08.17.09
Gearing Up
Why hello there, it has been a long time!
The start of school is just around the bend, and my life has been buzzing as things start to pick up again. In preparation for school I have found myself gearing up in several ways to make sure it is a successful semester:
Despite my normal frugality, money has been flowing quite steadily as I pursue quality and success in my life. Back on January, this meant buying a new car so I could avoid paying ~$2000 a year to fix a ~$3000 old luxury car. And I do mean new, as in 2009 Jeep Compass new. I have been absolutely happy and satisfied with my decision and find it quite enjoyable to drive, so I consider it a success. However, I must admit that if I knew my CS scholarship was going to vanish I would have forgone the car and used that money for debt and tuition payment instead. On the other hand, driving a car backed with a warranty and knowing each and every mile put on it was by me is a very, very good feeling. I used to think new vehicles were a huge waste of money due to depreciation, but I realize now that if it helps put your mind at ease (as it does for me) then it is money well spent, especially if you keep it for a long time as I plan to do.
My brother and several friends started buying computer equipment from NewEgg, so of course I ended up joining the trend. When our school received Win7 RTM copies and keys, I couldn’t help but throw it on my laptop and see how it ran. Considering it is still unreleased to the public, I am incredibly amazed with it’s state and the amount of polish. And, as XP starts to show its age in size and performance, and I became increasingly dissatisfied with my computer’s setup (two 37GB 10k RPM drives holding XP/Steam games, and then a larger 160GB drive holding programs and other bloat) I decided to bite the bullet and reorganize with Win7. I decided to get two new 500GB drives and put them in RAID 1 via fakeraid on my motherboard. This left me with enough spare parts to only require a case, power supply, and motherboard to build a cheapo computer, so I jumped at the chance to finally have a dedicated Linux machine (more on it’s intended use another time) at the cost of $130 or so. I ended up buying new hard drives, more RAM for my desktop, more RAM for my laptop, an external hard drive enclosure, a KVM switch to switch between my two desktop computers, and more. As I spent a night or two piecing everything together, I was reminded of just how much I really enjoy putting things together. It was a very fun and satisfying experience. Sadly, I have no plans to do any more computer hardware flip-flops or buying in the near future.
To prepare more for this school year (and fill a void of wall space near my window), I bought a brand new wooden desk from Target.com. It is quite stylish, well priced, was easy to put together, and seems pretty sturdy. The theory is if I have a dedicated homework space I will be more productive. We’ll see how that goes. It is a problem I’ve “solved” before, but I ended up switching from my old desk to the desk I bought for homework only as a computer platform to facilitate more monitors.
A month or two ago, I also decided to become a legitimate Pandora.com customer. While 40 hours a month is a lot of free music, I find myself listening to Pandora at home and at work (meaning I blow that in a week easily). I figure $36/year is fairly cheap compared to what many people pay for music, and I am quite satisfied by the service and use it regularly.
After a near eight-month break from the game, my brother and I have reactivated our World of Warcraft accounts. This came about only because I have found many of my coworkers play together, and the only reason Dan and I quit in the first place was because we had no one to play with. So, in league with the title of this post, we spent this weekend playing like the good old days: gearing up with heroics. I imagine with limited playing the game will stay fun for quite a while, though I have started my payment cycle on a monthly basis just in-case it starts to conflict with schedule.
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#include “std_blog_apology” // Clever, eh? 
I spend an ample amount of my day thinking and analyzing everything. Current events, health, exercise, programming, school, work, food, games, cleaning, economics. My brain is constantly crunching the angles, and when I stumble upon something I find interesting and wish to explore more it makes it into my draft post called “Topics to Blog About”. As summer quickly comes to an end and my list of things to write about is in the dozens, I figure it is time to start making this whole blogging thing a bit more routine like it used to be. Even if there happened to be few, if any readers, I often find myself coming back to the pages of this blog to reread my analysis of topics and refer to whatever started the post in the first place. Plus, it is a convenient place to store information I use on occasion (such as the hardware information for my computers) or would like to give out to people (gift list).
Given a new schedule that will free up more time for stuff like this, I hope to be posting more. Lets see if I can keep that promise!