Sorry...

[bassmadrigal]

Sorry about not being around much last week. Although I did fix a couple of Justins screwups . I ended up renting a car for a week (for a little over $400). It was an Audi A3 1.9L Turbo Diesel. The car wasn't too bad, but I wasn't impressed with it (I also hated the fact it was a hatchback). I ended up traveling over 2400km which is around 1450 miles. I went to the Haut Koenigsbourg castle in France, Trier, Germany, Luxembourg, Luxembourg, and Brussels, Belgium.

So in a week with only 3 days off, I went to 3 different countries, and traveled about the distance from my home to Chicago, Illinois. I had to fill the gas tank 3 times. Luckily I didn't have to pay German gas prices. 1 liter of diesel is about 1.30€. 3.57 liters equals 1 gallon. 1.30€ equals about $1.90. So that means that a gallon of diesel would've costed me $7.12. And the tank holds around 14.5 gallons, so if the tank was completely empty it would've costed me a little over $100.

I did get some really cool pictures and I finally got some stuff up on my main site. I finally moved it from my laptop to my real domain, so you don't have to worry about my slow internet speeds. I did remove all the content except for my galleries right now, because I don't have time to write everything up. I also add some new galleries, mainly of an overlook of the base and surrounding area, and of the Haut Koenigsbourg castle, although I haven't written discriptions up yet. That will probably happen within the next couple of days. For those of you who don't know the site is MyAirForceLife.net.

On the other front, I think most of you know that I ordered almost all the parts for my computer. And lucky me... the post office is slow. I finally got my case today, but I am still waiting on everything else. I am going to be leaving for the post office within an hour to hopefully get the last package but I don't know if it will be in yet. If it isn't there by the time they close, I won't be able to pick it up until Tuesday. Oh well I am still off then, so I can take all the time I need to get it built and play around with it.

For those of you who want to know what I got, here is the list...

• AMD Athlon X2 6400 (3.2GHz Dual-Core)
• MSI K9A2 Platinum Motherboard (Supports 4 PCI-E Video Cards, although I will only be using one... for now)
• 2x1GB Corsair XMS DDR2 Memory
• Thermaltake Armor 8000 Series Full Case (when I get another hard drive caddy this baby will hold 10 3.5" hard drives, 2 CD-Drives, and a floppy and it comes with 2x120mm and 2x90mm fans, and when i get the second hard drive caddy it will add another 120mm fan)
• Diamond ATI HD3870 video card (512MB 256bit GDDR4)
• SoundBlaster X-Fi Fata1ity sound card
• CoolMaster 1300Watt Modular Power Supply (Modular means that I just hook up the cables I am going to use)
• 1x150GB 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor

I also just got my tax return check, so I will be buying the few remaining things within the next couple of days. The remaining things are 1 more 150GB 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptor. This will be setup as a RAID 0 with the other hard drive. Essentially this makes the computer see the two hard drives as one 300GB hard drive, and when it reads/writes data to them, it will split it between the hard drives, so it ends up being almost twice as fast. I also am going to get at least one 1TB (1000GB) Western Digital Hard drive. I was originally going to go with two, but at $240 a pop, I am thinking of holding off. This is the main reason I am going to wait at least a day to order them, plus newegg won't ship out on Saturday, so it won't hurt to wait a little bit. I am also going to order the additional hard drive caddy. Once big reason for this is for the additional air flow it will create. But then I can also hook up my other hard drives easier to get data off them.

All in all it has been a great week. Although it was really expensive. All told, I spent probably around $2400 between the car, computer, gas, and getting things from the store that I didn't want to walk back with. Oh well, it was worth it (at least we will see when I get the computer parts, and get it all together).

Wow... that was a long post.

[bassmadrigal]

OK, so I finally got all the captions up for everything I have on there right now. Plus I redid the viewing of pictures. I really like how it turned out. The link is above.

So the big thing is I got my computer. Oh this thing is awesome. So far, any game (except for one which I will touch on) I have been able to max out the settings for my screen resolution (limited to 1280x1024 with my 19" LCD). But everything is maxed out and it is still running buttery smooth. So far I have tried Need For Speed Carbon (hovers around 60fps), Half Life 2 (average is probably about 100fps), Doom 3 (I don't remember but I want to say it was about 70fps), Call of Duty 4 demo (50fps). It is freaking awesome and incredibly fast. Now about that one game that I couldn't max out the settings. It was Crysis. This is a DirectX10 game (which is only supported on Vista, and I haven't installed it yet). With me not having DirectX 10 I can't max out the settings anyway. It will only let me go up to high. So I put everything on high, and set the anti-aliasing to the max of 8x. Well the game ran from about 15-20fps. So I turned off anti-aliasing and I went back to 45-50fps. But then I restarted my computer since I got it, and just from the programs I had running before I started the game, I was using 1.09GB of RAM. Even then, this machine responds like a bat out of hell.

I haven't ordered my other parts yet, but I plan to within the next couple of days. Oh and another big piece of news. I finally heard back from the post office (after I kept pestering them), and they will be sending out a check within the next couple of days. So that crap is finally over.

Well I guess I should quit bragging (although I can't guarantee that I won't start again). Just thought I would give everyone a heads up, and if I am not visiting the forum... well it is because I am busy playing games on my sweet computer.