Building: Commenced

After over a year of prep-work, set-backs, and worrying, I finally took the plunge. The building blocks for my new desktop are on their way.

Since before my mother-in-law moved in with us (and subsequently moved out), I've hemmed and hawed, vacillating on whether I could afford this project, or even if I had the ability to put it together once it got here. But with money saved from both Christmas presents and holiday pay, and more importantly with my bills budgeted for, I bit the first bullet.

First?

Well... yes. You see, this is the first step. I bought the core components last night, but there are massive upgrades needed before I will be ready to call this thing ready to roll out. So, last night's shopping list.

• Processor: Intel Core i5-3330 @ 3.0 GHz. 
• Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Pro3
• Memory: ADATA XPG Gaming Series DDR3-1600; 8 GB (2x4GB)

Total cost: $325. You may notice quite a few things missing, especially for a build that aims to be a complete computer, much less a gaming machine. You know the old adage, "waste not, want not?" This is a prime example. Last year, my uncle came to me with a computer problem that boiled down to a faulty motherboard. He was short on money, so I sold him one of my older machines -- powerful enough for email and Skype, which is what he used the computer for anyway -- for trade-in plus a little cash.

Why would I do this? Mostly, I wanted to get my hands on a SATA drive. All of my other hard drives are IDE which, if it isn't already, is quickly on it way to being a legacy interface. As evidenced by the motherboard, which does not have an IDE connector. It also gives me access to an empty case and a (more than likely) working power supply; though at 400 watts, it is fair to consider it under-powered for my purposes. I also have a mouse, keyboard, and a monitor on hand that can be re-purposed quite easily. 

Which brings us to the elephant in the room. What am I going to do for discreet graphics? For the time being, the answer is nothing. I spent the extra $10 on the i5-3330 instead of the 3350P to get the integrated graphics. A mid-range graphics card would probably end up taxing that 400 watt power supply to brown-out levels even if the PS had the right plug on it. As it is, between the integrated graphics of the 3330 and the VGA output on the Pro3 (because the monitor I'm salvaging was bought when DVI was optional and HDMI was expensive as heck), I'll be in business pretty darn quick.

So, if processor, motherboard and memory were round 1, what's round 2? More than likely, a new case (something along the lines of the Rosewill Blackhawk) and power supply; probably in the 600-750W range, so another $150-200. Round 3 looks like a new, smaller desk and chair because as much as I look forward to gaming marathons, the idea of sitting by myself in my office all day is not particularly appealing. I was looking at the WalMart specials and found a combo in the $75 range, pretty good for me. Then Windows. Yes, I'm waiting that long to put Windows on this computer. I'll decide what flavor when the time comes. Then will come the graphics card; and again, the flavor will be decided by costs at the time.

All in all, looks like a good start.

Spoilers Ahead: Cloud Atlas

The hotel the wife and I stayed at for her birthday gave us free tickets to the Warren Theatre in the Old Town district of Wichita. Or rather, I paid a little extra to get a "Date Night" package and a pair of tickets were part of the deal. In either case, with it being the weekend before Halloween, the majority of the offerings were horror films; a genre which my wife has negative interest in seeing. That left us with an action-thriller, a biopic, and Cloud Atlas. By the title of this piece, you may have already deduced we chose the latter. I went into it mostly blind, having never read the book and only seeing a teaser trailer and the cast list.

Do you remember reading Catch-22 for [High School/College] lit class? Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings' screen adaptation of Cloud Atlas reminds me a lot of the style of Heller's classic, if not the substance. The focus jumps around at seemingly random intervals, introducing characters in story-lines throughout different points in history. Each of these different time periods seem to be self-contained and cross-referential; such as a young composer in one time period reading the published journal of a young lawyer in another, or an writer's story in one section having a movie adaptation in another.

Let's get the accolades out of the way: it looks amazing. The movie boils down to four period pieces, a dystopian sci-fi piece and a post-apocalyptic piece: even with the three parts that are supposed to be fairly close in time, there are enough differences in the clothing that if you pay attention you can tell which story you're watching by the wardrobe alone. The makeup effects are also amazing, to be expected when each actor is playing multiple parts. The score is wonderful as well, adding to the story rather than distracting from it.

Now, flip the coin. Remember how I said it reminded me of Catch-22? That's not necessarily a good thing. This movie tends to bounce back and forth between its various stories; filling in blanks, and forming new questions in a way that can be not only jarring but downright confusing at times. We never stay on one character or sequence for very long, which is a trick for a movie that clocks in at just under 3 hours.

I really enjoyed the film. I found it thought-provoking and a decent, if not great film. My wife, not so much: she found it a confusing, jumbled mess. It's like someone took six concept albums from the same group and rotated albums between tracks.

Hopefully, when the movie comes out for home viewing, the disc will have an option to show each of the stories separately. There are six enjoyable stories in this movie; and doing it that way will let more people enjoy all of them.

Making my old desktop functional

I've been without a desktop computer for just longer than a year now.

My laptop has kept me well enough; but there's just something about sitting down in a roller chair and sliding up to a keyboard and mouse in a space of my own that makes me feel like I'm actually getting something accomplished, even when I'm just watching random YouTube videos or browsing TVTropes.

I haven't had a real desk here at the house for about 6 years. My wife had a desk, but it comes back to that space of my own. I had a WalMart special computer stand,  a overstuffed chair, and a tray that I used for a mouse stand/drink holder. While the overstuffed chair was comfortable as all get out, it was not particularly conducive to anything I wanted to do beyond watching videos -- too laid back for gaming, too comfortable for coding, too fuzzy for hardware changes.

Last year, however, my office/spare bedroom was taken over by my mother-in-law, niece and nephew. The story of why is too long to go into here (and the details of it are frankly none of your business, faithful reader); but the gist was if MIL didn't have a place to live, the two kids were more than likely going to end up wards of the state. My wife and I were not willing to let that happen while we had a say in the matter, so instead, we let them use the office.

Over time, things have changed. I got rid of my desktop; selling it cheap to an uncle who needed a working box ASAP. The chair is still here, a little worse for wear; and the stand will be heading for the rubbish bin the next time furniture pickup comes around. And, at the beginning of the month, MIL found the means to move out. After cleaning the office (three people in a single room accumulates clutter, despite the best of intentions), I realized that my wife's old desktop... our old desktop actually.. was sitting here unused.

This old Gateway computer (back when you bought from them and they shipped in Holstein boxes) has been around the block a few times, and I've made some effort to keep it running over the last decade. Yes, I said decade. This was a middle of the road PC when we bought it back in the fall of 2002, shortly after my then-fiance moved in with me. After all my upgrades over the years; it's a Pentium 4 @ 1.8GHz; 2GB of RAM; CD RW drive, and an Radeon 9250 (PCI). It's not much, but it's enough for a web browsing machine, or just to keep the radar up during storms. The problem was it had 10 years worth of crap on there; XP updates, programs that never got fully uninstalled, that sort of thing. But the last thing I want to do is spend more money on this beast -- I'd rather save it for a brand new box. So I plugged in an old IDE hard drive (no SATA for you, it didn't come out until the year after I bought this) and made a fresh install of XP (quickly updating it).

It works, and runs pretty well (especially compared to how it did the last time I used it) considering the age. Hopefully, I'll get my new computer bought and built soon, so I can retire this one to file server status.