech you want instead of just telling the game to research what you want.

The battles felt very unbalanced and that one tech always dominated, and if you don't happen to know what tech that is then you've lost.  What's the point of having hundreds of ship components when only one is worth using?

Basically unless you're a big fan of the game category, avoid this one.

Parallels 7 and Games can get along!

My wife got a new iMac, the 2011 model with the i7 processor. She uses it for her illustration work and for playing games on occasion (mostly with me).

She decided to go a new route with this new computer and get Parallels so she can be playing a game and illustrating at the same time. I was skeptical that it would work and wanted to stick with good old Bootcamp but she liked the idea of switching back and forth during turned based games like Heroes of Might and Magic.

I googled and googled and googled and never found any definite info on if Parallels actually runs games or not. All I found were either vague assurances it will work (Something like "Get it, it runs faster than the old version") or screenshots (you can take a screenshot even if the game is running at 2 fps).

Finally I guessed the lack of information means people must have some degree of success or they'd be online whining about it not working. (It's sad how we report things that make us mad much more than things that work great).

Parallels Installation

We bought Parralels at the local college bookstore. It came on a USB drive with the setup program on it. When we ran the setup program it asked us if we wanted to download the latest version, which we did. It then installed fine without issue.

Windows Installation

This part had me worried. We had the Windows 7 Family Pack upgrade which meant we couldn't install it from scratch. We did try, but it said it needed a previously installed version of Windows. So we dug out an old Windows XP 64 bit disk that we had gotten free when we bought a copy of XP a while back. It installed fine surprisingly! Then we had to set Parralels to boot off the DVD drive instead of the hard drive and ran Windows 7 setup. It upgraded and activated without a problem.

Need to install toolkit through the Parallels menu after windows 7 is running.

Once we got Windows 7 running and updated it was time to install some programs. I started with basic utilities like WinRAR, Direct X, Foxit... and gosh they installed fast! I didn't even see the installer copying files I just clicked "next" and it said it was done! So far so good...

Running Games

Then I decided to try TrackMania Nations Forever first. It didn't have a single issue installing. I did the benchmark and it ran on almost max settings... except something would make it suddenly drop to 2 fps. With a little testing I found it was the shader quality setting. Any shader quality above 1 would kill the framerate, otherwise the game ran 60 fps at 2560x1440 with max settings!

Then I tried Heroes of Might and Magic 5 and Civilization 4 with the Tomas' War mod. They both ran perfectly at max settings, and we didn't have any issue playing them over a LAN.

Finally, we tried Sins of a Solar Empire... with poor results, but it could be my fault. I was running v1.05 with the 7 Deadly Sins mod v2.1. Both the game and the mod are old unfinished versions.

The main problem was that it crashed frequently and without warning. That makes any game basically unplayable. The next issue was the right click to rotate camera feature was so sensitive the camera would jump about 90 degrees with a slight movement of the mouse. The third issue was many of the textures would flash black as the game ran and sometimes the whole screen would flash. The game still had a great framerate at max graphics settings when it did run. I didn't get to test it with lots of objects onscreen though.

I tried contacting Stardock about the issues and got a frank reply: "There is nothing we can do about this, it is out of our scope." Apparently they weren't very interested in working with someone who is running the game on a iMac.

I did have issues with some of the installers, like Sins and Civ 4 went terribly slow

Some installer's backgrounds would cover up the windows and I'd have to alt-tab to see the window with the next button.


Hope this information was helpful to someone!