Ugh
Haven’t managed to post since I got back from spring break. There isn’t much new to talk about. Classes haven’t been terribly fun recently. 6.331 (crazy circuit design class) keeps piling on assignments, while 6.334 (power electronics) is just plain boring. Combine that with a complete lack of motivation to do work, and stuff isn’t all that pleasant…
My desktop managed to break last night. Blame the capacitor plague. I was planning on upgrading it in the near future, but those plans have been suddenly accelerated. Not having built a new computer in years means that I’ve had to spend far too much time performing research and learning about the latest and greatest in computer components. Thankfully, Muth has a motherboard that seems to be perfect for me, and although he had problems with it under Linux, hopefully with a little bit of hackery I can get it up and running. The video card, power supply, RAM, and processor are costing far too much money though…
Doing all this research has confirmed one thing for me: how woefully inadequate most computer hardware review sites out there are right now. I couldn’t find a single one with a comprehensive guide with comparisons of the various components (motherboard chipsets, video card chipsets, processors, etc.) available on the market right now. Instead, what generally tends to be available is a collection of reviews for individual products or series of chipsets. The comparisons for each of these reviews tend to be against a small, seemingly arbitrary subset of components from the current and previous generations. Review methodology also tends to be scattered. For example, video card reviews tend to just spit out average frame-rates at various resolutions and settings instead of something more useful, like a comparison of maximum playable resolutions with various quality settings. Some sites seem to be getting better at these types of comparisons, but most of them have the same old crap. And none of them have any sort of information about stability with various combinations of components. Anyways, the end result of this problem is either spending far too much time researching and compiling information, or just asking people for their opinions. Which also tends to degenerate into something along the lines of, “[ATI, nVidia, AMD, Intel, VIA, SiS, Asus] [cards, processors, chipsets, motherboards] are always [broken, slow, unstable, unsupported]!” Not terribly helpful.
I suppose not everything’s been bad. I managed to turn 21 last week, but even that had its interesting experience due to my stupidity. Oh well, it’s over now. With Sam (the female one) and Michelle also turning 21 in the past week, we headed up to Piccola Venezia on Friday night, and then went to Redline (which had lots of bhangra). Good times.
And on a completely unrelated note, I just had an extremely sketchy encounter with a “lock-out” as nightwatch. This place just gets weirder and weirder…