Happy 6month-anniversary To Jana and Tony

Happy 6 month to Jana (she is the one on the left) and Tony. You should build him a new computer with an OC'ed Core 2 Duo as a gift.

Just kidding Jana. :-)

Benchmark Results

Got the system running stable at 3.0 ghz. That is a 1.2 ghz overclock above the stock speed. (See first picture). Sandra CPU benchmarks at 3.0ghz shows a 27188MIPS and 19166 MFLOPs. Stock speed gives 16379 and 11447. The old athlon 2500 was 6871 and 2872. 3dMark2006 at 1280 x 1024 resolution is 5820. The athlon got 1600. Last, the 3.0 ghz speed gives a 5.3 rating on vista's performance rating.

New Speed Demon PC built

The computer upgrade is up and running. Woohoo ... the first picture is of the motherboard with the Rosewill heatsink mounted. These modern heatsinks are tall !! The second picture is the X1950XT graphics card. This thing is solid and the cooling system is pretty robust. Third picture is of everything in the case up and running. Last picture is the Windows Vista benchmark at stock settings (a 4.7 rating). BTW, big thanks to vincent for buying me Windows Vista for my bday.

Computer Upgrade time

{Edits added to translate technospeak into JanaSpeak to help regular people understand the significance of this upgrade.}

It has been nearly 4 years { that was Season 2 of "24"} since my last major computer upgrade. I am currently running an Athlon 2500+ on a ECS Nforce2 board (this combo was a $99.99 Fry's special back in the day) with a Nvidia 6800 graphics card. The machine is decent but rather slow by today's standards. {Think of this as popcorn shrimp at Red Lobster. Decent and will fill you up but you aren't going to blog about that meal.} Also, the motherboard has been acting flaky lately so i figure it was time for an upgrade.





New parts are MSI P6N SLI motherboard with the nvidia 650i chipset. Processor is the Intel Core 2 Duo E4300. Heatsink is the Rosewill RCX-Z775- EX (they might as well add Deluxe Turbo SuperFun to that long-ass name). The videocard is a Sapphire ATI X1950XT based graphics card. 2GB of Crucail ballistix RAM rounds out the upgrade. The E4300 runs at 1.8ghz stock and paired with the MSI board and the rosewill cooler, I am expecting to hit 3.0 ghz via overclocking the FSB. {Think of overclocking as ordering 2 shrimp tempura rolls at Kyoto's, and they decide to give you 4 rolls at no extra cost.}

Improving on a masterpiece

I took Matisse's Body collection of sculptures and updated it. Note my use of color on the fabric. :-)

Outdoor sculptures around the DC Mall

Lots of interesting art and sculptures in the museum/mall area of DC. We think that last one is from the same guy that did the big spinning windmill/rectangle thing in downtown Cincinnati.

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Cool pictures from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. That is SpaceShipOne hanging from the ceiling-- the first private enterprise spaceship to orbit the Earth. Like NYC, there are lots of big groups of Asian tourists.

Meet Mini-T

Mymy and Carlos gave me the coolest birthday present: a bobblehead of me !! I shall call him Mini T. Here are some pictures of Mini-T. The first picture is the box with the picture they sent in to model the bobblehead. The second picture is Mini-T trying to drink some Blue Moon when i was not looking. The third is Mini-T trying to update my blog. That Mini-T is so crazy.

Magic Shoes winning streak ended

Patrick Probst (not Schwing) and I played tennis on Sunday. Even at 9 AM it was hot (probably in the mid to high 80's). I restrung patrick's racquets for him and to thank me he goes out and beats me 6-3, 6-3 :-) (the last set could have been 6-4, but I literally can't remember). He was hitting really well and serving very consistently. With that, my winning streak while wearing those new Nikes ends. Next match will be in a 2 weeks since I have some travel coming up.

Greetings from Geneva (Thoiry)

I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Thoiry which is actually in France since the hotels in Geneva are crazy expensive ($600/night versus $150). The hotel is at the foot of the Jura mountains (pictures 1 and 2). I was going to go for a hike but then realized I hate hiking. The other neat thing about this location is that I pass CERN (pictures 3 and 4) on the way to and from Geneva. You can find more info re: Cern here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cern

Last, even $3 gas in the US is still cheaper than in Europe. It is 1.2 euro per liter which is about $6 a gallon.