damn i'm fast

I don't normally post this often, but I'm feeling good today.

Last time I attempted a cycling trip to UBC, it took about 1 hour 50 minutes. And I was tired as fuck afterwards.

This time, I got to campus in 1 hour 10 minutes. That's fast. Just as fast as taking public transit from home, if not faster.

Holy shit. Not gonna lie, I'm pretty proud of that.

Unfortunately, the way to UBC is an uphill battle, and I don't want to arrive at school feeling like I just ran a marathon. I think I will be doing the standard half bike half bus on my way to school and biking the full distance on the way from. Maybe I'll meet a prof or two on the way!

Only two photos this time around - I wanted to minimize stops.

Damn right, someday I'll beat all y'all lazy asses taking public transit.

My ghetto $100 dollar bike. 1980s Norco Model.

Suck it haters.

Generic sunset shot off of the Arthur Lang Bridge

buying a pc

I've been wanting to build my own PC for a while. I actually never understood how a PC worked, since my home only consisted of laptops. I believe that last time we owned a desktop PC was back in 2003.

On a side note, my dad purchased a PC for $3000 back in the 90s when they were just starting to enter the consumer market. Apparently the thing was massive, and my mom got pissed at how expensive it was. Of course, our smartphones are exponentially more powerful for a fraction of the price. Crazy how technology evolves, right?

I thought about buying the parts and building myself, but I figured that it woulds be really inconvenient. I am new to online shopping, and from my experience, I find deliveries to be quite inconsistent. Also, I didn't want to buy all the components brand new, as parts like DDR3 RAM sticks and coolers can be bought used on Craigslist for very reasonable prices.

So I just bought a used PC. $500 cold hard cash. How did I pay for it? I sold three sets of Kendo armor lying around in the closet for $800. Plus an old piano keyboard nobody was using for $110. Not too shabby. Maybe I'll write a post on my Craigslist adventures later.

Now that I've owned the PC for a week, I really understand the ins and outs of the inner PC components. It's not so bad. The power supply (ideally at least 750 watts, if you plan on heavy gaming) and the motherboard are attached the the case, and other PC components such as the network card and the graphics card are attached to the PCI / PCIe slots on the motherboard. A cooling solution must also be installed on the CPU, the RAM attached to the RAM slots, and all the cables attached correctly.

To be fully honest, the PC isn't 100% perfect. It was a good value, yes. The seller was very helpful, offered support even after the purchase, kept the PC in great condition (complete with cable management), and most importantly, delivered straight to my house so that I wouldn't have to lug a 40lb (or whatever the weight is) hunk of metal around via public transit.

1) The motherboard only supports first generation Intel Core CPUs.

This is probably the biggest issue I found with the PC, but for my purposes it's not a huge deal. At the moment and in the forseeable future, I don't think I'll be running incredibly processor heavy tasks that the current processor (Intel Core i5 750) cannot handle. Even games like Planetside 2, which is the only recent game in which gamers experienced CPU bottlenecks, runs silky smooth. In the worst case scenario, I could probably find a i7 950 (which surprisingly, still sells for $300 at retail stores despite the fact that the model has been discontinued for at least 2 years). However, I can see the motherboard needing an upgrade in a few years to accommodate the new and relevant processors.

2) The graphics card only supports Directx 10

Normally, this wouldn't bother me at all. Every game in recent memory has supported dx10, heck, sometimes dx9 as well... however, things are going to change with the release of Crysis 3. Crytek has decided to make the game require a dx11 card in order to even run (the application does a check before it starts up). This time, I'll be siding with the conspiracy theorists with the belief that Nvidia paid them off to set dx11 cards as a minimum so that their more recent models will sell. The graphics are nice and all, but it would require minimal effort on the developers side to make the game dx10 compatible.

Well, I guess I'll be skipping on this game.

Well, we all have to start somewhere. Before, I didn't even know that motherboards support limited types of CPUs, or that graphics cards were designed around specific Directx versions. This is technically my first PC, and now that I have gained a huge understanding in how the components work, as well as what components in the market are currently overpriced or worth buying, I can guarantee that my PC upgrade in a year or two will transform this machine into quite the beast.

computer nerdz

I volunteered for TechTrek this morning, helping out some grade 10s and 11s operate Greenfoot to program some crab behaviors. Afterwards, all the volunteers got together in the DLC for a lunch. Most of the guys, me included, got together around the central table, and a few others (including the 3 only girls there) sat on separate tables.

The conversation started off easy, laughing about the food, volunteering, and a YouTube video featuring a Korean girl saying "please, may I have some cock?" (she meant coke, go look it up!). Naturally, since this was a great big collection of computer nerds, the conversation took a huge turn to a discussion on the efficiencies of iterative vs recursive methods. I could follow along - after all, I did take CPSC 110 and CPSC 121.

But then the conversation evolved into talking about database management methods, efficient ways to transfer massive pieces of data across multiple servers, parallel and series distribution, how method speeds differs across different languages, dealing with data in cloud storage... Meanwhile, off to the side, a bunch of event coordinators and professors were discussion the future of some development software that I didn't really have time to listen in on.

Oh boy did I feel a good 3 years behind in understanding what these guys were talking about. Here I am struggling to get a piece of Java code to successfully parse XML (which I completed just now, whew), and these guys are talking about their strange/hilarious industry experiences and arguing about computer science concepts - during a lunch! If that isn't the pinnacle of nerdism, I don't know what is.

Other than finding the discussion (which I unfortunately dropped out of halfway through) incredibly fascinating, this will serve as motivation to push ahead in the computer science field, to get more exposure to various concepts, and to dabble around in different areas of development. Everybody's gotta start somewhere.