Building a new computer

So, I have been commissioned to build a new PC. My brother's friend is back from a 2 year haitus from the world and he needs a PC to do video editing. He gave me a budget of $2000 and told me to go buck wild. Well, not exactly buck wild, but he asked me to build a machine that I would want to have. So, for the next few days, I am going to document the building process of the machine.

We'll start with an list of parts. I ordered everything off http://www.newegg.com. NewEgg is, hands down, the best online retailer of computer parts. Fast, cheap shipping, excellent customer service, top notch hardware. You can view the wishlist I put together for the computer HERE. The CPU and motherboard came today. If you were too lazy to click the above link to see what they were, I'm gonna tell and show you.

CPU

I ordered a brand spanking new Athlon 64 X2. That's right ladies and gents, this is one of those splendiferous dual core processors we've all heard so very much about. The AMD is clocked at 2.2 GHZ, but it's a 4200+, which means in AMD terms this baby performs like a P4 running at 4.2 GHZ.

/me wipes the sweat from his brow

It's hot in California. Oh, and check out the behemoth heat sink below...




That is, by far, the largest and coolest stock cooling device I have seen bundled with a CPU. And look, it's even got heat pipe technology. AMD sure has come a loooong way.

Motherboard

Now, to back up this incredible brain powering the entire computer you need a fantastic motherboard. Quite literally, you can have the best and greatest individual components making up the different parts of the computer, but if you skimp on the motherboard you are gonna pay for it. The motherboard connects all of the parts together. I mean ALL of them. And a bad motherboard can do things like fry your nice expensive components to a crisp. So, ALWAYS spend extra money on the board, you will not regret it.

This board is chock full of the latest and greatest features. SATA2, PCI Express, something like 10 USB2 ports, Firewire B, Dual Channel DDR 400, Dual gigabit LAN, and 8 channel audio. Now, the one downside is currently, there is not an official supported BIOS for this board that supports the A64 X2. I managed to find a beta BIOS, but I am a little weary to try it. It shouldn't be too long before an official supported BIOS is out... I hope. ***Edit: Well, that was quick. Official BIOS is out.***




I'll update again when the rest of the parts arrive.

Our new dog

This is Chester. He is 100% Pomeranian, 75% fluff, 1% annoying, and 3 pounds soaking wet.

So, about a month ago Ashley was jonesing for a puppy. One day over AIM she just kept saying "puppy" over and over again, like she had invented a new language. Puppy, puppy puppy puppy-pup-pup puppy. Also, Puppy. I took the hint, she found one she wanted, and we drove out 30 minutes down to South Sacramento to a private breeder and purchased our dog. Incidentally, the family we bought him from was Vietnamese as well, so our dog is Vietnamese. Chester is so adorable, even the über macho man Tony exclaimed he was the cutest dog he had ever seen.

I am amazed at how smart he is. Already, after not even one month, he is about 75% housebroken and going in a litterbox. We've taught him to sit, lie down, stand up and balance on his hind legs for a short time, and we are working on shaking paws. We are crate training him and have confined him to a small area in out living room, probably will be there for another month or so until he is 100% housebroken. Then we just gotta stop him from chewing on things... but that should come after the teething stage has gone.

Attention Dog Guardians

Thought this picture was funny. Oh yeah, I have a dog now. More on that later. 

Succumb to the Dark Side

This was linked a while ago on Slashdot, but I'll put it here cause its damn funny.

Darth Vader's Blog

This blog is written from Darth Vader's POV, from the beginning of Empire and through Return of the Jedi, probably up until the end. Extremely funny, here is an excerpt of the entry where he froze Han Solo in carbonite:

"Human science experiments. A meditation on sculpture.

Today we put Captain Solo into the carbon freezing chamber, in order to test the system before capturing Luke Skywalker for delivery to my master, Sidious, on Coruscant. Everything went swimmingly -- the punk smuggler was put into perfect stasis. And people question the merits of human experimentation!

Captain Solo's body was half-visible, fused in mid-emergence from the face of the carbon brick. He was frozen in a cry of agony, hands grasping like claws, pelvis turned.

It made a beautiful sculpture. A perfect captured moment of a man in bondage, his heart blackened by hopelessness and pain.

It really spoke to me. Made me feel weird."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Saw the movie opening day with my wife, with Vince, Dan, Stephen, and Tony. I must say, I was a little weary after reading MJ Simpson's short spoiler-free review. He made it sound like an absolute travesty, an insult to Douglas Adams' legacy. Well, I am happy to say that this is absolute bunk; the movie rocked. Yes, it was not letter for letter the same as the book, a lot was changed, left out, or otherwise altered. This does NOT make it a bad movie, quite the contrary. H2G2 is and always will be a story constantly in flux. From the BBC Radio series to the Commodore64 video game (which is now available as a flash game on the BBC website) to the TV series (which I have not seen, but would love to) to the increasingly misnamed trilogy of 5 books, to the towel, the story varies from medium to medium. The movie more so than any other before, but it is still H2G2. Now, you may not exactly get it if you haven't experienced any of these medium, but it is still a good movie. My wife has not read the books, and she liked the movie.

I am currently reading the Ultimate HitchHiker's Guide again, and am surprised to see how many little things were in the movie that were direct homage to the book that I did not notice before. For instance, the book describes Prosser as being a direct descendant to Ghengis Kahn, and as such has unexplained visions of battle and a strange predilection for little fur hats. The movie says none of this, however I believe Prosser is wearing the fur hat. Also, the book talks about the Vogons and how the forces of evolution had given up on them but they did survive. It then mentions the "scintillating jeweled scuttling crabs" (which were in the movie), and the "elegant gazellelike creatures with silken coats and dewey eyes" which the Vogons would catch, sit on, and break their backs. There was a chair that a Vogon was sitting on in the movie that at first to me looked like the dog statue from Friends (with a broken back), but after reading the book's description I realized what it was. There are lots of little inside jokes like this that fans and dedicated diehards will love, such as Marvin from the TV series standing in line at the Vogon paperwork office.

I guess Disney is already talking about filming the sequels. They don't really need to go as far as "Mostly Harmless" or even "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (SLATFATF)", but it would pretty pretty spiffy if they did. Now that I think of it, "SLATFATF" would be hard to pull off, seeing as it deals with the Arthur's return to the Earth. At the end of the movie, they saw it fit to have the Margratheans complete Earth mk 2 but leave Arthur out of it. I guess they could work it in somehow, but they'll really have to start mucking about with the story and that would piss quite a few people off. As I understand it a lot of people are pissed about the movie anyways, but they can all eat their towels as far as I care. I liked the movie dammit, and I wanna see it again after I finish the books again.

Crunch.

Whats left of Ashley's car. A Truck rear ended us at an intersection and totaled it.

That sucks

I suppose I should explain the pictures above. On Monday, April 11th, 5 days before our wedding, we were in a car accident. We were on the way to pick up my car from Der Wagon and had to stop at a green light because traffic was backed up in it. Almost instantly we were rear ended by a teenager who was, and I quote, "Checking the price of gas" on the corner. In retrospect, the time between us stopping and us getting hit seemed like an eternity, things were going in slow motion. I wasn't seriously hurt, just some cuts from the flying glass of our rear window and some aches and pains the day after, but Ashley has severe whiplash according to her doctor. We have been to the Chiropractor three times since the accident, and she feels a lot better now. We are still dealing with the insurance company, but we have some help with that since Ashley's father is a lawyer.

Kinda chilling. The insurance adjuster came out last week to look at the car (it is parked at her mom's house right now) and said he had seen cars in better condition where people had died. O_o I guess since the kid who hit us truck was lifted up so high, it only crumpled the trunk and bashed the window, never hit the frame and transferred energy into our bodies. He hit us at about 35, you should see the damage to his truck. Negligible. He had a big ass bumper and a wench on the front of his lifted truck, I think all he broke on his car was a turn signal lens. In the meantime, our car isn't safe to drive, the adjuster says that it is totalled, so we have a rental.

I guess Ashley's mom said that someone at Intel had a similar accident and got a settlement of ~$60,000. Considering the accident happened 5 days before our wedding... well, I hope we can expect similar numbers. Maybe some good will come of this. The week before the accident we started taking dance lessons so we could have a nice dance for our first at the wedding. We had 2 classes, learned about 6 moves and were practicing to get it down right. After the accident Ashley was in too much pain from the whiplash to dance, so we couldn't practice. Come the wedding day, nearly every step was forgotten and we looked like a couple high school kids at Prom. I can't get that back, but maybe a settlement will fix it.

Married Life

So, got married on Saturday. It was a beautiful day, everything was great despite the numerous problems that plagued us. But I try to focus on the good things. You can see some of the pictures here, they were taken by Ashley's friend Kat.

The job a Sutter is coming along, training was weak but fortunately they are pretty lax on what they want me to do. So far I have been working on email issues, which is nice because there is almost no direct interaction with the customer. Either they have enough information for me to fill out a ticket for them or they don't, and I send it back to them. Piece of cake, except the email system has been going haywire so I've had a lot of downtime. Today I started taking voicemails, which is alright. I'm kinda fearing getting thrown into the queue to take blind calls, there is SOOOO much to learn here, what department supports what, what applicatations there are, etc etc etc. It'll come with time I'm sure.

I picked up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory at CompUSA on sale for $29, I'm stoked to start playing it. Ashley said I couldn't start until after the wedding, and it is after! Just need to clear up some hard drive space and install it...

/me can't wait

*Edit* Oh yeah, almost forgot. My titanium frameless polycarbonite lens glasses BROKE yesterday... frikkin piece of crap. Called up the optometrist and they gotta order the part... so I am only driving and watching minimal amounts of TV with my glasses on, as they are giving me a headache wearing them broken.

More on outsourcing, job update, and maybe pickles.

I'm writing this from the training computer at my new job at Sutter in the IT department. Kinda funny, Sutter Health doesn't refer to us as Sutter Health IT, because then our acronym would be SHIT. I started my job on Wednesday, and so far I think I am really going to like it here. Has the same vibe I got at Earthlink, the sense of closeness between coworkers, not the detached feeling I sort of got at HP.

Anywho, outsourcing. Went off on it in my last blog update, going to vent some more in light of this news post, courtesy of the Indian Times. It seems that as many as 12 call center employees of MsourcE, and outsource call center located in India, (who, coincidentally, is the same company Earthlink uses to outsource) stole approximately $350,000 USD from customers of one of the the companies that they are outsourcing for. Now, to put things in perspective, call centers reps in India make about $20,000 a year, give or take. This is quite a bit of money, as the cost of living in India is pretty low.

http://xe.com/ucc

350,000.00 USD (United States Dollars) = 15,281,000.00 INR (India Rupees)

15 million India Rupees. Not sure how much a rupee gets you in India, but 15 million of them sounds like an awful lot.

Splinter Cell 3 demo score. Next step is to go through knocking out the least amount of people possible, no killing, etc. To be a ghost.

Earthlink revolves around poo.

http://www.youdecideonline.com/youdecide_home.htm

Anyone whos seen the new Earthlink ads on TV knows what I am talking about. "Who deserves a new office?" or "Who gets a company car?". I for one, am furious.

For those of you who don't know, I worked at Earthlink from August of 2001 until February of 2004. I loved it there. We were like a family, we had a lot of fun, it was just an overall great place to work. That started to change in the beginning of 2003, when Earthlink announced that they would be outsourcing all of their dialup tech support. Earthlink has always outsourced, just not on this scale. The Natomas office where I started closed and we moved to Roseville, no big deal. The feeling of family was starting to leave, however, things seemed to be getting darker. Our higher-ups assured us that they had no intention of outsourcing our high speed products like DSL/cable/satellite, that these postions were secure. What a crock. In January of 2004, right after the new year starts, we get the news: Earthlink would be outsourcing all of their phone based support, email and live chat as well. We had essentially six or seven weeks until everything went bye-bye.

Overseas outsourcing is getting very popular. Dell did it. Dell went from number one in customer support to number two, maybe even further down; Apple, whose call centers are stateside, rose to the top. Dell aknowledged their mistake and bought back tech support to the states. Basically, what a company gains by outsourcing is money. It is cheaper to send support overseas than keep it here. I guess there is a fine line to be aware of, that is, how much your customer base can stand talking to someone whose first language is not English. Not that I am racist, not that I am a xenophobe, but I believe that it is incredibly important that you and the person on the other end of the phone have an understanding with one another for it to work. We were told that if Earthlink kept their call centers in the US of A, within a year the company could fold. So it was in the company's best intrest to save money by sending support elsewhere. It was hard for us to accept, but we all moved on with our lives. I wouldn't trade anything for my time with the company, the people I worked with were awesome.

Which brings me up to date on the rant I had going. What. The. Fuck. "Who gets a company car?" "We did such a good job on scamblocker please reward our efforts!". What about the THOUSANDS of call center employees who were let go because of money problems? Is Earthlink saying now it has money, it is going to reward the few employees they kept? I find the whole thing insensitive and downright immoral. A scant year later Earthlink is in the clear, so select few get new offices and cars.

cl_rant 0

Blog you, mother blogger.

Got back from meeting... ouch. Had to shell out $3k for food, and we have just about that much left to pay as well. Next week. Fortunately, after that, we won't have much left to pay for, just rentals of some decorative equipment, DJ and Officiant fees, cake... I think that's it.

Started playing Hitman: Contracts, and I must say I am happy with it. Didn't think Hitman2 was as good as the first, and Contracts started off kinda the same, but I was pleasantly surprised that some of the missions from the first game were in it. I can understand how a lot of people might feel gyped because of the rehash, but I enjoyed playing the same missions again. For one, they were slightly different, and the graphics were better. Plus, the hotel mission from the first game is, hands down, one of my favorite missions from any game, ever. The sheer bad-assness of starting the level with a metal detector and needing to ditch all your guns and walk around pretty much defenseless with TWO targets to nuetralize... awesome. You can snipe the cops at the beginning and take a uniform to pass the detectors, but if you want a Silent Assassin rating you can't exactly do that. I've been playing the game trying to be as stealthy as possible, getting a Silent Assassin rating on about half the missions. But when it came time for the assassination of Lee Hong (again)... I went a little gung-ho with the micro-uzi and wiped out nearly everyone in the restaurant. Which is pretty much how I finished that mission the first time in the first game. Oh well, maybe one of these days I'll go back and play it, super-stealthy style.

Commence with the bloggings

Well, it seems everyone and their mom has a blog, I figured it was about time I had one as well. And what better blog service to use than Google's? I don't know how often I'll update or the rhyme or reason as to why I'll update.

Short list of things happening in my life:

*Got hired by Teksystems yesterday for a contract job out at Sutter Health in Rancho Cordova. After 6 months of being unemployed, I finally have a source in income again.
*Getting married April 16th, 2005. 23 days to go...
*Have a new apartment, it's pretty sweet. Has water meandering through the complex, and a swarm of ducks live here.

Well, I am off to meet with our site coordinator to finalize the food for the wedding.