July 25, 2005
by dhoytt
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BDFL Fantasy Football League on Yahoo Set!!

We have a fantasy football league that I am the commissioner of and it is set up now with 10 team managers and Yahoos Fantasy Football Plus League format. This league has highly customized settings. We also have a weekly payout bonus and a championship payout.
Most of the people in the league have played in it in years past with one exception and I played with him in another fantasy football league last year.
Like I said this league has highly customized settings that insure that you cannot have somebody just sit still with the team that they drafted and win! You have to actually be active and manage your team.
The superstars play a big part in the league but if you do not do your research every week and get some lesser stars and fill in players you will not win! With the bye weeks and a limited bench no one can stock up and expect not to make any moves and win!
Her are some of the settings:
Roster Positions: QB, QB, WR, WR, RB, RB, TE, W/T, W/R, K, K, D, D, D, DB, DB, DB, DL, DL, DL, BN, BN, BN, BN
Stat Categories: Completions (1)
Passing Yards (50 yards per point)
Passing Touchdowns (6)
Interceptions (-2)
Rushing Yards (20 yards per point)
Rushing Touchdowns (6)
Reception Yards (20 yards per point)
Reception Touchdowns (6)
Return Yards (20 yards per point)
Return Touchdowns (6)
2-Point Conversions (2)
Fumbles Lost (-2)
Offensive Fumble Return TD (6)
Field Goals 0-19 Yards (3)
Field Goals 20-29 Yards (3)
Field Goals 30-39 Yards (3)
Field Goals 40-49 Yards (4)
Field Goals 50+ Yards (5)
Point After Attempt Made (1)
Tackle Solo (1)
Tackle Assist (.5)
Sack (3)
Interception (2)
Fumble Force (2)
Fumble Recovery (2)
Touchdown (6)
Safety (2)
Pass Defended (1)
Block Kick (2)
Fractional Points: Yes
Negative Points: Yes

July 24, 2005
by dhoytt
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Oak Trees Growing

Good news on the new trees that I planted a few weeks ago. The trees are actually growing new leaves and limbs I noticed yesterday. I was more than a little concerned since the trees were dropped off before I was ready to plant them. I planted to spec as provided by the Sacramento tree foundation and fertilized the soil and watered regularly and kept the weeds out of the 4 foot diameter area I gut 16” deep and the tress appear to be doing ok now.
Today I also filled in the holes where my pine trees were located and seeded those areas as well as the rest of my lawn. I also put down some additional lawn fertilizer.
The trees are oak, one is a Bur Oak and the other is a Valley oak a native of the Sacramento Valley area.

July 18, 2005
by dhoytt
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New Primary Computer System & Work Outs

My system I built with the new AMD 64 bit 3200 processor is now my primary system after transferring all of the relevant gigs of data from my 3.2 Intel system. As I said before not only is the CPU fast but the 39160 Adaptec card with the 5 10k rpm SCSI drives this system really cooks! I also have over .5tb’s of capacity on this system, so that will hold for a bit.
Once again after a cold spell with my work outs I am trying to get back into it with the 100 degree weather we have been having this has not been great timing. I normally love the hot temperatures but when you are a bit out of shape and have to get some long runs in that means getting up in time and not going to bed late so you can get up and beat the heat.
I know I can get in shape really quickly which is probably a bad thing since I tend to let it go sometimes knowing I can take the slight pain and discomfort when I do my burn work outs for a few weeks. I never let myself get so far out of shape that I don’t know what it takes to get back on track but man when you are in the middle of only your second 6 mile run back to back days in months it still hurts!!
I have to qualify what I consider being in shape. Having the energy to get up do a minimum of stretching after work and hitting a six mile run at a pace where you are almost skipping is my version of being in shape! I’m far from that now, hell I can make six miles or even more but not with the pace I want. Being able to do it easily every day of the week easily is also a key.
On top endurance and stamina, flexibility and strength are the other keys to what I call being in shape. I rarely weigh myself but I know my body well enough to approximate my weight pretty well. The important thing about being in shape is the energy that’s how you should measure progress, everything else (weight loss, tone etc…) will fall in place. You will always have a fast weight loss when you start any regiment in the first week or two, that’s the easy part. What you do after that is where you earn it which is why weight loss is not the most important thing to gauge progress.
Time for me to start getting ready for bed after staying up so late the past few nights working on different items.

July 12, 2005
by dhoytt
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Cleared Garage For Workouts

I cleared enough space in the garage for workouts on the weights. I am still in the process of getting more things out of the house to get room in the garage permanently!!
One thing at a time though!

July 9, 2005
by dhoytt
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Trees Planted & Hard Drives Moved To Next Primary System

The last pines was cut down and my Oaks are planted, prepped with the plant food is mixed in the soil. I only had to stake the Valley Oak. The Bur Oak was a bit more mature and had a stronger trunk.
Both tress I had left in the pots the past week and were a bit dry because they were dropped off earlier than I expected and could not get the time to plant them.
The Bur Oak’s roots had gone through the bottom of the planting pot so I had to cut the pot off.
The biggest issue was digging through and weeding all of the roots from the trees I had cut down.
I gave them a generous watering without turning it into a swamp and with the food I left in the soil plus the food tablet from the Sacramento Tree Foundation and constantly keeping the trees watered I should be able to resuscitate them.
I am also closer to making my new system the primary system once I move all of my critical data to the drives. I moved one of my drives I took off of my music server and placed it on my new system. I moved the drives to the place they will be permanently on the system until my next hardware upgrade! Most of the applications are already loaded and everything is working fine.
I will post my old system and new system specs later. I am however moving from a 478 P4 to an AMD 64 bit system with an Adaptec 39160 and some screaming drives. The new system is very fast!

July 9, 2005
by dhoytt
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Finishing Projects

I will finally get my trees into the dirt Saturday that SMUD and the
Sacramento Tree Foundation http://www.sactree.com/ left me.

Hopefully I didn’t wait too long but I wanted my last pine tree cut down so that
the trees that I got from the Sacramento Tree Foundation wouldn’t be injured
from the tree getting chopped down. I usually have a good green thumb but it
will be tested having the tress in the pots this long.

I will completed that project and then will eye a few other things like
finishing the transition pieces between the rooms.

I am going to place a screen/security door for my French doors off the master
bedroom so I can have a nice breeze at night and during the day without letting
bugs in.

June 28, 2005
by dhoytt
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Getting Busy

Now’s the time I finally have my weekends to start finishing up my projects and bringing them to completion. Everything is just rolling along and then its time to really start making some #&*$ing noise. Watch the smoke and that’s what’s going to be showing from the ruins because you know that when the fire’s at its hottest the smoke is at a minimum.

May 22, 2005
by dhoytt
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Lesson Learned Blow Out Dust From CPU Fan to Avoid Over Heating

 Well this was strange. My main system I use kept
periodically shutting down for no apparent reason. I checked for the usual
virus, what was running on the system at time of shutdown etc…

There was no pattern to the
shutdowns. I had the latest virus protection and had upgraded my Windows XP Pro
to the latest levels of updates. I looked in the event logs and saw some
references to the video driver so I downloaded and started to update the video
driver. During the video driver update the system cut-off again!

 Well this time it would not boot
all the way back up but kept cutting off before the system could complete the
bios load. After a while it did not boot at all!! The system stopped even
powering up!

 I then went and got a spare power
supply I had not used in a while and that also failed to power the system up.
This is when I started smelling the aroma of burnt silicon. My next step was to
promptly unplug my system and power supply. I tried a few more items but since
it was late (3am) I went to bed.

Now this is what really threw me
down the wrong path is that when I woke up and came into my computer room My
hubs, routers and system in my 19” rack where down. My UPS I had bought at a
computer swap would not come back up! I unplugged everything and went to the old
standby surge protectors. My systems and hubs came back up.

Since I have had issues with power
the past few months and had moved things around and considerably reconfigured
the power structure in the room I figured this was a contributing factor to my
system failure.

That day at lunch I purchased
another 550w ATX power supply. Tracking down my power supply manufacture of the
power supply I thought had failed produced another side story. The company’s web
site listed on the side of the box was not active and they had no address or
other information about the company on or in the box! I had to go to the store
and convince the place I had bought the power supply from seven months ago to
call their buyers of the power supply and get the number to the company I had
bought the power supply from! Even the current boxes on the stores shelves had
the unreachable website and no other company information!! I called the company
and they had changed the companies URL but had no other information on the web
site listed on all their power supplies currently in the stores pointing to the
new site or anything about the company! More to come on this issue later!

Now the real craziness begins. I
took the power supply home and of course was met with the same results as
before. The system would chirp quickly not even spin the system fans one
revolution and quit!

            I then thought well
maybe it was some other device but after isolating the system to its barest
components just to see if the CPU fans would spin I thought I had either a
faulty mother board or a failed CPU.

A couple of days later I went and
purchased a new mother board & CPU along with memory. The new configuration
powered up fine with my power supply.  Problem solved correct?? Well during this
time I had decided to try and trouble shoot my old mother board again and see if
it was just bad memory since I felt maybe I needed to blow out all my part and
reseat everything and presto my original mother board powered up!! Ok I’m out of
a little money but happy. I started building up my old system in the case after
blowing it out with canned air. I then tried to power it back up and the thing
started cutting off on me again when I got into the OS. Then after a while each
time it would cut off a little quicker.

            Now I made sure that everything was properly
connected and seated in the case and in the respective connections and still the
system kept cutting off.  I again started isolating components to determine the
issue. I then noticed that I had failed to clean one item and since I had the
canned air I decided to correct this issue and buy me some time to think.

 I took out the CPU fan which
looked like it had a fine layer of dust on it off the CPU. I looked at the CPU
and noticed that in the fins of the heat sync with the fan on top was more dust
than I anticipated! I blew all of the dust out of the CPU fan and placed it back
on the system. Surprise of all surprises the system came up and has not shut
down since. This has only been 24 hours but it would not even stay up for all my
systems to load when it hadn’t been powered up after the system was cooled down.
When not cooled down it would not even power up!

Now I looked at the design of the
whole CPU cooling apparatus. Basically the CPU fan is drawing air to cool the
CPU into the heat sinks and if any dust particles are in the air it was getting
trapped against the CPU and motherboard! This is an Intel 3.2 GB P4 478 pin
system but I imagine this may happen to many other CPU’s.

Now I will build my AMD 64 bit
3200 system and move the 3.2 GB to one of my other systems as I said in the post
before eventually but now I can wait a bit and take my time and work on other
projects.

The lesson learned CLEAN and BLOW
OUT the CPU FAN otherwise it can cause your CPU to OVERHEAT!!