Staff Letters: Phil

...This is the face that you hide from...

OHHK. So this month I'm posting two months worth of Lana's letters, mostly because she got my the June letter about a week ago. In here June letter, she's stoked about her computer, and she lists a bunch of model numbers. Glancing over it, it seems she has a pretty impressive setup, but it's hard to tell. On the plus side, she didn't skimp on ram, she has a DVD burner, a good graphics card... But I had to wonder, what exactly is a 250Gb motherboard? I mean, since when is a motherboard measured in bits? Looking up her board, I found the Northbridge is a "NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb" which actually does make sense. She does of course have Klipsch speakers which are super sexy. Of course, she ruins all this spiffy new hardware with... Windows, ::puke::.

I recently got a new computer as well... about 8 months ago. I'll give some comparative stats, but I'll try to actually make then readable. Most of her hardware is roughly as powerful if not a bit more powerful, though I note where that's not true. Plus she has SATA drives and I don't.

Processor: 3 Ghz Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading
A few notes (1) the Pentium 4 beats the athlon because of the 800Mhz FSB (front side bus) - the Athlon has a 400Mhz, as I recall. (2) Hyper Threading works like having two processors.
Motherboard: Asus P4P800
A model number means nothing, so I'll expand... holds up to 4GB of RAM (I have 1GB of ram - but some boards limit to 2 or 3 which I don't understand), 2 ATA100 controller (4 drives), 2 Serial ATA RAID controller (4 drives) with RAID 0 or 1 (all the above on the southbridge), and a Promise RAID controller that has 1 ATA133 (2 drives), and 2 Serial ATA (4 drives) RAID 0, 1, 0+1, or multiraid support.i It also has 8-channel audio, gigabit ethernet, 3 firewire ports, 8 USB ports, 5PCI slots, and of course AGP 8x.
Storage: 2x ATA133 120GB
These two drives are doing mirroring (RAID 1), so I can lose either hard drive to a ahrd drive crash and my machine will continue to run with no data loss. Further I bought a large hard drive to put in my other machine which I back this machine up to (the entire thing).
Ram: 1 GB
Video: Nvidia GeForce FX 5700
This was a kinda mid-range gamers card - I bought it to get decent Doom3 performance, but didn't need a $600 video card. It has dual-head support, TV-out, DVI, 256MB DDR ram. It was only a step or so lower than the top-top of the line cards out there, but I got for 1/3 the price.
Case/Power: Antec SX835II Case and Antec 480Blue power supply.
I have a large tower with lots and lots of room, and 8 fan slots for optimal cooling - many of the cages are removable for easy drive installation. I bought a 480 watt power supply.
Other: Moved my old DVD driver and CD Burner over. Both of which work but neither of which is all that impressive.

My hardware is reasonably impressive, but the RAID for the hard drive is something I really like. I also have fully automated backups to a separate machine which I think is pretty fucking important (but since most people don't do this, it moves into 'impressive'). Of course, it runs Linux which makes it blow away any Windows box. =)

OK, enough with the computer talk.

Next month I'll have some good personal news to report. I have the news already, but I'm not quite ready to go posting it on the internet just yet.

What else? Oh, I finished my last class! I don't have my diploma yet, but I've essentially graduated now, go me!

Oh yeah, I've finally see all 6 Star Wars movies! I saw 4-6 in early June. It was quite an experience to have not seen them until after I saw 1-3. Yes, you read that right, I'd never seen the original Star Wars (episodes 4-6) until just now... I saw episodes 1-3 first. It was a lot of fun - and while there are things I suspect I'll never appreciate about 4-6 that people who saw them first do, I know there are things I appreciate more about 4-6 than those people do. For example, when Luke leaves his training and Obi Wan and Yoda are vehemently going "No! No!" I understood VERY clearly, and was very much going "NO! NO! NO! You can't go!!!" but I would never have had such a strong reaction from just those movies... the only reason I related to Obi Wan and Yoda so clearly was because I understood that the situation with Anakin was exactly the same - he wanted to help someone he loved and he went off to fight the dark side but got seduced by it instead. The whole thing was identical to his father's situation and so I was genuinely scared for Luke when he went running off. And the majority of that came from knowing the full story of Anakin/Vader. There are several such instances where I was watching it and going "wow, this wouldn't be as powerful without knowing the back story!" Of course, on the other hand, there are other places where people where really excited about something that I don't quite get because I didn't grow up with those movies.

But it's a very unique and exciting experience to be, probably the only person on the planet (at least for a while), to have had my first time through the story be actually in order. And to all the people who said I'd never do it... HA! =)

What else? Not too much - as I said, I'll post cool news next week.

Phil

GOOD

The new Tour section!
Done with school!
Visiting my niece in a few weeks!
Lynn

BAD

Insane people

MOVIES

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle
Star Wars IV, V, and VI
Batman Begins
The Devil's Advocate

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