Snow Leopard Unboxing

At this point I’ve actually completely (and successfully) installed Snow Leopard. It’s just that I got sidetracked with a web design project, which led to a distinct lack of blog posting. Forgive, and enjoy:

Snow Leopard

Apple totally designed this cardboard sleeve

Snow Leopard is better and stuff, we swear.

More Apple stickers? Dude, just what I wanted!

Snow Leopard is fierce.

…yeah, that’s all I’ve got.

IT IS ALIVE!

No, really. After a relatively uneventful assembly process, half an hour of cursing Dell for using non-standard parts in my old rig, an overly-eventful fighting-with-software process, and a bit of testing for stability, my rig is up and running. In fact, I’m typing on it right now. Fun, right? That’s what I thought.

In all honesty, I’m not particularly inclined to write up a large computer-building post about the assembly and install process, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just post a few pictures I took during the build. Please forgive the image quality, my DSLR’s battery was dead and I had to use my phone.

Ahem:

Summoning the Beast

“I suspect if more people understood how simple it really is to get computer components to fit together, more would try it. Getting them to work together is a dark and terrible magic.”

My thoughts exactly… sorta. I’m building a new rig this week, and while it’s always good to be careful and even a little nervous when assembling expensive components, that attitude is a little cynical for my taste. Building computers is fun. Doing mods, upgrades, repairs, is fun. I’m absurdly excited about my rig, truth be told. For your viewing pleasure, below are the parts I’ve got so far (still waiting on the case):

Processor: AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE

X3 720 BE

Death, Quietly

My iPod died yesterday.

I’m not entirely sure what time it passed, though I became aware of its demise somewhere around 8 pm. I’ve been busy moving back into my house in Oklahoma, and had plugged it into my computer to juice up. The battery on it had been absolute crap in recent weeks, so charging had been taking forever. I popped back into my room, and hit the home button to check the status of the battery.

Nothing.

Borderlands Box Art Released

It remains to be seen how the game itself will turn out, but if the recently-released box art for upcoming game Borderlands is any indication, it will be absolutely fantastic.

Because really, how can you resist a game like this? It’s dystopian mayhem that just begs me to play it. The game should drop in late October, if I recall correctly.

Score Big with Bing

Honestly? When the Bing search engine was first released by Microsoft, all it garnered from me was a shrug. I was in China at the time, so my top priority was minimizing my bandwidth use – when you’re working at dial-up speeds, you don’t care about resource-heavy perks or the background eye-candy that Bing is so fond of. I just wanted speed.

The homepage on Bing.

Now that I’m back in the US, I’ve tried it out rather extensively as I order parts for my coming computer build. I’ve got to say: Bing isn’t perfect, but it’s off to a great start. Search is decent, as are the various categories that filter results. What’s great right now, though, is the cashback program.

In Interim

I’m home. As in really, truly, home. It feels strange, but oh so good – like returning to some really comfortable clothes after not wearing them for a while. Yeah, that’s nice.

China was cool, don’t get me wrong, but half of my time there was spent learning to make do with inferior products and amenities. Music? All through the speakers on my MacBook. Don’t get me wrong, they’re actually pretty decent as far as laptop speakers go, but woefully inadequate compared to my surround sound setup (which in truth isn’t even that great, but compared to a laptop? Auditory nirvana).

Also, my 24″ monitor looks positively gargantuan against the 13″ laptop screen. Believe it or not, there were several times in China when I started thinking that my laptop’s screen was nice and big. ‘Cause, you know, who needs more than thirteen inches? On that note, I’ve had my bigger monitor connected to my laptop for ten or fifteen minutes, and only just now did I think to actually take advantage of all that space and move a window over. That makes me feel silly.

I Am A Horrible, Horrible (Internet) Person

It’s been a while, huh? It’ll be a while longer, too. CBF posting anything for a bit. Hang in there, internet kids. T+L will be back up and running shortly, albeit in a modified form.

And then there will be cake.