Yearly Archives: 2005

Damn The Consequence

One of the keys to blog­ging is to nev­er give a shit about what any­one else thinks. Never write for an audi­ence. Never cen­sor one­self based on what oth­er peo­ple may say. Never be embar­rassed or ashamed to admit any­thing.

Otherwise, one isn’t being true to one­self. If there are those who are nosy, those whom we’d rather not have read­ing, that should nev­er be an issue. I may have my fair share of creepy inter­net stalk­ers (one is already more than enough), but I refuse to let that stop me from say­ing what’s real­ly on my mind.

It may be dif­fi­cult to let go, but it’s worth it. The free­dom is com­plete­ly empow­er­ing. Blogs are a per­son­al space, as pub­lic as they may be, and should be treat­ed as such.

Expression is an act that should nev­er be hin­dered by some­thing as harm­less as opin­ion.

More Sickness

Hence the absence from work. It feels like the long week­end burned me out, and I need anoth­er one. Thank god it’s already Wednesday.

Really, it’s prob­a­bly just a mild stom­ach bug, caus­ing my body to reject every­thing but very dry, thin­ly sliced toast that comes in packs of eight, named after the stage name of Australian opera singer Helen Porter Mitchell. I sus­pect that I’ll also be able to con­sume col­la­gen processed from pork skin, cat­tle bones, and cat­tle hide, but I’m still wait­ing for it to set in the freez­er.

I feel so help­less when I’m like this. I gen­er­al­ly don’t wor­ry about much, but health is the only thing that I can’t look at cere­bral­ly. I’m not even com­fort­able writ­ing this. It just keeps mak­ing me think of how bad I feel. Too nau­se­at­ed to fall asleep. Too tired to do any­thing else.

New Computer '05

I final­ly got my com­put­er, and have the week­end to spend set­ting every­thing up.

Let’s talk geek.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Dual-Core) 4400+

Thumbnail: Large CPU heatsink

The sex­i­est stock heatsink I’ve ever seen. Notice the dense fins, and the sym­met­ri­cal cop­per heat pipes. I did­n’t dare take it off the cpu for a pic­ture. One time, after I pulled the heatsink off a P4, I noticed that the proces­sor was stuck to the bot­tom while the proces­sor lock was still in place. The ther­mal paste had caked and turned to glue. The edges of the cpu were chipped and a few pins were bent, but I care­ful­ly put them back in place and it still worked.

This one is an AMD though. It’s clocked at 2.2 GHz, with two megs of lev­el 2 cache (one per core). Even though it can almost be con­sid­ered unrea­son­ably expen­sive, I went with a dual-core proces­sor because I want­ed some­thing that could han­dle both sin­gle-thread­ed and mul­ti-thread­ed apps. All the reviews I read said that the Pentium Extreme Edition chips were slight­ly bet­ter for the lat­ter but much worse for the for­mer, so this marks my first for­ay into the use of an Advanced Micro Devices proces­sor, at work or at home.

Continue read­ing “New Computer ‘05”…

I Bought A New Computer

The last part came in from back order today and they’re run­ning the burn overnight, so it’ll be ready for me to pick up before the week­end.

It’s the most expen­sive sys­tem that I’ve ever bought, but also the most guilt-free. At home, I spend the major­i­ty of my time at the com­put­er — I use it to write, manip­u­late pho­tos, ren­der video, play games, com­mu­ni­cate with friends, watch movies, lis­ten to music. I could sur­vive on my cur­rent sys­tem, but I could also take advan­tage of an even bet­ter set­up.

Some of the parts may be a lit­tle exces­sive, but why not go all out? I only know a few peo­ple, such as Trolley, who could appre­ci­ate a top-of-the-line sys­tem in the same way. Ever since Intel announced their line­up of dual-core proces­sors in the first quar­ter, I’ve been sav­ing my mon­ey, keep­ing track of the parts I’ve want­ed. By the time AMD announced their own dual-core archi­tec­ture, I had a com­plete list of com­po­nents for my dream sys­tem. Most stores could­n’t even get their hands on the chips, so for two months I would peri­od­i­cal­ly check for avail­abil­i­ty. Eventually, I end­ed up going through a cor­po­rate con­tact, who has his own direct con­tact to AMD. To boot, he gave me a dis­count (rang­ing on 15%, which is insane, con­sid­er­ing the tiny mar­gin on com­put­er sys­tems) since I’m a busi­ness client as well.

The kick­er is that my work just hap­pens to need a com­put­er capa­ble of han­dling some heavy graph­ics edit­ing. The com­put­er most ade­quate to han­dle this usage is mine, since it’s also the fastest in the office, so I get to give up my already ade­quate sys­tem for a bet­ter one. I got approval to order the same sys­tem that I bought myself per­son­al­ly. The same sys­tem that I’ve been dream­ing of, plan­ning for, and drool­ing over since February.

The Next Level, Part 2

It’s get­ting eas­i­er to write again. Ideas are com­ing a lit­tle more flu­id­ly, and aren’t quite as strain­ing to devel­op any­more. Perhaps there’s been an excess of inspi­ra­tion in the last while, from the music that keeps me mov­ing, to the peo­ple I inter­act with, to the tem­per­a­ture of the sea­son, to the words in the books that I’ve been read­ing with rel­ish.

Life is a series of sen­sa­tions that gal­va­nize, encour­age, pro­voke, and teach.

I can nev­er seem to get it all down.