I realize this isn’t a car blog, and it’s not the first time I’ve posted about the ub3r Civic, but I was pretty annoyed by the situation I found myself in fairly recently. I woke up in the morning to go to work and found my passenger side window smashed in. The theif took a 5+ year old bottom of the barrel JVC deck faceplate (not even the whole thing) and left everything else including the video card, wireless card, Sony deck in my trunk, change in my ashtray, etc. I mean, seriously! It’s like breaking into someone’s house just to steal the right foot of all of their flipflops. They’re not valuable. They’re not useful to you, and now they’re not useful to me.

Fortunately the total cost was $200 for the window and labour from Boyd (thanks guys) and $50 to install the Sony deck I’ve been meaning to put in FOREVER because I’m a lazy SOB… It just grinds my gears when stuff like this happens. Especially to me!

Well I’ve officially broken my first review sample. I’m not sure what happened, but I was setting up the NAS, playing around with the features, and otherwise preparing for what should have been a fairly interesting episode of Tech Tips

Then BAM!

We’re in the Tech Tips studio and I’m getting ready to start showing all of the cool features like scheduled backups to the Blu-Ray drive, RAID configuration, fast network transfer speeds and all I get on the front LCD is “Initializing Kernel” over and over again. I can’t help but wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with the power delivery in the Tech Tips room because we’re not running it off a UPS, but I’m pretty sure I know a borked firmware when I see one and I certainly didn’t try to update it.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board for a new topic I guess. We’ve had some requests for a video card overclocking guide, so maybe something like that would be appropriate.

Well I’m breaking the news a little bit ahead of the official NCIX announcement, but we’ll be creating a workshop that we’re going to start running on Saturday July 11, 2009. It’s something we’re really hoping will be an ongoing project and we’re basically going to give customers who are buying a new PC the option of paying $50 for assembly or paying $50 to attend a workshop on how to build their own PC. There’ll be a free toolkit and free pizza at the workshop so it should be a great experience all around.

I’ll be teaching the first couple of workshops, so there’s a lot of preparation to be done over the next few weeks, but I’m very excited about it.