Upgrading Cometh

Here's my up-to-date computer plan, with much help from and many thanks to Tim. He receives today's Boba Award, which while it does not come with a cash reward like the Nobel Prize, it is nearly as prestigious.

Anywho, here it is. Everything should fit together just fine (in theory). I assume the power supply that Tim has will fit with everything okay? I also added a new video card that should be better than what I had before.

Store of Tim Case / Power Supply [ $7.00 ]
Widescreen 20" [ 246.98 ]
Vista Premium [ 75.99 ]
Wireless KB/M [ 25.99 ]
2GB Flash Drive [ 19.55 ]
Headphones [ 19.99 ]
500GB Drive [ 86.00 ]
4GB RAM [ 109.96 ]
DVD/CD RW [ 34.50 ]
Motherboard [ 68.00 ]
CPU [ 170.00 ]
Video [ 115.00 ]

Total: $978.96

Prices may vary, of course, when I order everything later this week. Here's another question for Tim - and it may be a silly question, but I just want to make sure - the motherboard specifies that it was 4 memory slots and "Maximum Memory Supported" of 4 GB. Is that 4 GB per slot, and not total? Right now, I have four 1GB sticks.

LotD: Lamborghini Reventón. Lamborghini's newest model, new for 2008. It's purdy.

Upgrading the Plan

Thanks to all of you for your thoughts on my computer purchasing, I very much appreciate it. I have updated the list. This includes a dual DVI output video card. I have listed on here a refurbished 15 inch LCD as a second monitor, but I'm not sure about that yet. I would like to have dual monitors, and I will have an extra monitor at home after I get the new widescreen, but the extra monitor will be a CRT, and I wouldn't mind conserving desk space and having both monitors as LCD. But who knows. I should have the capability for dual monitors after this, so I could always wait and get the second one later, or live with the CRT for the time being.

This motherboard should have 4 PCI slots (1x PCI-Express x16 slot; 1x PCI-Express x1 slot; 2x PCI slots - I'm not exactly sure what the differences are).

I also don't know why this excessively large empty space appears when I try to put an HTML table into a blog entry. So, um, here's a really big empty space, and then some computer-related information. :)

Total: $991.67

Item

Price

Notes

MB / CPU

247.31

Link

Case / Power

7.00

Store of Tim

Widescreen 20"

206.99

Link

Vista Premium

75.99

Link

Wireless KB/M

25.99

Link

2GB Flash Drive

19.55

Link

Headphones

19.99

Link

500GB Drive

86.00

Link

4GB RAM

109.96

Link

DVD/CD RW

34.50

Link

Dual DVI Video

55.97

Link

15 in LCD

79.00

Link

LotD: SpongeBob SquarePants Saves Sinking Boat. And you thought he wasn't a superhero.

Computadora Para Yo

So, I have about a week until I can order my new computer, so I need to start making decisions. I am choosing between either simply buying a system from Dell, or building my own. As pointed out by Tim, building a system is also a little more fun (I built my second computer, in 2002). I had previously be leaning toward a Dell system, but now I'm not so sure. If I were to build it, this is what I've come up with:

Barebones System
$231.87
AMD Athlon X2 6000+ AM2 Dual Core. (Case / Motherboard / Processor / Fans.)

Memory
109.96
4 GB DDR2-667 RAM (x4 1GB)

Hard Drive
86.00
500 GB Western Digital SATA

CD/DVD
31.99
Samsung 20x DVD/RW

Monitor
206.99
LG ELECTRONIC 20 Inch Widescreen LCD

OS
100.99
Windows Vista Home Premium 32

Input
25.99
Wireless Keyboard / Mouse

Flash Drive
19.55
2 Apacer Pen Drive

Audio
19.99
Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 Headphones

TOTAL: $811.24

Though the Mac Man has cheap / free case and power supply for me, it was practically the same price to get a barebones set than simply buy the same motherboard and CPU. Looking at the specs, a comparable Dell system would be around $1300. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this (like I'm missing something really important or something). :) I could get a Dell system that is in the $900-$1000 range (which is actually in my price range; $1300 is too much), but some of the specs wouldn't be as good (less RAM, for example). The advantages, of course, of getting a system from Dell would be an improved warranty, and of course the fact that everything comes put together. :)

LotD: Hard Drive Clock. Rather geeky, which makes it pretty sweet.

The Vampires Cometh

Today, I am going to do something that I have never done before. I am going to go donate blood! It is both a good thing to do, and I will figure something else out that I don't yet know, which is my blood type. Very exciting stuff. I assume, because I am not a small person, that I will not faint from this experience. :) That is the hope anyway. I haven't fainted since the sixth grade, and that was because a girl beat me up. (Or something close to that anyway.) :)

My wife is a dork. Because of this, she is rather excited for Halloween. We looked through a bunch of Halloween-related decorations and costumes yesterday. Funky stuff. I never dressed up as anything exciting when I Was a kid. Ah well. She may dress herself up as a vampire or something funky like that. And I have offered myself up as a costuming canvas, so she can dress me up in whatever Halloween garb she feels like. I'm probably setting myself up for something very bad. :)

LotD: Gadwin Printscreen. Nifty little application that allows you to take custom rectangular screen shots and both copy them to the clipboard and save them to a file, so if you have something you want to save, you don't have to copy it and then paste into Paint and save it. It's pretty slick.

Project Recaps

Ah, so many fun little projects I have created for myself. Here's a quick update.

GOP Convention Report - this is the website I am creating for the wife of a former coworker. I am starting the programming on it, and will be spending large amounts of time on it between Thursday and Sunday. I am supposed to have it done by October 6th, but am hoping to have it mostly done by this weekend.

The Lords of Sargoff - I have written through the sixth chapter in the story. I am going to try to write the whole story in rough draft, then go back and fix things up and add more details. This will be my main project after the website is completed. I will post the new first chapter at some point, after a little more tweaking.

Reclamation - I have not abandoned my card game, though it has taken a back seat to other things for the time being. I plan on picking this up again.

In other news, I can order my computer in approximately nine days. :) I am totally excited. I need to make final decisions on whether I will order a system or build it myself (I am leaning towards a system at the current time). But we will see.

LotD: Man Declared Dead Awakens During Autopsy. That pretty much sums it up. Weird. Guess it just wasn't his time.

So, He Does Exist

First off, this is for Aaron:

[hug]

I finally met Mr. Bauer today at the TEC leadership meeting, and there it was determined that it would be best if him and myself communicate merely on a digital level. So I'll plan on completely ignoring him at meetings and during the weekend.

Well, maybe not. :) Anywho, the meeting went well, and I'm looking forward to the first full team meeting in two weeks. In the meantime, I need to call to set up garbage collection (a task I also did when I worked Support at TEC 66) and set up a place for the candidates to go swim (and for transportation). Whooah!

Fortunately, I know many more people on team this time than I did last time. It should, as always, be an excellent and powerful weekend. I am also happy that now, Mr. Mac Man has joined the team as an ATL. It's about time that the stars aligned so we could work together. :)

LotD: Etch-A-Sketch Art. Assuming they're real and not Photoshopped, this is some impressive art, especially considering it would have to be one continuous line. It's either impressive, or shows that this guy has too much time on his hands. :)

Digital Destruction

Tonight, we're having ourselves a little gaming night. We'll be playing some StarCraft, which is an aging yet classic game that we may never stop playing. Well, that may change when StarCraft II comes out (if we all end up getting the game, that is). I'm pretty excited for that game to come out, though it will be at least 2008. (Those who want a sneak peak can go to the movies page and download the gameplay video.)

It has recently been decided that my wife and I will be going down to visit family in Ohio for Thanksgiving. While it is always good to see family, the main reason for the trip is of course to get more Graeter's ice cream - the best ice cream in the world.

(That's really not the main reason.) :)

The main reason is to see Scruffles.

LotD: Ironman trailer. While I had never even heard of Iron Man until playing a video game with Dan, the trailer still looks like it has the potential to at least be a good action movie. You know, lots of things blowing up. A guy in a bit metal suit with a flamethrower. What could possibly go wrong? Considering I was never a Transformers fan, and yet rather enjoyed the movie, I'll be more than willing to give this one a try next May.

Link of the Day

I have nothing exciting to blog about today, except to announce that I will be adding a Link of the Day (LotD) to the end of my blogs. It will just be a link I find interesting or exciting or weird or whatever; could be an article, or a picture, or anything. Just whatever the heck I feel like. Aren't you pumped?

LotD: The R2-D2 Home Theater System. Life-size R2-D2 that contains a projector, among all sorts of other things. Also comes with Millennium Falcon remote control! How cool is that?

Spot On

It's a sad, sad world when work gets in the way of my blogging. Well, maybe not really, but it certainly should be considered so.

Uh, anywho... I have been working on a website for a woman who is the wife of one of my former FLS Connect coworkers. I created a mock layout according to her instructions and sent it to her, and she replied and said the design was "spot on," so that must be good. :) I have some changes to the layout to make tonight and send to her for tomorrow. Then, depending on my schedule, but sometime during Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday while my wife is at work, I will be putting lots of work toward it to get things running programmatically. Once the site is set up and online, I'll post a link to it here so you can all see my high quality work. :) Or, hopefully not too horribly dreadful work.

It is a little extra money, which is always helpful (though the check I get from it will go directly towards my student loans), it will be good experience and something to put in my portfolio.

On that thought, I think it would be really fun to do things like this as a full-time occupation. Free-lance web designer? Working from home? I think I'd thoroughly enjoy that. More experience + more skills = anything is possible. :)

As mentioned in a previous post, I will be doing monthly maintenance on all computers in the office (about 43). The last couple days, I have had the fun of trying to get all the office's employees on a monthly schedule. I will end up doing this maintenance on between 1 and 4 computers daily, in order to get through all the office's computers in a month. Fun stuff, eh? :)

All in all, work is going well, and I'm feeling more and more comfortable in the position. Yehaw! :)

The Joys of TEChnology

Well, it's been an interesting day. Throw in the last few hours of yesterday, and it's a rocking good time. :)

(geekspeak)

Basically, my work computer has been on the fritz. This computer was brand-new out-of-the-box when I started work on Tuesday. Thursday afternoon, I restarted the computer, and it booted up, showed the Windows loading logo, and then the screen went black, and I couldn't get any farther than that. With no luck getting it to do anything else, the network administrator here decided to do a system restore, which appeared to work successfully. I even restarted
the computer and everything worked fine. Then I shut down the computer overnight, came back this morning, started it up, and had the same problem again. Sweet, huh?

Well, after another system restore, a Windows repair installation, and finally a clean wipe of the hard drive and a fresh Windows installation, I appear to be up and running. I am currently installing a rather large set of programs (Macromedia Studio and Adobe Creative Suite), which allows me time to blog (that's my theory anyway). Hopefully everything works out all good.

I also now know some of my new job duties. They include (these are not necessarily things I am doing completely yet, but things that - once fully trained in - I will be doing).
-Checking that overnight maintenance (tape back ups, tests) completed correctly
-Doing monthly updates of all computers in the office
-Maintaining and updating laptops that are reserved by employees and taken on business trips
-Maintaining and updating the company website, and possibly, in time, redesigning it
-Creating simple newsletter emails and website for our clients

I also have one other business opportunity. The wife of a man that worked at FLS (my former job) is considering having me design a website for her. It would be neato - good experience, and a little extra money. I don't know for sure if it will happen, so we'll see.

(/geekspeak)

In other non-geek-related news, I got accepted to work the next TEC weekend. I am pretty excited, I actually know people who are working this one - people I met when I worked the TEC in January, and also a couple good friends of mine (Troy B. and Kelly A.) are working. I'm pretty excited.

SUPPORT!

The Beginning of the Beginning

The first day of my new job went well. I was introduced to a lot of people, was told a lot of stuff (most of which I won't remember), and attended the weekly staff meeting.

At this meeting, they go around the room and everyone gives an update of what they're working on. This is something I'll have to get used to and put up with, because I hate talking in front of people.

There are definitely a few things that I prefer about my job at FLS. Nothing too big at all, but a few minor things. The dress code is a little leaner at FLS (here I wear khakis Monday - Thursday with jeans on Friday; at FLS, I wore jeans everyday). The scheduling is a little stricter here. When I get to the office in the morning, I have to sign in. At the end of the day (and whenever I leave the building for more than 15 minutes), I have to sign out. This is more so they can tell who is in the office and who isn't, but I still find it to be a little silly. :)

They seem to want to enforce the 40-hour work week a lot more. At FLS, things were more flexible. If I had an appointment somewhere, I could just tell my boss about it, and it would be okay to be gone during the middle of the day for a couple hours. Here, not so much. They also basically force you to take an hour lunch. Now I rarely took a lunch break at my old job, I'd just eat at my desk, and I'll probably do the same here. Even if I work through lunch, that "lunch break" is still part of my day. Thus, even though we only technically work 8 hour days, I end up being here 9 hours anyway. Kind of silly.

I know all these things are pretty normal for companies, so I'll get used to them. Every job has its advantages and disadvantages. :)

They track your Internet usage here, or at least kind of. Not that I would surf to any questionable websites anyway, but one of the IT guys showed me the screen that displays what website everone is currently connected to. They also don't want you doing any video or audio streaming, because it affects their bandwidth. So no more listening to RadioU or Pandora. Guess I may have to bring in some CDs or something, since I don't think I'll be able to splurge on an iPod. :)

Everything does seem nice here, and I'll sure they job will be good. It's always a lot to take in near the beginning. Hopefully my mind stops spinning after a couple weeks.

Amid all the new information that has flown into (and out of) my mind today, I forgot what my login password was. I rememebered it was 5 digits long and that it had 2 non-alphabetical characters in it; I remembered what and where those characters were, but I couldn't remember the rest. Silly me. But now I'm all good. :)

It was also the first day for a girl named Shannon, who is an intern, on the design team I believe. Today we went around and talked to the team leaders for a couple different teams and learned about what their teams do and how all the teams work together. Today we talked to design and sales. Later this week, we will be talking to the team leaders for marketing, editorial, and the account executives.

All in all, a perfectly fine day.

I can't believe you read this whole thing. :)