Welcome Home, Farewell fggjp.blogspot.com

Hello, humble fool. My dear, hapless, humble fool.

This is the last post for fggjp.blogspot.com. It’s been a good time. It’s been tough, it’s been easy, I’ve poured hours and hours into it. I cut a lot of corners that I wish I had not cut. Corners don’t heal very well…you regret cutting them sometimes.

I’ve made some really good posts…I’ve made a lot of boring posts. Sorry about those. Hopefully I can resist the urge to post here anymore.

I barely remember when I first started…a long time ago. I couldn’t write very well then; and I haven’t improved much. I have gained a bit (just a tad, actually) more judgment related to my maturing slightly. I’m still a jerk, though. The maturity means less idiotic posts…but I’ll still look back on them in a few months, or best-case, a few years, and think I’m an idiot. But I’ll live with it.


So, I hereby say farewell to fggjp.blogspot.com. I’ll leave it up so that you, my humble fool, can read over my prior writings. A lot of posts that you can endlessly peruse…it’ll take awhile to transfer them to my new blog, fggjp.com.


Welcome home. I’ve decided to move to WordPress and host my blog on my own server. Or, rather, my own purchased server space. Theretountoforheretothere, all new posts will appear AT MY NEW URL, FGGJP.COM. That’s my hope, at least- I could fall off the wagon.

I began this transitional trek on 02/20/2009 at around 9 AM. I ran into some trouble; I did a lot of weird things; and I spent about 8 hours working on the layout/theme. That’s not much considering how long time it took me to do fggjp.blogspot.com’s- and that one just managed to work. This one rocks. Not really. It’ll do. MY MOM MADE THE HEADER! GO MOM! THANKS!

At this point, you should be reading this post at my (direct link to post) new blog.

Go there now, fool. Go on. To the full extent of my knowledge, it’s safe.


I’ll meet you on the other side.

My HP Pavilion dv5215us: A 2.5 Years Later Review

My laptop. My cherished, beloved laptop. It’s gotten me- no, it’s given me- more than two years of service. Hard work. Not really. Man that was a sappy sentence!

I got this laptop somewhere around the time I started this blog- way back in late August 2006…and Post #1: Drama at its Finest. I must say that, given my inexperience at blogging at that time, that’s one fine first post. Drama at its Finest? Genius.

It cost $700 according to memory. With tax and shipping it would be around $800. I got one other, but returned the other. I forget why and where…I just faintly remember that I got one then returned it and got this model. It “looked weird.” And I was the one who said that. It does have some unconventional, trying-to-look-cool-like-an-expensive-car features, but it doesn’t look all that weird after staring at it for two years.

The processor is either 1.79 or 2.2 GHz (power saving 1.79 or power-sapping 2.2), single core. When it goes from 1.79 to 2.2 it lags, but it’s not too noticeable. I got it one generation/line of laptops before dual cores became standard. It is an AMD Turion, which I like, but it isn’t an AMD Turion X2. I could have gotten the dual core for $100 more. A sticker on it says “Designed for Windows XP. Windows Vista Capable.”

The screen is nice, but dim according to today’s standards. I haven’t experienced any dead pixels- I despise dead pixels. It came with 1 GB of RAM…and I never upgraded to 2 GB. And I’ve never had a system stability problem that wasn’t caused by me- a lucky run so far with no spyware or viruses. It runs very decently with few lockups or slowdowns. My biggest problem with it is the Wireless Indicator Light, a very bright LED which resides at the bottom of the display and indicates when the wireless receiver/transmitter is active. It’s oppressively bright in dark rooms and especially when the monitor is turned down. I lived with it.

It has either a 128 MB or 256 MB graphics card- it never really gives me a straight answer- and the most recent game it can run is Command and Conquer: Kane’s Wrath. It runs it quite well (except for infantry swarms), but the graphics have to be bottomed out. It came with a 5,400 RPM 80 GB drive which lasted me until I upgraded (space requirements) in October 2008 to a 250-GB 5,400 RPM Western Digital Scorpio Blue. Space is nice.

The battery was all but useless by mid-late 2008. After living with it for months, I bought a new one at the same time as the 250 gig hard drive; a nice doublecell which increased battery time from 7-10 minutes to 2-3 hours. Time away from the outlet is nice.

It also has a decent keyboard. It’s sort of loud (not overly clicky) I suppose, at least according to today’s standards; I’d never use it in a classroom setting. And it catches your fingers under the keys at odd times. I enjoy this, some might not, but it’s rare enough to ignore. In mid-2008 the ‘O’ key failed to reinstall. I removed the ‘`’ key (next to 1) to attempt a structural replacement. It failed and I lost both keys, destroying the placement structures. The rubber nipple that the key normally presses on has worked just fine without a key. That’s neat. Also, the lettering on the keys has not faded at all. That’s neater.

The touchpad is very nice. It’s slick but not too slick- and that also means it isn’t sticky. And it isn’t sandy, either. Travel is nice and it’s happily controllable; it also happens to be in the middle of the laptop. I can’t fathom why you would align it to the right or left. The color wore off of it in the high-traffic middle, and the scroll wheel is only operational when some as-yet undiscovered process is running. Maybe “ScrollWheel.exe,” I don’t know- point is, when that process isn’t running, or is preempted by a process with higher priority, which is often enough to annoy, the scroll wheel does not operate. It will return when the problem resolves, sometimes requiring a system restart.

For some reason I’ll never know, about as often as the scroll wheel issue occurs, the control key will get stuck. Try holding control and typing “so there I was.” A million things pop up, it’s wacky, don’t try it. The sound is loud enough, but lacks any real oomphish depth that you get with more modern/expensive systems/desktop speakers.

In mid-late 2008 (can you tell this laptop lasted exactly 2 years before it started falling apart?), the CD/DVD drive began malfunctioning. As a result, a month or so later the faceplate fell off. The structure is a bit weak, and sometimes the uneven pressure of picking up the laptop with one hand causes the CD/DVD drive to rev up as if you had pressed the “rev up and do autoplay” button. Extremely annoying, I got used to it, it happened less when the faceplate fell off. But when the faceplate fell off, the ejection motors began wearing down, and it only pops out part of the way. At current, my CD/DVD drive is only operational at odd times. It’s usually operational when I need to game. That’s serendipitous.


Here are the specs: HP dv5215us 15.4″, $800 including tax/ship.

Processor/CPU: 1.79 to 2.2 GHz Single Core AMD Turion Mobile
Graphics card/GPU: 128 MB dedicated, possibly additional 128 shared Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 series
RAM: 1 GB
Battery: Double, 2-3 hours at brightest setting running browser and writing programs, charges slowly
Weight: roughly 7 pounds with normal battery, 7 pounds 7 ounces with extended battery.
Notable features: nice touchpad, nice placement of USB (2 on left, 1 on right), came with remote.



Well done, good and faithful servant.