In my ongoing efforts to fold proteins to find a cure for a myriad of diseases, I've also been moving up steadily in the [H]orde's rankings. Currently, I sit just two or three days away from the top 600 and from there, what looks like about a month to break the top 500 (of course, this is factoring in my results from the past seven days which have been less than stellar).

My Duron 850 went offline a couple of weeks ago and to upgrade it, I bought an older Athlon XP off of eBay. The chip cost a bit more than I was wanting to pay, but I figured I could use it in my current motherboard and get better results than the Duron 850. Unfortunately, the motherboard was underclocking it and my secondary motherboard which I thought worked, didn't. So, when I tried to get it running at the right clock speed, the motherboard refused to boot and a new one was bought from Newegg.

The new mobo came yesterday (along with some nice new RAM (2x512 - good for 2 computers)) and the new TIPHYS is up and running (PROMETHEUS is no more). TIPHYS is an Athlon XP 2200 running at 1800 MHz with 512 MB of RAM. It replaces PROMETHEUS and now bumps me up to a total of 12.425 GHz folding with 4.8125 GB of RAM.

I had thought about upgrading my main computer's chip to an X2, but I have some other things planned already for my paycheck that arrives next week (a new monitor and hard drive), but the paycheck after that should bring me an X2 4400 hopefully - clocked at 2.2 GHz, it will be the same clock speed as my current XP 3700, but with the dual cores, it'll run the equivalent of 4.4 GHz for the [H]orde and immediately send me shooting up the charts.

I also have a couple of sweet boxes coming to put two of my nekkid folding boxen in early next week and if they look and work like I expect them to, I'll probably get two more and make some tweaks to MENOETIUS and EPIMETHEUS who both are running on ATX ECS K7S5A's - I'll just get them some nice mATX mobos and stick them in the cases (though we'll have to see what kind of RAM they're running on as the newer boards don't like SDRAM that much).

And now, I leave for work, to put in another 10-12 hours to pay for it all.

URL: [H]ardfolding.com - [H]ome of the [H]orde

While I still love The Amazing Race, this season has been agonizingly hard to watch. Whoever came up with the idea of putting families on the show should just be fired. In my last post, I lamented the fact that they hadn't left the U.S. and last night, they finally went to Panama - Central America - not too far out of their comfort zone. All transportation is arranged and all the tasks are menial. To lose, you just have to be stupid or have bad luck.

Case in point: The Gaghan family. Last week, they came in second to last because they wasted time playing blackjack on a boat. To win, they had to beat the dealer three times - all four family members. If any one family member lost, the whole team lost. Now, that could be hard you think...but then, you figure out how to do it and get through. If your whole family must win, that means none of you can bust - so don't hit. Everyone stands and you let the dealer bust and you all win. I kept seeing family after family, parent after kid, bust and cost the family a round. How hard is it to use logic?

And, the most egregious error of all - back to the idea to put families on the show rather than the two person teams we're accustomed to. I can only imagine that it's to draw in families to the show when it returns to its great premise next season. Yet on tonight's show alone, I've heard "bitch" three times - twice as "son of a bitch." If you're trying to draw in families to the show by exhibiting them as teams - why the need to allow them to curse? It's easy enough to cut out...I guess it's just not that bad anymore. I'll have to ask my friend who teaches elementary school to say "son of a bitch" a few times in class to see what happens.

Just bring back the Amazing Race we love. Get rid of these stupid teams.

URL: CBS.com - Amazing Race