Les Misérables after episode 03

The anime is so vaguely familiar, yet I cannot remember any details about Les Misérables. I did encounter Les Misérables before. It was back in high school during a grade now fuzzy to me in my French classes, where I saw the movie in its native language, en francais, with no subtitles. Maybe it’s because I saw it in French that I can’t remember anything particular about the story. I wasn’t very good at French. I can’t compare the anime to the original story with any accuracy, but this means the anime will be more than just a rehash for me, as I will learn the specifics about the story from the show, at least one version of it. Hmm, I should read the translated book in English.
Although the character designs and animation are on the simplistic side, they are fairly consistent throughout the three episodes so far. Poor Cosette. I don’t know how many episodes of Cosette being cruelly abused, bullied, starved, and beaten I can take. And yet those eyes of her still glimmer. During the beating scene I came this close to smacking that wretched fat woman. I fear for the safety of my LCD monitor. Oh, when will Cosette be saved?

“Some things simply shouldn’t come with words”

When I first stumbled upon Andy Mckee on Youtube over a month ago, I was dazzled by him. So since then I have been browsing through the videos uploaded by that particular member, rpoland, and through the process I have discovered other fingerstylists that were unbeknownst to me. Rpoland turns out to be CandyRat Records, and uploading videos of their artists is perhaps the best thing that they can do, and have done, serving thrice as a kind of advertisement for their CDs and transcriptions, a way of recognition for the artists, and increasing their accessibility to the rest of the world, enabling those who can’t see them in concert a glimpse of their talent and music. From that rummage, here are the names whom I felt requires some attention:

Antoine Dufour
Dean Magraw
Don Ross

I won’t guarantee one will like these particular songs, but they are an exposure to other artists. Actually, I have already heard of Don Ross. He is one of the bigger names in fingerstyle. While I have heard of his music, I never saw his music. Seeing him play made his music that much better. The visual performance of the fingerstylist adds a lot to the instrumentals. Those seemingly inhuman arms and fingers reinforces the impressiveness and beauty; movements essential to the making of such sound. When I watch these mesmerizing fingerstylists, I am both inspired and discouraged. Inspired, because I want to be able to write and play such great music. Discouraged, because, unless I choose fingerstyle as a profession and devote all my time and effort into the guitar, I can never play even half as well as as they do. The feelings somewhat cancels each other out, so I will not retire my cheap Washburn and Simon & Patrick just yet.

Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru after episode 12 – Final Thoughts

The gender jokes subsided away in the latter half as the show focused on a more significant plot. Mizuho sure is one outstanding student, becoming essentially the school’s best girl as the Elder, fulfilling a ghost’s wish, and even single handedly fighting off some kidnappers (where did he learn those moves, and how can those thin limbs of his possess so much strength?), all the while he gained lot of confidence. It should be no surprise, because he is the only male in the whole school, as a weak and shy boy may be a strong and bold girl. Besides the questionable excuse of not letting Mizuho cut his hair, the fact that Mizuho wore a girl’s swimsuit, and his grandfather wanting to attend an all girls school, caused me to speculate that perhaps his family really wanted a (grand)daughter. Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru was not particularly exceptional, save for its premise. Indeed, the series will be remembered by its “boy going into an all girls school”. Still, it was enough to sustain humor and story that made the anime’s twelve episodes a decent diversion.

On the word “lolita”

Lolita. Later revealed in his Pale Fire, Lolita was an obscure Spanish name that Nabokov chose for Humbert Humbert’s Dolores Haze. Dolores Haze was a young girl, whose age spanned from twelve to seventeen in the novel. Due to the book’s immense splendour and fame as a piece of literature in the English language, this once rare name somehow became a noun and acquired a meaning of its own, based on Dolores Haze’s basic qualities of age, gender, and appeal. This popular definition of “lolita” persists to this day, spawning derivatives and abbreviations such as “loli” and “lolicon” that sees common usage in the anime community. Of course, people have their own versions of the word, distinguishing sexual context and whatnot, but the variations are still a rather broad usage of the word.
I do not like the general definition of “lolita”, and subsequently, its derivatives. Lolita refers to the object of Humbert Humbert’s passion and obsession, Dolores Haze. He never uses the word for anyone or anything else. It addresses a very specific person. Also notice that Lolita always appears capitalized throughout the novel, reinforcing its distinctiveness. Lolita is suppose to be a very sacrosanct word. So when people use the word “lolita” without capitalization, with apparent indiscretion, saying “Oh isn’t she a loli?” or “You’re a lolicon.”, it is unpleasant for me to see such an unique and sacred word being relegated to banal and civilian usage.
One can already use an underused and overlooked word for such a purpose. Recall the second to the last paragraph of page sixteen in the second vintage international edition of the novel:

“Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and those chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets.’”

Here Humbert Humbert conveniently defines “nymphets”. He also goes to refine that definition and introduce the word “nympholepts” in the next paragraph that is too long to be included here. Yes, in its original form nymphets has a rather heavy sexual connotation to it, but like any other word, one can customize the definition to their own liking, for example focusing only on the mental and physical traits without the requisite of lust if one wishes so. But the point is, “nymphet” does not refer to anyone specific, while “Lolita” does. Among the innumerous nymphets, by an optional distinction, Lolita would be the epitome, the chosen one by the nympholept. Dolores Haze is Humbert Humbert’s “Lolita”. Shinku is my “Lolita”. It is this symbolic definition that I am faithful to.
As for the novel itself, I love it intensely, and it remains by far the pinnacle of the literature that I have read, and most likely, will be for the rest of my life. It would be an understatement to say the novel is important to me. Part of my soul was forged by Lolita.

Overclocking my Conroe Rig

I gave birth to my Conroe rig a month ago. In the latter part of that chronicle there was a brief passage of my overclocking efforts, at that time I was just beginning to tinker and tweak with my new computer. Little did I know this last phase would grow into a huge endeavour, as the extensive length of this post might indicate.

Better Programs
Continuing where I left off, after I reached 3.1Ghz that I realized the program I was using to monitor my CPU’s temperature was not very accurate. I found two other programs called Intel Thermal Analysis Tool (ITAT) and Core Temp that reads the temperatures from sensors in each of the cores of the CPU. The temperatures from both programs agreed with each other excellently. I choose to use ITAT because it also offers the ability to stress the CPU. Although ITAT stresses the cores even harder than Orthos, sending temperatures at load about 5 degrees higher than Orthos, I never really used ITAT to stress test. Orthos was already an aggressive enough test, putting more load on the CPU than any other realistic applications. Plus Orthos was able to stress both the CPU and memory, in one instance, which is why I chose it over Prime95. So I stuck with Orthos as my staple program to test stability.

Rebuilding
With these new programs, I compared my temperatures with other temperatures of similarly configured systems and parts. My temperatures were on the high side for that level of overclock and voltage, so I soon became unhappy about my computer’s condition. I remembered that I was a bit liberal in the use of thermal paste while setting up the Scythe Ninja heatsink. So I took apart the computer to re-seat the heatsink (it was impossible to set the pins in place without removing the motherboard from the case), this time with a smaller dab of thermal compound right on the middle of the CPU. In the process I rearranged and connected some more wires (Power LED, HD activity LED, front USB ports) and moved the back fan to the front middle panel as an intake fan. After this reconstruction, for the same overclock and voltage, there was on average a 5 degrees Celcius drop. Confident that my CPU and case was being cooled properly, I set about pushing my E6600 some more.

3.2Ghz, that’s it?
My goal was to reach at least 3.4Ghz, as that was the average overclocked E6600 speed, but unluckily my E6600 is one of the more paltry chips. I started to hit a wall at 3.2Ghz. My E6600 at 3.1Ghz needed 1.40 volts, 3.2Ghz needed 1.44 volts, at 3.3Ghz it was unstable at any voltage. I went all the way up to 1.55 volts before I gave up. And also, any voltages about 1.45 volts the CPU was running too hot for me. By hot I mean CPU temperature at load consistently hovering over 70 degrees Celcius. Some people have a conservative definition of “hot” for a CPU, regarding anything over 50 degrees as “hot”. Conroe’s tjunction temperature is 85 degrees Celcius, so anything below 70 is a safe enough for me. Amidst all this testing, the new F7 bios was released for my motherboard, the Gigabyte P965-S3. I thought a new bios must be better right? Wrong. F7 bios did not improve my overclock at all in F6, further confirming that I did indeed reach the limit for my E6600. On top of that, I encountered the well known but incurable cold boot issues that plagues later bios versions. At times upon booting up, the computer would power up and power down in a cycle for a few times before it would POST. But upon POSTing, it would lose all overclock settings in bios (except CPU multiplier). So I decided to look for the best bios without this problem. There is a paucity of overclocking accounts from S3 owners, but DS3 reports were abundant, and from them suggested that F5 was the best bios for DS3. The only difference between the S3 and DS3 are solid capacitors that are suppose to lengthen the lifetime of the motherboard. As a gamer, my computers last at most for three years so S3’s projected lifetime of five years is sufficient for me. Comparing the bios descriptions at Gigabyte website, the F5 bios for DS3 corresponded to the F4 for S3. Flashed that in, no more cold boot issues. However, in F4 my computer would not boot up at 400 FSB or above. Since I would not accept any speed lower than 3.2Ghz, I had to settle for 356 FSB with 9x CPU multiplier. At 1.44 volts running at 3204Mhz my E6600 idles at around 38 degrees C, and loads at about 68 degrees C, very rarely hitting 70. Temperatures are 2-3 degrees less with case open. Ambient temperature was about 24 degrees. This ends my long and bumpy road of overclocking my CPU. Fortunately, overclocking other components were much less of a pain.

Timing my memory
With the lowest memory multiplier of 2.0, this meant my memory was running below specification speed at 712Mhz (5-5-5-15). I wanted to run at 400 FSB with 8x CPU multiplier so my memory would be running at specification speed of 800Mhz (5-5-5-15), but that wasn’t possible. I had two choices: to run at lower memory speed with tighter timings, or increase the memory multiplier next step up and run at higher speeds with relaxed timings. But after a little bit of research, the performance difference between slower speed and tighter timings versus higher speed and looser timings were minuscule. All I wanted was to push my components to its maximum ability, one way or another. So I kept my memory speed and started to tighten up the timings, one by one, step by step in the bios, stressing the system with Orthos and occasionally Memtest at every adjustment to test stability. At 2.1 volts, the fastest timing that ran without error at 712Mhz was 3-4-4-10. All that was left was the graphics card.

8800 GTS and Benchmarking
The 8800 GTS at stock speeds ran at 500Mhz core and 800Mhz memory. ATI tool did the job of both overclocking and stress testing at the same time, and I reached 615/930 for my 8800 GTS. Fast and easy. Temperatures were at 59C/85C , idle and load respectively. I played some demanding games such as Hitman, Dark Messiah, CS: Source as a further test of stability. The drivers are at 97.92.
With the last configuration finalized, my augmented computer managed to break ten thousand points in 3dmarks06. I am quite content with this result, bringing my overclocking efforts to an end. These are the settings that I will sit upon in the foreseeable future. The details of my Conroe rig is as follows:
E6600 at 3.2Ghz – 1.44V, cooled by Scythe Ninja heatsink
Gigabyte P965-S3 – F4 Bios
OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Gold XTC 2×1 gigabyte sticks – 2.1V, 712Mhz, 3-4-4-10 timings
EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB – 615/930
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB using SATA2
Fortron AX500-A 500W Power Supply
(and parts of lesser relevance to overclocking)

Hmm, I should give it a name…what should I name it?
This is the first computer that was entirely made by myself. My father and I never bought prebuilt computers, and he always had a hand or word in the construction of my rigs. His intervention dwindled with each iteration, until to this one where there was none. Building and configuring my Conroe rig has consequently forced me to learn a lot about computers, specifically, computers of current generation. From the performance of tower air coolers, to the chipset features of motherboards, all this knowledge I emerge with in addition to my material creation. I sit here in wonder at the harddrive LED blinking on and off sporadically, the CD spinning smoothly in my DVD-RW, the music pulsating out of my speakers, reassuring the vigorous life I imbued it. It has been a humbling and strangely satisfying experience. Now, I just need a name…